[Foundation-l] Organization on Wikipedia that deals with content issues.

[David Gerard]

On 29 August 2010 17:19, David Moran <fordmadoxfraud at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think my problem with suggestions like this is that the assumption at the
> heart of all of them--that "experts" with degrees are preferable as
> information authorities to nonexperts without--is deeply problematic, and
> I'm not convinced it won't create more problems than it solves.  I am not
> myself an academic, but I've worked in an academic setting for over a decade
> (I'm in college textbooks), and I work closely with college faculty and ...
> quite frankly the number of them I would trust to edit an article I wanted
> to read is very small.
> Academic qualifications generally just mean you stayed in school long enough
> to get them, and little else.  I'm not trying to spout anti-intellectual
> nonsense, I'm just saying that academia churns out an awful lot of people
> with degrees every year, a really astonishing number actually, and an awful
> lot of those people are no more deserving of the term "expert" than the guy
> driving the 2 train that took me to work this morning, or the girl who
> served me coffee at Dunkin' Donuts.  I'm worried we'd give the imprimatur of
> extra scholarly specialness to the edits of a bunch of people who honestly
> would not deserve it.


Take care not to conflate expertise with credentials. At best,
credentials are a shortcut to finding an expert; at worst, they're a
union card that people without workable expertise use to get a job
anyway.

Clay Shirky noted this important distinction:

http://many.corante.com/archives/2006/11/20/social_facts_expertise_citizendium_and_carr.php

In practice, academics who are really interested in their field will
happily listen to the uncredentialed on their topic, even if only for
a moment, just in case they have something interesting to say.
Academics who are not all that good will be very credentialist.
Cranks, having no accepted expertise, will attach especial store to
what credentials they can scrape up. This, btw, is how Citizendium
became a pseudoscience haven:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Citizendium#The_concept_of_expertise_on_Citizendium


- d.