Marc Riddell wrote:
Ya know what we need in WP, an Article on Expertaphobia: The fear of, and seeming intimidation by, people who know stuff about things.
That assumes that all experts know what they are talking about. Some do. Others have merely been credentialized. We also have Wikipedians who are incapable of making that distinction.. I don't even know if a fear properly encompases the situation; there is also a clear rejection of deference.
Someone, I don't recall who it was, wrote that they would never work on something where experts were involved. Really? Who would you go to if you needed heart surgery, or wanted to learn how to play a violin?
That's one end of the scale. I think that most of us are willing to find some level of working arrangement with experts. This necessarily involves a rejection of the argument that a difference of opinion is decided by the fact that one of the participants is an expert. We are not generally going to practice heart surgery or violin playing, but we may enter into discussions about those topics, and we want the experts to understand that the opinions of others should not be perfunctorily dismissed.
Don't look now, but you are working with the aid of experts right now! Those marvelous persons behind the scenes of this computerized market place who make all of this possible. Without them we would be typing into the ether.
True enough, but we can still argue with them. When they propose software "improvements" they still need to interact with those of us who may feel oppressed by improvements. There was a virtue to keeping Wikisyntax simple as it used to be.
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