On Tue, 19 Dec 2006 13:43:48 -0800, "George Herbert" george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
It seems to me that part of this is the way we want to spin this. Yes, we all agree, we want good experts to come contribute and make highly technical articles better. No, we don't want to allow anyone including experts to slip unverifyable unreferenced stuff in, because we basically don't know for sure what anyone's qualifications are.
Exactly. The only way to do it is to have *enough* experts that they can point out the fringe ones when they turn up, and enough non-experts to point out when the article is unintelligible.
Policies which are good for soft sciences, history, etc, where anyone generally can read the source and understand it, are probably not a good match for hard ones where even the notations used are domain-specific and arbitrary.
I have a horrible suspicion that this is a gross oversimplification. I am pretty sure there are areas of Balkan history that require both a substantial amount of background research and a fireproof suit...
Guy (JzG)