[Foundation-l] Fwd: Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

[Andreas Kolbe]

> >We were talking
> > about very aggressive editors who know absolutely
> nothing of the subject,
> > and drive away specialist editors.
> >
> 
> I see an equal proportion of very aggressive editors among
> the expert
> as well as the non-expert editors.  Expertise does not
> necessarily
> mean a devotion to expressing all significant views and
> presenting
> them fairly. I have been involved a little with
> some   articles in
> Wikipedia written by fully-credentialed experts --in one
> case with an
> international reputation and distinguished academic
> awards-- devoted
> to expressing their own peculiarly one-sided view of the
> subject.  And
> there was a group of articles with several experts of
> established high
> reputation each taking the position that the other
> ones  were
> hopelessly wrong.   And not confined to
> Wikipedia, I  think we all
> know of subjects in all fields where there are or have been
> people of
> high authority with peculiar views  Indeed, this sort
> of bias infected
> the old Brittanica.

<snip>
 
> I remind you that in the case of climate change, the
> scientific view
> was eventually supported, though it took several rounds at
> arb com.

While this is a whole other topic, it is worth bearing in mind that there is another arb com round currently ongoing on climate change in en:WP, and that one of the most visible experts looks likely to end up topic-banned.

It is unfortunately true that experts can also be aggressive, and wedded to strange ideas about how to edit articles related to their field (in this case, BLPs of their ideological opponents).

A.