On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 08:40:27PM +1100, Mark Gallagher wrote:
Phil has hinted at it, but the primary reason we should be able to summarise and rephrase the words of humanities experts is that if we don't, our articles won't make any gosh-darned sense ...
Not only the humanities. This same issue appears in technical science and mathematics articles equally well. And the current practice is that we can indeed summarize and reword technical material to make it more accessible. There are three main requirements (all informal, nowhere spelled out).
(1) the summary should be in agreement with the consensus of written opinion in the field
N.B. The only way to tell if an article satisfies (1) is to have a very good sense of the overall consensus in the literature. In practice this means actually being familiar with a large chunk of literature in the field. But this is already implicit in the principle of undue weight - how can you decide if something has undue weight without knowing how that thing is covered in the literature?
(2) the summary should not introduce new theories or new interpretive frameworks
For example, contemporary mathematics is all about finding very general systems of which various specialized systems are just concrete examples. But in WP articles we avoid creating any ''new'' general systems, even if it appears possible to do so. This is a common error in new editors, who may try to develop an entirely new taxonomy of some area, or try to replace theorems with more general theorems that don't appear in the literature. That would be OK in print, if you could get it published, but not on WP.
(3) when there are several conflicting opinions in the literature, the article's summary should give due weight
This is not a very common issue in mathematics except for certain philosophical aspect, and fringe/pseudoscience topics. But I think it would be more important in writing about Derrida.
- Carl