On Dec 11, 2008, at 10:43 PM, Thomas Larsen wrote:
You're right--and I guess this issue brings us
down to the fundamental
rhetorical question asked by Larry Sanger: does Wikipedia tolerate
academic(s| opinions)? The answer tends to be no--because some people,
who tend to be the most vocal people and ironically seem to have the
most time on their hands, have got it into their heads that years of
study don't help someone to become more knowledgeable and to produce
better scholarship.
I think this is misleading to some extent - we are generally more
tolerant, i think, of scientists. Part of this is that the standards
of publication in the sciences are different - my sense is that it is
normal to, every few years, publish review articles that sum up work
in an area, and that definitive compilations of existing information
are considered valuable. Also, scientists tend to have a unitary
consensus - that is, on the vast majority of science, there is a
single view about how it works.
Humanities academia is messier - we don't publish overviews of
existing work nearly as often, so accounts generally need to be
stitched together from multiple sources. We do not tend to come to
definitive conclusions - there is no single consensus view of a given
novel. So the use of sources to provide an overview is harder - there
are more synthetic leaps that need to be made to create an overview.
Part of this is that our policies were not written with the humanities
in mind. 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.
-Phil