"Andrew Lih" wrote
I'm curious if there is a reasonable reason against Wikipedia serving this function, other than "encyclopedias are not news", which I would argue is old-style thinking (and something I've heard from more than one so-called "academic" committee.)
It's a reasonable argument, re current affairs and 'first draft of history', that two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back is less convincing. It is not one I support - I'm with Andrew on this. After all, in science, this is the norm, and we have no problem with saying that when the science changes, we change the articles.
The second-order point on that is, well, WP shouldn't _anticipate_ the scientific revision, so the same should apply to history. But I think the policy on original research then enters: it can correctly be said of WP that its current affairs coverage should _not_ be doing the job of historical synthesis, ahead of the historians.
Charles
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On 9/21/06, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
"Andrew Lih" wrote
I'm curious if there is a reasonable reason against Wikipedia serving this function, other than "encyclopedias are not news", which I would argue is old-style thinking (and something I've heard from more than one so-called "academic" committee.)
It's a reasonable argument, re current affairs and 'first draft of history', that two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back is less convincing. It is not one I support - I'm with Andrew on this. After all, in science, this is the norm, and we have no problem with saying that when the science changes, we change the articles.
The second-order point on that is, well, WP shouldn't _anticipate_ the scientific revision, so the same should apply to history. But I think the policy on original research then enters: it can correctly be said of WP that its current affairs coverage should _not_ be doing the job of historical synthesis, ahead of the historians.
Charles
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G'day folks,
It seems to me that we have a valuable function in giving the news a context such as who public figures are and the importance of public events. As long as our articles are based on reliable sources rather than unorthodox versions of events such as Queen Elizabeth II is a drugs smuggler.
We first came to widespread public awareness as a result of the work on the 2004 tsunami. It is one of our strengths and our coverage of contemporary events cannot be matched by our rivals.
We cannot afford to wait for the historians to eventually write articles before we cover publid figures and events. We should do it right but we should do it.
Regards
charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
The second-order point on that is, well, WP shouldn't _anticipate_ the scientific revision, so the same should apply to history. But I think the policy on original research then enters: it can correctly be said of WP that its current affairs coverage should _not_ be doing the job of historical synthesis, ahead of the historians.
I agree with that, and I think that the fact that our articles do sometimes wander into that territory is the source of some of the sentiment that we shouldn't have them in the first place. The articles on the 2004 U.S. presidential election were the worst set of them, *just now* finally being cleaned up of literally dozens of articles filled with novel syntheses, Wikipedian-produced data analysis, and all manner of other original research. We do need to find some better way to keep that sort of thing out.
-Mark