In a message dated 12/11/2008 8:17:02 PM Pacific Standard Time, snowspinner@gmail.com writes:
Another big part is that our policies are shaped heavily by who showed up in the early days of Wikipedia, and that means that they are shaped heavily by a techno-libertarian philosophy that has been, historically, very hostile to postmodernism, and thus, by extension, very hostile to humanities scholarship. It is the case, frankly, that Wikipedia, on a policy level, has a systemic bias against the humanities.>>
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I think yes and no and maybe and also I refuse to answer but only in a post-modernist way.
But maybe you could give a concrete example of where you think there is bias against the humanities. I think that some of the people who shaped the early policies were actually involved in the soft sciences.
Will Johnson
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On Dec 11, 2008, at 11:19 PM, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
But maybe you could give a concrete example of where you think there is bias against the humanities.
Well, in an earlier reply I pointed to the ludicrous problems with NOR and "interpretation." There's a policy that is actively geared against the humanities. (Or, let's be fairer, against literary studies, which is my field)
Beyond that? Literary studies really does have a substantial DIY ethic with primary sources. We're not going to publish an essay that tells you that the theme of John Steinbeck's _The Pearl_ is greed, or that the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is an unreliable narrator. We have a basic expectation that you can figure that out. Now, yes, you can probably, if you go looking, find a source that mentions either of those facts. But it's going to be a side mention. It might be possible to stitch together an article via side mentions in scholarly articles, but it's an awkward and unnatural way to do it that does not resemble any sort of existing research practices.
A lot of this is that humanities knowledge does not have the same sort of hierarchical structure that science knowledge often does, where you go somewhat smoothly from basic concepts to advanced ones. And you have textbooks that cover the basic stuff, advanced overviews for the advanced stuff, and journal articles for the absolute newest stuff. Humanities knowledge does not split easily into basic and advanced pools, and so you rarely have a textbook of obvious and basic knowledge about various pieces of literature - and even less so a good one. Where basic textbooks in the sciences provide explanation, a basic textbook in an English class is often a reader of various poems and short stories.
So our bias against primary sources becomes a major barrier to adding basic knowledge from the humanities. Because while it exists in patches here and there, there just isn't the sort of systemic effort to document basic knowledge about literature that there is about chemistry. We rely more heavily on an oral tradition and on the belief that there will be a substantial commonality in interpretations resulting from reading the primary sources.
I think that some of the people who shaped the early policies were actually involved in the soft sciences.
I'm sure they were. I mean, Larry was a philosopher. But he was an Objectivist philosopher, and they don't exactly enjoy widespread acceptance in the philosophical community. I didn't mean "techno- libertarian" as a comment about disciplinarity - more as a philosophical view. The Slashdot and XKCD crowd, basically - which does share certain political and philosophical views, among them a general hostility towards postmodernism. And that is where we started, because it's where any crazy free content project in 2003 was going to start. That was the base you built from in 2003. It's not a problem as such - they did a great job. But literary studies was not high on their mind.
An example - I remember in the early days a discussion about using content from an avowedly Marxist source, and Jimbo saying that, given how discredited Marxist economics was, he did not think they were a reliable source. Now, he's right - in economics. But in literary studies, Marxism remains huge. I mean, absolutely massive. And so dismissing a source as unreliable and insignificant because it's Marxist is a really significant problem from the perspective of my field.
Now, mind you, I suspect most of what happened there was that Jimbo just didn't really know what was up with literary studies, and the needs of that area of the project didn't even occur to him - not that he actively wanted to stomp out coverage of that. But it remains a bias that was very present in the early days, and has shaped some of our fundamental attitudes.
-Phil