<<In a message dated 1/6/2009 4:31:29 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, cbeckhorn@fastmail.fm writes:
Doesn't the NPOV policy, specifically the "due weight" part, demand that our articles include exactly those things that people educated in the field all know about, and avoid including things that people educated in the field feel are not important?>>
These two clauses have an excluded middle or rather two such. I know and it's important. I know and it's not important. I didn't know about it, but I see now that it's important. I didn't know about it, but I see that it's not important.
Due weight does not *demand* anything at all, but what it states is that we should give the appropriate weight to sub-sections of articles *based* on how the community who knows about them would themselves weight them.
In an articles on "Number Theory" the expansion of Pi wouldn't even be cited much less discussed. However in an article on Pi it might merit at least a citation, maybe one sentence in a ten paragraph article.
In an article on "Normal Numbers" it might merit several sentences.
We have no requirement to base our perspective on the most edge-cutting research, and I would suggest that encyclopedias of the print variety don't either. There is a time to weight to see if the *community* who cares... decides to care.
In the case of the missing neutrino problem it decided it cared. In the case of whether sun spot cycles effect the price of rice it decided it didn't.
It's not our place to decide *for* the community, what sholuld come to the top of the pond. It's our place to just skim the top of the pond and write up what we find.
Will Johnson
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On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 1:21 AM, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
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It's not our place to decide *for* the community, what sholuld come to the top of the pond. It's our place to just skim the top of the pond and write up what we find.
Do you never get the urge, when discovering something interesting, to see if it in Wikipedia? Sure, it should be put in the right place with the right sources and the right weight. But that urge is still there to educate and inform.
Carcharoth
On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 08:21:18PM -0500, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
It's not our place to decide *for* the community, what sholuld come to the top of the pond. It's our place to just skim the top of the pond and write up what we find.
We can also use our actual knowledge as members of the relevant community of physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, etc. to judge for ourselves how "prominent" a particular viewpoint is, in order to decide whether to go along with some particular content addition.
The idea that we have to wait a few years for secondary sources to sort things out before we write about a piece of news would be very surprising to the people who edit biographical articles about current politicians and articles about the latest release in the Harry Potter series. The general practice on wikipedia is simply that if material is verifiable and a consensus of editors on a page favors it, then it can be included. Why would academic articles be different - why would we have to wait for history to judge a new mathematical theorem, when we don't have to wait for history to judge some political scandal?
- Carl