2008/12/17 Phil Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com:
Picking up on a thread from the anti-intellectualism thread, WP:NOR currently reads " Any interpretation of primary source material requires a reliable secondary source for that interpretation. Without a secondary source, a primary source may be used only to make descriptive claims, the accuracy of which is easily verifiable by any reasonable, educated person without specialist knowledge. For example, an article about a novel may cite passages from the novel to describe the plot, but any interpretation of those passages needs a secondary source."
At a number of points, this steps squarely into a decades-long debate in literary studies about the nature of reading and of interpretation. This is a debate that is still - perhaps permanently -unsettled. However the view Wikipedia is taking - that there is some core of knowledge that is "descriptive" as opposed to "interpretive" - is decades out of the realm of accepted. It's a discredited view.
The counter, which I've seen discussing this on the NOR page, is that the language represents community consensus, and that's good enough.
This is troubling to me - most significantly because it suggests that the community is empowered to set an official Wikipedia position on the nature of language and meaning, and to settle a decades long dispute. On the one hand, this seems to me a problem of NPOV - but it's also an intractible one, as we can't avoid having some policy on the nature of reading.
But on the other hand, surely we do not actually intend to empower the community (by which we really mean the people who wrote NOR) to rule on issues like this and ignore a huge scholarly debate.
I don't have a good answer here, so I figured I'd ask the list - to what extent is the community empowered to set a Wikipedia policy on a scholarly debate? How do we square this with NPOV? Is there a clever out to the underlying problem in NOR that sidesteps the debate?
Thoughts?
Wikipedia policy is written with a certain degree of pragmatism. Finding secondary sources for descriptive plot mummeries tends to be rather hard and since wikipedians can generally agree on them there seems to be little point in preventing them from doing so. Yes students of literary criticism can argue for endlessly over what descriptive means but most wikipedians are not students of literary criticism so the problem doesn't appear.
Sure you can start arguing over the validity of this approach but those kind of conflicts have been done so much better by others.