Fred Bauder wrote:
You're changing the subject. Which is that an excellent article written by a
knowledgable person which CONFORMS TO THE ACCEPTED CANON OF KNOWLEDGE can be trashed back to the level of what the average users remember from their undergraduate courses.
There's an ACCEPTED CANON OF KNOWLEDGE? Wow, I had no idea! Where is it, and how can I get my hands on it? Why hasn't anybody deleted everything in Wikipedia yet and replaced it with this CANON? (sarcasm alert)
Seriously, Fred raises a valid concern that the survey material taught to undergraduates is frequently incorrect or dated. But the idea of a canon of knowledge veers dangerously to POV. And suggesting that more advanced education is the cure is arrogant; Ph.D.s aren't required here (caveat - Fred's statement doesn't mean he's arguing for this, I'm just drawing one possible conclusion from it). Anyway, if such a canon is possible, Wikipedia seems like the best way to get it accepted, but it will take literally forever to reach that point.
--Michael Snow
--- Michael Snow wikipedia@earthlink.net wrote:
There's an ACCEPTED CANON OF KNOWLEDGE? Wow, I had no idea!
...
Ph.D.s aren't required here --Michael Snow
There is no accepted canon of knowledge.
Why Ph.D.s are not required here (you mean, in Wikipedia?) ???
--Optim
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Ph.D.s aren't required here --Michael Snow
There is no accepted canon of knowledge.
Why Ph.D.s are not required here (you mean, in Wikipedia?) ???
Not the people. Michael wanted to state that you don't have to have a Ph.D. if yout want to write articles. Of course we don't throw you out if you have one!
Uli
--- Ulrich Fuchs mail@ulrich-fuchs.de wrote:
Not the people. Michael wanted to state that you don't have to have a Ph.D. if yout want to write articles. Of course we don't throw you out if you have one!
Uli
oh ok. sorry I misundestood! I tend to read in a quick & dirty way :)))
--Optim
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Including only material in an article which is within the accepted canon of knowledge is one of the Wikipedia editing guidelines. I think it means facts which are accepted by scholars in the field.
Fred
From: Michael Snow wikipedia@earthlink.net Reply-To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2004 21:34:40 -0800 To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: why an average person would wish to ruin a good article?
There's an ACCEPTED CANON OF KNOWLEDGE? Wow, I had no idea! Where is it, and how can I get my hands on it? Why hasn't anybody deleted everything in Wikipedia yet and replaced it with this CANON? (sarcasm alert)
Michael Snow wrote:
There's an ACCEPTED CANON OF KNOWLEDGE? Wow, I had no idea! Where is it, and how can I get my hands on it? Why hasn't anybody deleted everything in Wikipedia yet and replaced it with this CANON? (sarcasm alert)
I can't vouch for what Fred was saying, because I think I disagree with him and actually agree more with what you're saying. But I would say that there *is* an accepted canon of knowledge, and that Wikipedia ought to (and mostly does) reflect it.
To me, the notion of "accepted canon" immediately raises the question "accepted by whom?" The wikipedia process/policy of NPOV answers that question by saying that articles ought to be such that they are acceptable to the widest possible range of _reasonable_ contributors working in a spirit of mutual inquiry. This means that we frequently have to make "softer" claims than we might like, due to the existence of some annoying minor (but reasonable) viewpoint. We have to "contextualize" a lot of claims, but this makes us stronger overall.
The gun control debate is one area that I know quite a bit about. And I don't know of any other source in existence that I can point to and say "Here is a body of knowledge about this subject matter that most closely reflects the accepted canon of knowledge, where 'accepted' means accepted by knowledgeable and reasonable partisans on both sides of the issue."
Important here is the idea that most people actually are reasonable, that not all writing is polemic, that most people are more interested in getting the information right than in pushing a particular point of view.
You and I might (or might not, I don't know you so I can't even guess) agree about gun control. But we can agree that this study said this, and that study said that, and about what the content of the arguments on both side actually are, and about what the laws actually say, and so on. So we could (if we were interested) work together in a spirit of love to present the basic information in a way that no reasonable partisan could find unfair.
That, to me, is the only possible sensible meaning for 'accepted canon'.
--Jimbo
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