Sarah wrote
Charles, anyone in the English-speaking world should
be able easily to
fact-check our material, and this is the English-language Wikipedia,
so that has to be our priority.
No. that's wrong, which is why I'm arguing the point. Our 'priority' is
the encyclopedia mission, and this 'anyone' stuff is getting in the way.
Your argument seems to be that because
everyone in the world can't fact-check it, no one should be able to,
and that we should instead leave the writing and research to
self-selected Wikipiedia "experts," many of whom are anonymous and may
have no expertise at all, or if they do, may not be highly regarded by
other experts in the field.
You should notice that of the three places I selected, two (Kerala in India, and Kampala
in Uganda) are substantially anglophone places.
And what is this "we should instead leave the writing and research to self-selected
Wikipiedia "experts," many of whom are anonymous and may have no expertise at
all, or if they do, may not be highly regarded by other experts in the field."? I
said nothing of the sort.
Einstein writes a paper a century ago. In German, in old-fashioned mathematical notation,
using concepts that will only later be tidied up by the mathematical physicists such as
Minkowski space. We want to do the thing an actual expert would do fluently: not repeat
Einstein verbatim, but to state the import in a style that is going to make sense to the
reader, and is compatible with the rest of the physics articles. This is likely to take as
read elementary algebraic manipulation (if not calculus), and logical moves - for anyone
who really wants to check it against the original. (Of course there will be textbook
treatments, but there are other fields which are not served as well). The fact is that Joe
Public will not usefully be able to fact-check all, in the typical case. Does this matter?
Not really. Some subjects just are hierarchically ordered like that.
I agree wholeheartedly that we should make the cream
of
reliable-source material globally available, but I strongly disagree
with allowing Wikipedians to insert their own opinions and
interpretations between those sources and our readers.
I'm not saying they should be. I'm saying that the 'populist' view is, if
taken to extremes, asking for too much verbatim quoting. If readers raise objections to
some basic massaging for readability, they can go elsewhere and see if they really like
the original sources that much better. The whole point about writing articles in technical
areas is that almost everyone would hate treatments that are really faithful to the
initial formulations.
Charles
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