On 4/7/08, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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. It is not taught (at least by any remotely intelligent teacher, which, admittedly, is far from coextensive with the set of high school teachers) because it is true or good practice - it is taught because high school students *honestly do not understand the basic idea of citing a source yet*. But what it produces is not good writing - it produces writing at a level which can be further improved to good writing. (And notably, high schoolers intuitively grasp that they are not engaged in good writing, because the moment they're not being watched by a teacher they will revert to more normal writing, which, while often not good, at least eliminates some of the artificially imposed badness of high school writing). The problem is that Wikipedia needs to be better than high school writing. And thus it needs to have a more intelligent relationship with the idea of what research is, what summary is, and what the relationship between a source and a presentation of information is. Right now V and NOR present viewpoints on these topics that are not merely poor policy or unwise, but are *wrong*. That is, they make claims that are explicitly contradicted by the basic rhetoric and composition curricula of major universities. -Phil

On Apr 7, 2008, at 7:42 PM, SlimVirgin wrote: I remain agnostic about how WP:V and WP:NOR were formulated - I note merely that they present a viewpoint of research that is, by current prevailing standards, wrong. It seems to me that they got wrong not because somebody stupid went and changed it but because careless editing over years caused the pages to drift from sane to wrong, but the point remains - they are simply wrong. Wikipedia's quest is to present the ur-source from which all knowledge depends through a process of recursive sourcing? That's new... Well, it's still useful. The problem with an article that offers accurate original research is that it's not presenting a NPOV perspective. Our articles shouldn't say what "is" about the world - they should provide attributed accounts of the important accounts of the world. Which, to say again (and hopefully this time it will stick and people will stop responding to claims I'm not making), we strive to provide accurate information, but the only information we strive to provide is accounts of what other people think. -Phil

On Apr 7, 2008, at 10:19 PM, SlimVirgin wrote: Indeed. It does so for several reasons, though. 1) It is terribly written. 2) It is woefully incomplete, with no context, connections with Kant's larger project, history, mention of the significance of the two editions, etc. 3) Is horribly POV in that it glosses over the existence of debates about any of the points 4) Makes no effort at explanatory summary, targeting itself entirely at people who are already familiar with Kant's work. That's not an OR problem. That's a shitty article problem. Have a look at the article on the Critique of Judgment. It's still flawed - and I'll admit, a good chunk of the article is my writing (now some four years old, and done while I was still editing from an IP - I wouldn't even have noticed it if it weren't for the fact that one of the examples is one that I am, as far as I know, the only one that uses). There are some idiosyncrasies on display, to be sure. And I wrote it from my knowledge of the Critique - I didn't even work primarily from the original text. I just went with what I remembered of it. And mercifully, a lot of people have added to it since my rather terrible earliest version (which you can see at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Critique_of_Judgement&oldid=3…) . But I think it's a much better example of what's going on. Yes, the summary of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment needs more perspectives and commentary - it's shameful that there's no Adorno addressed there. And the off-handed comment about Hannah Arendt needs expanding. (Also one of mine. Mea culpa.) But the article, as it stands, is far from useless. It needs improvement, and sourced, NPOV material is what it needs most direly. And it could stand to be de-jargonned a bit. But it is, to my mind, clearly a reasonably useful article. And, more to the point, I do not think that an article that had the same relationship to a wealth of secondary sources would inherently be any clearer or better-written. Its main advantage would be a better meeting of NPOV. But, reading it, I am genuinely hard-pressed to argue that it is unhelpful or that the correct course of action is to remove information from it as original research. Indeed, as bad as the Pure Reason article is, I don't think deletion as OR is helpful there either. Which says a lot, I think. -Phil