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

[David Moran]

Well, right.  That's kind of what I mean.  These things happened to
Citizendium because credentialism is the natural outcome of trying to create
a system of valuing a certain class of contributors more than others.

DM


On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 12:35 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>