On Jan 6, 2005, at 1:41 PM, Daniel Mayer wrote:
--- Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
And even where NPOV is concerned, an expert is much more useful than just someone off the street. A non-expert POV-warrior will easily blow away a non-expert NPOV-fighter, simply because he is the one who has read at least something about the subject. An expert POV-warrior will have a much harder time fighting an expert NPOV-fighter.
And that is why we have a dispute resolution process. RfC is used to expose a conflict to a wider audience. That increases the chance that other NPOV-minded and at least semi-knowledgeable people get to voice their view and add their contribution. If that gets the attention of an expert in the field, then all the better (so long as that person adheres to NPOV). And you incorrectly assume that the non-expert POV warrior knows more than the non-expert NPOV-minded person or group (if the later are really in the right, then they will garner more support in the end and win).
Most academics are poves, that is why they became academics in the first place. The POV problem isn't going to go away any time soon, because it is a feature of the society we live in. In a micro broadcasting world of scarcity, there is a very large economic niche for being an expert Pove, recruiting lesser poves, and producing*confirmation* rather than *information*. NPOV is a more revolutionary concept than most people realize, because it is precisely not how academia operates.
What is happening on wikipedia is fundamentally different from the old knowledge system, and one which is systematically addressing many of the problems of that old system - such as the high rent to participate in it. However, it means that what you see, is what you get for a very long time in terms of social dynamics. Academic and expert Poves are merely trolls who have been taught how to do it without upsetting the other pove trolls that they have coffee with, and have been given permission to Povetroll so long as they do some level of useful work to earn their keep. (see Thomas Kuhn).
Fundamentally expertise means something very different in the wikipedia verse - it means not being able to frame competing ideas out, but being able to draw a large enough frame so that readers can reasonably weigh the competing ideas available.
This is why tools are needed that will make creating a wide frame possible, and why I propose we have a system for making citations easy, clear, annotable, and in their own namespace with macros.