In a message dated 12/17/2008 1:04:54 PM Pacific Standard Time, snowspinner@gmail.com writes:
In fact, I would bet you that if I were to find the one of my colleagues with whom I most disagree on every point of literary theory and criticism, and pick at random a Derrida essay neither of us had read, we could hammer out a summary of it that we both agreed with. And I would further bet that this would not be possible if I were to pick two random people out of the aisles of my supermarket.>>
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As expert editors, we are allowed to summarize our sources. A summary is a description of the source. A summary *of the source* is not a criticism of the source, nor an interpretation of the source vis-a-vis some other source such as "Here he makes an obvious allusion to the Iliad although in a post-modern Kakaesque melange...."
Your opinion of what the source is saying is a summary, your opinion of *why* the source is saying what it's saying is not a summary of that source. It's an evaluation of the source.
I can give a good summary of an episode of Bewitched. If I then go on to give detailed critiques and understanding, and interpretations, evaluations, additional references to other things, etc etc that is not a summary of the source.
If in "Lady Chatterley's Lover" D.H. Lawrence does not state that "this is a send-up of middle class values" then we cannot, in a summary say "this is a send-up of middle class values". We can summarize what the source is saying. Additional layers, must be left to existing reviewers, not us as editors. *We* are not experts because we can add additional layers, *we* are experts because we can find sources which (they) add those layers for us.
Will Johnson
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On Dec 17, 2008, at 6:01 PM, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
As expert editors, we are allowed to summarize our sources. A summary is a description of the source. A summary *of the source* is not a criticism of the source, nor an interpretation of the source vis-a-vis some other source such as "Here he makes an obvious allusion to the Iliad although in a post-modern Kakaesque melange...."
Your opinion of what the source is saying is a summary, your opinion of *why* the source is saying what it's saying is not a summary of that source. It's an evaluation of the source.
Yes. I agree. (Though I quibble with your use of interpretation)
But current policy explicitly forbids even summary of sources that require expert knowledge to understand.
-Phil
On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 10:01:01PM -0500, Phil Sandifer wrote:
But current policy explicitly forbids even summary of sources that require expert knowledge to understand.
I use such sources all the time for mathematics articles. There's simply no way to require verifiability but also exclude the best sources as "too technical".
If there is a policy document that actually forbids these sources, that can be changed. But I don't think that NOR actually does forbid them, at the moment.
- Carl
Phil,
This is a
On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 10:01:01PM -0500, Phil Sandifer wrote:
Yes. I agree. (Though I quibble with your use of interpretation)
It's a general fact of life that Wikipedia talk is out of touch with critical theory. This is partially because the population at large is not well educated about it, partially because CT is stereotyped as pomo navel-gazing by some critics, and partially because Wikipedia was founded by an Objectivist.
So, even if we all know that every act of writing is an act of interpretation, and that there is no such thing as a pure uninterpreted source text, for the purposes of WP the terminology in WP:NOR is meant to be read in a naive, uneducated sense. This makes some sense, as NOR would not be improved by adding a long introduction to critical theory at the top.
This topic came up on this list a while back, and Jimbo Wales posted what I thought was a very reasonable opinion at http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2008-April/092995.html
- Carl
On Dec 18, 2008, at 11:03 AM, Carl Beckhorn wrote:
This topic came up on this list a while back, and Jimbo Wales posted what I thought was a very reasonable opinion at http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2008-April/092995.html
And that's a very good point about NPOV - I've actually long thought that NPOV is a very clever way of dealing with the problem of deviant epistemologies - from Lyotard to radical Christian fundamentalists.
I am not sure the point applies as well to NOR, where we do actually run into the problem that we need to have some way of differentiating between an acceptable interpretation of a source and an unacceptable one.
-Phil
On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 11:15:10AM -0500, Phil Sandifer wrote:
I am not sure the point applies as well to NOR, where we do actually run into the problem that we need to have some way of differentiating between an acceptable interpretation of a source and an unacceptable one.
The only method we have is to engage in discussion on the talk page. I often say something like "Anybody can edit Wikipedia, but not everyone can edit every article". In practice, I find that it's not specialized topics that are more difficult, but topics that are associated with actual political or religious debates.
One incident I remember involved an article where an editor wanted to introduce a certain type of proof that the editor found more intuitively clear. In the editor's opinion, the way that the proof is ordinarily presented in the literature is non-ideal because of the way that certain basic parts of the field are organized. Responding to this sort of proposal is extremely difficult without a broad knowledge of how the literature as a whole deals with a particular topic, because there's no single source that can be consulted to settle the debate.
This type of high-level decision about the fundamental organization and due weight of ideas in a certain article will always require a broad knowledge of the field.
- Carl