On Wednesday 22 February 2012 03:45 PM, Thomas Morton wrote:
Jokes aside :) the problem here is exemplary of
what Wikipedia *doesn't*
do well, which is to find ways to assess the
legitimacy of
not-yet-legitimised knowledge
I'm not seeing a good argument that we *should* assess the legitimacy.
This
seems to be being cast in the light of "verifiability not truth" (a really
silly maxim) but, in reality, it goes more back to our idea of "we use
reliable sources because they are *peer reviewed*".
Well actually, we use newspaper sources very frequently, as well as
non-scholarly (and therefore non-peer-reviewed) books, so in fact, we rely
on *printing* (or to put it more kindly, publishing) as a signal for
peer-review, not peer-review itself. In my opinion, this is a poor signal.
Well realistically, yes, we consider something that has been reputably
published to have a basic level of reliability. But that is not the end of
the test.
This idea of "published" can (and is) relaxed though. Indeed it is my
perception that in many topic areas we rely far too heavily on online
sources - there can be a distinct prejudice against offline source material.
However I am interested in whether you have a specific idea of what you
would change? Can you express a reason for why using the published test is
a poor signal?
Tom