On Tue, 11 Sep 2012, Charles Matthews wrote: If someone who could reasonably be seen as speaking for Wikipedia told him that Wikipedia needed secondary sources for his claim, they are wrong, and Wikipedia failed. It completely misses the point to explain how Wikipedia's actual policies are reasonable. The policy that Roth was told about is not reasonable; if it doesn't match Wikipedia's actual policy, he shouldn't be expected to figure that out. It has nothing to do with celebrity power, except that when celebrities run into bad admins, people learn about it.

On 09/11/12 8:23 AM, Nathan wrote: The subversive principle lies in making reality a victim of group-think. This subjects truth to a wholly flawed mechanism of verification that is immune to any kind of reality check. Wikipedia has a perverse history when it comes to dealing with expertise. It substitutes it's own bureaucracy for recognized experts in a field. These admins are the wrongheaded self-defined experts that expect to be treated as authorities. In circumstances of law they are quite willing to evade responsibility with a strategic "IANAL" while they run to the acknowledged experts in that field. Understanding and good judgement are not the product of rules. If we note the wording, "There’s no way Roth could have tackled this subject without thinking of Anatole Broyard," It doesn't state Broyard's influence it speculates about it. The innuendo works for all but the most careful readers. In the underlying incident instead of treating the word "spook" in its ordinary meaning of a ghost, the crowd willfully mischaracterizes the word in a more obscure sense. In the famed Seigenthaler incident the writer did not make a blunt claim that Seigenthaler had been involved in the Kennedy assassination, he merely stated that he had been cleared of any such charges. That claim may have been outright vandalism, but, judging by the reaction, it was effective. How we fail to read accurately is frequently a big problem. I tend to be very critical of experts in any field. I still like to give them the prima facie benefit of the doubt in the absence of evidence to the contrary, or other basis of conflict. Similarly, I also read "reliable sources" with the same criticality. Needing "to do a better job educating potential editors" sounds to much like the politician who thinks that the only reason the public hasn't agreed with views is that he hasn't explained them well enough. It doesn't occur to him that there might be something wrong with his views, nor to us that our epistemology might be flawed. Ray

On 09/12/12 2:32 AM, Thomas Morton wrote: I think a lot of what happens on Wikipedia is a result of the computer science mindset where everything can be reduced to a series of zeros and ones. In the humanities young editors too easily fall into the trap of a the first year university student who has taken a Psychology course and is ready to analyze everyone around him. Ec

The easiest solution would have been to ask Roth to write a blog post (or something similar) detailing the inspiration for the book -- as far as I know, that inspiration was not publicized until the open letter was published. Another option would have been an interview with basically any website. While I'm sure someone will chime in saying "that's against WP:RS!", it's actually not. See WP:SELPPUB: "Self-published and questionable sources may be used as sources of information *about themselves*, usually in articles about themselves or their activities" (emphasis in original) --Ed On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 12:03 PM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net>wrote;wrote:

On 11 September 2012 16:14, Ken Arromdee <arromdee(a)rahul.net> wrote: That is what I have described before as the point of failure, if the inference is correct. There has been plenty of discussion on the premise that there was a failure of courtesy, which I don't see. Without the whole mail being made public, I don't see how we can conclude "bad". Selective quotation is what we have in the New Yorker letter, together with some over-interpretation. Which is rhetoric. But the bulk of Roth's letter is much more interesting than that rather scanty intro. Charles