In a message dated 4/16/2009 2:38:26 PM Pacific Daylight Time, michaeldavid86@comcast.net writes:
Then why, David, are academics, professionals and other experts in their fields still treated with such hostility in this Project?>>
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The role of experts is to help find the sources, not to include their own original theories about those sources. That's been the essential problem with experts in the project. They want to write up their own unpublished, or unvetted information into the pages.
An expert in this project needs to realize that we are not original publishers, we are only re-publishers. Whatever you put here, when questioned, needs to be able to be backed up with some published authority.
Will Johnson
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2009/4/16 WJhonson@aol.com:
The role of experts is to help find the sources, not to include their own original theories about those sources. That's been the essential problem with experts in the project. They want to write up their own unpublished, or unvetted information into the pages.
*Some* experts. You can hardly move on WIkipedia without bumping into a Ph.D.
Our problem comes from people who can't work well with *lots* of others - but that's hardly restricted to experts.
Some parts of Wikipedia are expert-hostile. But there's plenty of others to tell those people they're doing it wrong. I think our claimed "expert problem" is way overstated.
- d.
On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 8:03 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Our problem comes from people who can't work well with *lots* of others - but that's hardly restricted to experts.
Adjusting to Wikipedia's peculiar methodology is another aspect of it (and one that feeds into collaboration issues). The good thing here is that one of the objectives the teacher has with this assignment is to give the students a practical lesson in different methodologies.