On 4/7/08, Phil Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/7/08, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
And the reason it's a problem is editors who are bright but are unschooled in joined-up thinking, who (usually unconsciously, some consciously) don't like the idea that judgement takes time and effort to learn, and jump at the promise of a mechanised substitute. Because it clearly works *up to a point*. (Which is what I mean when I say it's at best training wheels for beginners, even if it's no way to do serious work.)
Yes - it's worth noting that many of the research practices espoused by Wikipedia on WP:V and WP:NOR are the sorts of things that are taught in high school, where the "every statement that has ever been thought by anybody other than you has to be precisely sourced" thing is taught.
WP:V has been written and maintained by a number of people with PhDs and other higher degrees, both in the humanities and the sciences, so it's wrong-headed to talk in terms of it being appropriate for high school students, as though we're too stupid to know how to do good research. :)
What it's appropriate for is a bunch of often anonymous people writing an encyclopedia for a massive audience -- a far, far bigger audience than any traditional academic could dream of -- composed of kids, generalists, specialists, and their mothers and their grandmothers.
The position we have to adopt is basically that of the teacher, but not teachers who want to imprint their personal views on their students. We are teachers who want to create [[Autodidacticism|auto-didacts]] -- people who can teach themselves.
We want to be questioned, we want to be challenged. That's a fundamental part of the revolutionary nature of Wikipedia. The expert is still respected, but he's no longer on a pedestal, where what he says goes just because he went to Harvard or Oxford. We want to know who his sources are, and who his sources' sources are, and on and on down the line, so our readers can make up their own minds.
An article that provides that for people is a really useful resource. An article that offers a Wikpedian's original research isn't, even if happens to be accurate.
Sarah