On Mar 2, 2007, at 7:35 AM, stvrtg wrote:
- If Essjay misrepresented himself in any substantial way in
arguments related to his claimed expertise, how is it that noone qualified in that area suspected he wasnt a Phd/Thd? I suspect the reason is because his ventures into misrepresentation were quite limited to the cantankerous. I suspect also that this fact might bother people who might have thought they could tell just by looking at someones pixels.
This is an interesting point. Many seem to be taking this as why we can't engage in credentialism. But it seems to me to be an example of the worst case scenario in credentialism working out OK.
Some observations on how this worked.
1) It was never blind argument - it used its credentialism as a supporting detail, not as the whole argument. 2) It was never totally wrong. He may not have a PhD in theology, but he demonstrated that he knows his stuff.
This is an interesting situation. It suggests to me that, in fact, we probably can [[WP:AGF]] when people cite credentials, take them seriously as credible, smart, dedicated users, pay heed to their arguments, etc. We have to resist letting them just dictate the content of our articles. We have to also listen to people who go "Look, I'm sure you do know your stuff here, but you did just make this error: [cites source]." (Which I've had happen in a debate regarding webcomics - I was making a point about the comparative notability of two sites, and just completely forgot that one site, in addition to all the random "anyone can host their comic here" stuff, hosted Tom Hart's work. Whoops.) But those are safeguards we'd put into place even if we knew absolutely that Stephen Hawking were editing [[Black hole]].
This ties in with another interesting point. It may be my limited experience, but it seems like most times experts have intervened as experts have been something like this.
Expert: This article/policy/whatever is complete crap. Other editor: What? No it's not! Expert: Look. I have a PhD in field X and have published articles about Y. This is complete crap.
That is to say, it's not that we tend to have experts slipping information in with no justification other than "I'm an expert. I know stuff." Their contributions as experts are more subtle, and, I would wager, less dangerous.
What Essjay's case suggests, which is striking, is that the safeguards of not letting expertise be the sole reason for something and of still taking seriously arguments against experts, particularly when they cite source are actually all we need in order to be able to deal with being respectful towards claimed experts and take seriously their critiques of articles.
-Phil