On Tue, 8 Mar 2005 14:33:22 -0500, Sj 2.718281828@gmail.com wrote:
To provide specific context, consider journals such as "Infinite Energy", with a bimonthly distribution of 3000--5000, which are hard to distinguish in any quantitative fashion from 'reputable' journals. However, this journal is devotes itself to publishing papers on free energy, cold fusion, an perpetual motion; and running headlines like "Einstein: Plagiarist of the Century." I think many of us would agree that a paper does not become reputable, or any less original research, for being published in such a journal.
Well, the problem is that any sort of approach to this question, even the appeal to "many of us," is going to be doing what the anthropologists call "boundary work."
Without boundaries, we have no realiability and we have no standards. With boundaries, we will be constantly accused of censorship, bias, etc. Constantly accused, of course, by the people on the other side of the boundaries, who we will have already regulated to the category of "negligible" or "fringe" by our very erection of the boundary.
Trying to come up with a "methodological" approach to the boundary definition ("only peer-reviewed journals with circulations of X") will unfortunately just shift the impetus to the interrogation of those standards once again (anybody can claim they work via peer review, but can it be verified? Even all that without getting into the question of the limits of peer review, i.e. the Sokal or Bogdanov affairs).
My take on this: There is no easy resolution, no rule which will work rigorously. The answer is just to accept that putting forth some general standards with some amount of flexibility will hopefully work out for the "best." Problems will be solved in a somewhat ad hoc manner and there will be compromise involved over things which ideally ought not need compromise. Some disputes will inevitably occur and some good contributors will inevitably become too frustrated and will leave. So what we have here is a system which often privileges patience over truth. But in this sense Wikipedia is more of a marketplace than a utopia, and perhaps that's for the better in the long run.
Again, I think I have maybe elaborated too much, and perhaps my analytic biases are showing... FF