On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 01:21:03AM -0400, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
My personal viewing of an artwork, should never be put on-par with a published account of same. My own personal knowledge, however collected of a situation, should never be put on-par with published accounts.
We probably agree the goal of the verifiability policy is that editors should avoid adding their own analysis to articles when that analysis hasn't been published anywhere. It's a very reasonable policy, and when I explain it to new editors they "get it" very quickly. Even experts in a field are able to see that the role of Wikipedia is not to present new arguments.
But the verifiability policy is not a suicide pact. It doesn't mean that editors should ignore what they actually do know about a subject. WP:V was never intended to prevent people from using their personal knowledge and training in the editorial process and on talk pages. WP:NOR was meant to keep novel, crackpot theories out of articles, not to force people to cite standard facts that every undergraduate textbook on the subject conveys.
In the end, I don't see how we can put forward a coherent argument that someone can write a high-quality article on a topic about which they are essentially naive. We are the encyclopedia that anyone can write, but not just anyone can write any article.
- Carl