On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 21:08, Michael Snow <wikipedia(a)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.