[Foundation-l] The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia (from the Chronicle) + some citation discussions

[David Goodman]

The one thing experts in a field are not good at, is predicting the
success of innovative material. If it were of predictable value, it
wouldn't be revisionist. Experts can tell is something fits into the
accepted paradigms; they can tell if something is so wrong with
respect to soundly known facts that is is very unlikely to be true,
they can even tell if they individually agree with a new proposal--but
they cannot tell what is outside the current boundaries but the field
as a whole will accept, or how many years or decades it will take for
such acceptance, or how long the acceptance will last until the next
reversal.

To the extent experts can judge the new work, we do not need them to
tell us on Wikipedia directly, overturning the principle that all
editors are equal; a new work of any importance will have reviews and
commentaries on it, and that's where the experts will have their say,
and where any editor can find and cite them, as is the established
practice.  We do need to cover such reviews more than we currently do;
if experts come to a talk page and indicate these to us, we can
include them.

Unfortunately, in the humanities such reviews can take several years
to arrive--though sometimes there will be an immediate discussion in
academic magazines,whether specialist ones or  general sources such as
 the (UK)  Times Higher Education or the  (US) Chronicle of Higher
Education. Perhaps we should even consider the use of some of the most
accepted blogs for the purpose also.

But we should at least give some mention to peer-reviewed materials
published by a major academic publisher--so at least the readers can
know of it and examine it for themselves.

On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 11:32 AM, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> On 2/20/12 10:39 AM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>>
>> As Mark has said, some subjects are highly vulnerable to recentism, but
>> one shouldn't expect that with a historical article about events from 1886.
>
>
> I agree it's more of a problem in some areas than others, but I think it
> also often applies as a heuristic to history as well: many revisionist
> proposals never succeed in revising the mainstream historical narrative. The
> fact that they're published in a journal simply means that several peers
> thought it was a legitimate proposal worth publishing, not necessarily that
> it's going to become the new majority view.
>
> I even ran into a recent example in classics while editing on Wikipedia. A
> paper was published in 1985 challenging the standard account of a Roman
> fellow's death, [[en:Marcus Marius Gratidianus]], which I dug up and
> suggested we use it to revise our (older) traditional narrative. But then
> some more searching dug up late-1980s and early-1990s papers that defended
> the traditional narrative, and from what I can tell that 1985 paper is now
> considered an intriguing suggestion but unlikely to be correct, or partially
> correct at best.
>
> But what if the year were 1985 and those responses hadn't come out yet? How
> do we determine if that paper's new findings are the new mainstream
> narrative, or just an interesting proposal, worth mentioning as a minority
> view, but ultimately unpersuasive? In hindsight, updating the article in
> 1985 to anoint this as the new scholarly view would've been premature,
> because it never did get accepted by the rest of the field. The only real
> answer seems to be "wait a few years and let it percolate through the
> literature", and my only guess at a faster alternative is to have experts in
> the field who can make some kind of educated guess as to which revisionist
> proposals are likely to ultimately succeed. I think it's a hard problem in
> general.
>
> -Mark
>
>
>
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-- 
David Goodman

DGG at the enWP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG