At 08:48 PM 8/13/2009, Carcharoth wrote:

It's striking a balance between experts who WP:OWN articles and revert "ignorant" editors who "don't know what they are talking about", and requiring experts to carefully explain everything. Ideally, you would tell both lots to edit based on reliable sources, not from their own authority.

If you are telling others that you understand the topic better than they do, because of your expertise, then, I'm saying, we should accept that, taking it in good faith, *and* require you to write strictly from sources, though in Talk you may explain more deeply.

Experts can actually be dangerous, even with strict sourcing requirements, because, if they are truly experts, they know the sources and can cherry-pick more effectively to support their own POV.

The other aspect is that experts often will insist on "perfectly accurate" text, and what it takes to do that can make the text so cumbersome, with the rare exceptions covered in every statement, with technical language preferred, to avoid what they will see as ambiguity, that the article becomes unreadable to a non-expert. We have some articles like that, they are impenetrable unless you already know the subject.

To reach a general audience, an article on a relatively abstruse subject must approach the subject carefully, building up understanding from what is most simple at the first, into what covers the exceptions and the details.

Experts can make sure that true errors don't make it into the text. Ordinary editors can make sure that it is understandable, and, when there is conflict among experts, resolve the conflicts. Conflict among sources is tricky; often, I've seen, when there appears to be conflict among the highest quality reliable sources, i.e., peer-reviewed secondary sources, the conflict isn't actually in the sources, it is in our interpretations of them. At least in the hard sciences.

I really shouldn't be writing here.... but this struck me.