Stan said
you've fallen into the "I'm a professional" trap
**You are right - on the other hand, when I first started working on the 'pedia (I am testing the waters after a hiatus of about 8 months, but contributed regularly for a long period before that, and also collaborated on many of the initial discussions on standards, etc.), people tended to trust each other's areas of expertise - whether professional or amateur. The thing I have found is that people who are interested in good articles can usually tell good work, and a good professional will often bow to a better informed amateur -- or vice versa. In the case of these particular articles, I really do suggest that you read the discussion that's been taking place. You seem to have gathered that I am in a very small minority, but if you read the discussions, you will see that I have qualified my discussion, been very inclusive of other viewpoints, and have provided reasons for my edits.
Stan said:
But it would take some adroit writing and citing to produce something that wouldn't be mangled by the semi-educated eager to promulgate the wrong things they were told by incompetent and biased CS professors, so I don't tend to work on those articles very much. It's an unfortunate weakness of Wikipedia, but no amount of fulminating about it is going to change things; what you and I experience in our respective fields is a predictable consequence of the rules under which Wikipedia operates. It's motivating me to ponder ideas for new rules that would address your complaints better, but it's tricky and I don't have any good ideas yet.
**That's true to some extent, but remember, Wikipedia isn't paper. It isn't the place for original research, but there are tons of examples where we make statements that mention growing trends and new approaches. And if we know more on a subject, don't we have some sort of obligation to share that knowledge and make wikipedia better than other online encyclopedias? After all, even the famous Helga did a great deal of eventual good in that she managed to get articles on issues like the Heimatvertriebene included and to shake several of us into checking facts and neutralizing the Polish-German borders. THOSE articles certainly contain lots of stuff you might not see all in the same place.
Cheers -- JHK
Julie Kemp wrote:
Stan said
you've fallen into the "I'm a
professional" trap
**You are right – on the other hand, when I first started working on the ‘pedia (I am testing the waters after a hiatus of about 8 months, but contributed regularly for a long period before that, and also collaborated on many of the initial discussions on standards, etc.), people tended to trust each other’s areas of expertise – whether professional or amateur. The thing I have found is that people who are interested in good articles can usually tell good work, and a good professional will often bow to a better informed amateur -- or vice versa. In the case of these particular articles, I really do suggest that you read the discussion that’s been taking place. You seem to have gathered that I am in a very small minority, but if you read the discussions, you will see that I have qualified my discussion, been very inclusive of other viewpoints, and have provided reasons for my edits.
To be totally candid, I got a mixed reaction from reading your comments. There were several that sounded to me like "this is what me and all my buddies have agreed is the truth, and anybody who disagrees with us is ignorant and can't read either". I know that's not exactly what you said, but that's what I heard, and if you had said something like that directly to me, I would have been hopping mad.
I'm sure the good old days of wikipedia are long gone - there are lots more editors and lots more opposing viewpoints to deal with.
[...] remember, Wikipedia isn’t paper. It isn’t the place for original research, but there are tons of examples where we make statements that mention growing trends and new approaches. And if we know more on a subject, don’t we have some sort of obligation to share that knowledge and make wikipedia better than other online encyclopedias? After all, even the famous Helga did a great deal of eventual good in that she managed to get articles on issues like the Heimatvertriebene included and to shake several of us into checking facts and neutralizing the Polish-German borders. THOSE articles certainly contain lots of stuff you might not see all in the same place.
Absolutely. Part of my work with navy ships is simply to assemble a consistent set of accepted facts that are presently scattered across dozens of books and sites on the net. But those aren't particularly controversial, or perhaps more accurately we haven't yet had a thousand ex-sailors descend on the Wikipedia to tell us that "those admirals and their eggheads didn't know what really happened". If you want to tangle with a tough subject, well, it's going to be tough, and you have to decide if it's worth the time you're going to have to spend arguing about it, when you could instead enjoy filling in the many empty parts of Wikipedia. For instance, what are the main sources of what we think we know about the Dark Ages? Many of the primary documents have interesting stories of their own, but only a handful are described in articles, and as I far as I know there's no "list of" article that I can scan to see what all there is.
Stan