On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 11:58 AM, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
All three of these criticisms, of course, are the almost inevitable result of some of our most strongly-held policies:
- We have no requirement that articles be written by experts in
the field; indeed we tend to discourage experts.
- Even if you deny the existence of an anti-expert bias, the fact
that we're "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit" virtually guarantees a certain mediocrity -- an article's quality does not increase monotonically until it is near-perfect, but rather, oscillates around a mean quality which is determined by all the editors who contribute to it over time (many of whom, yes, will be high school students or university undergraduates).
- Our vociferous insistence on sources guarantees that some
(if not many) of them will be "poorly selected".
These well worded, and perfectly accurate in my experience. As you say, they are the result of other goals that we have, such as "anyone can edit". One thing I wish we emphasized more is: even though everyone can edit every article, this doesn't mean that everyone should edit every article.
The issue of selecting sources is particularly difficult because the way that people often interpret WP:V leads to "cherry picking" dozens of sources for individual facts in an article, instead of finding a smaller collection of sources that cover the overall literature. The issue is further complicated because people confuse articles on current events, for which there is no established "broader literature", with articles on subjects (e.g. music theory) in which there is an abundance of reliable scholarly literature. Our articles on current events are essentially forced to use newspapers (in print and online) as sources. Our articles on music theory should ideally be referenced to the best textbooks and scholarly works on the subject.
- Carl