On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 7:06 PM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Any policy - or policy change - we can think of will have unforseen consequences.
I agree with you. But we can't let this paralyze us in responding to a problem that is no longer "unforeseen," but that in fact has occurred. At minimum, the Haymarket article ought to edited to accommodate a well-documented minority scholarly analysis -- surely we agree about that.
Is it possible that you being Mike Godwin is leading to a selection bias, where a large fraction of the actual experts with actual problems with process who did anything about it came to or through you on their way to solving or reporting the problem?
It's entirely possible. But it happens with enough frequency for me to be able to articulate a credible hypothesis that this is happening too often. Certainly there's no "selection bias" problem associated with the sheer fact of the Chronicle of Higher Education article itself -- its existence is something that nobody here disputes, regardless of how we interpret it. And I think there is a second hypothesis that is also credible, which is that the Chronicle article very likely hurts Wikipedia reputationally.
It seems that there are a large surplus of the latter, and only a few of the former, statistically. Assuming that's accurate, that should inform the policy discussion.
Certainly.
--Mike