Delirium wrote:
But how to decide this seems a little bit of a
case-by-case thing.
Perhaps eventually we'll need a Wikipedia meta-editorial board of
sorts? Some of these things are really pseudo-editorial decisions, and
someone has to make at least some of them. Is someone with a PhD who
takes outlandish opinions an expert (Linus Pauling on Vitamin C comes to
mind)? We'd have to override their qualifications on a case-by-case
basis, hopefully somewhat conservatively. And which non-credentialled
people have enough experience to make them experts? Same decision. Of
course we don't want a board deciding editorial issues directly ("this
article shall say this"), but eventually making some sort of
pseudo-editorial decisions ("this guy is not really an expert in the
field") seems unavoidable. But how to do that without getting biased
("disqualify all people who disagree with global warming", or something
of that sort) I don't have a good answer for.
I guess at least some of this is about the would-be reviewers
understanding and accepting the concept of NPOV - there'd be no
problem with an expert with an 'outlandish' opinion who accepted it as
being outlandish and expected it to be treated that way. Come to that,
perhaps we could make it an aim to have an expert from each side of a
contentious issue both review the same version of an article...
Of course, that doesn't solve the "what makes an expert anyway?"
problem, so I guess *someone* has to decide that.
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]