----- Original Message -----
From: "Phil Sandifer" <snowspinner(a)gmail.com>
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Friday, December 12, 2008 4:44 PM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Anti-intellectualism
On Dec 12, 2008, at 6:09 PM, George Herbert wrote:
Even a superlative college paper is only rarely
notable or significant
criticism. Grad students' product might be, professors or
professional critics moreso. But there are plenty of
out-in-left-field reviewers and critics who lie outside the body of
normal academic criticism et al.
Our criteria for sources have to include enough guidance for filtering
that we can filter out random not-notable commentary. What line are
we trying to draw - and why. We have to draw the line, otherwise we
do become Cruftpedia. We're not here to collect 101 million grade
school essays on "Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret" in the
article on the book.
There certainly are loonies in the field, but I'd say more papers get
rejected from journals for being boring than for being wrong. Which is
to say, there's a lot of stuff that is very fundamental and obvious
that you'd see in college papers, but not in published essays.
Which is part of the problem. There's a lot of stuff that, in
academia, we just consider too obvious to publish.
-Phil
That's about where my review of Mark Purdey's book (about BSE) would go.
Purdey's *remotely* plausible explanation of a mechanism is far shy of Occam's
Razor, which is so strange coming from a guy who explicitly likes Occam's Razor. Heavy
metal poisoning is a very old subject; Roman pathology. So, why all the complications
about another metal falling into the category of having limits on exposure and causing
[[manganism]]. I wish Purdey's brother Nigel well in preparing another edition of the
book. Hoh boy. Yah...then I guess I should look a Brown's book, especially since I
agree with him on the point that burning cattle might've been a good idea. Purdey
(deceased) did not.