On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 21:08, Michael Snow wikipedia@frontier.com wrote:
On 10/2/2010 8:59 AM, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
I do believe the fact that there is less of a culture of scholarly source research in en:WP, and a preference of press sources over scholarly sources, especially in the humanities, impacts very negatively on en:WP's performance in this area.
I believe this is twin to the common problem in English Wikipedia culture of an inappropriate bias against sources that are not written in English, or not readily findable online (and often both apply). Given that English is much more of a lingua franca in the sciences than in other disciplines, it should not be surprising if this leads to inferior coverage in the humanities.
I would say that the roots of the problem lay in the bias of the methods of humanities rather than in something inherent to Wikipedia. Unlike in science, just [not all] top scholars in humanities have enough exact methodology. The rest are using various types of mystification to support their own myths. And building knowledge database in open and collaborative manner is mostly in collision with their interests.