George Herbert wrote:
Yes, we all agree, we want good experts to come
contribute and make highly
technical articles better.
No, we don't want to allow anyone including experts to slip unverifyable
unreferenced stuff in, because we basically don't know for sure what
anyone's qualifications are.
Precisely. That's why what is said is far more important than who says it.
It is likely that in many cases, "anyone"
isn't going to be qualified to
understand primary or secondary sources. That is probably simply cold
reality; as an example, I don't understand much of the math in the advanced
physics articles, and less so in the primary sources, despite having had
many years of advanced university math.
Policies which are good for soft sciences, history, etc, where anyone
generally can read the source and understand it, are probably not a good
match for hard ones where even the notations used are domain-specific and
arbitrary.
Yes, if every mathematical step in deriving a theory in physics needs to
be explained on the spot in great detail the whole article loses its impact.
Ec