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

[Thomas Morton]

On 22 February 2012 13:11, Achal Prabhala <aprabhala at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Wednesday 22 February 2012 03:45 PM, Thomas Morton wrote:
>
>> Jokes aside :) the problem here is exemplary of what Wikipedia *doesn't*
>>> do well, which is to find ways to assess the legitimacy of
>>> not-yet-legitimised knowledge
>>>
>>
>> I'm not seeing a good argument that we *should* assess the legitimacy.
>> This
>> seems to be being cast in the light of "verifiability not truth" (a really
>> silly maxim) but, in reality, it goes more back to our idea of "we use
>> reliable sources because they are *peer reviewed*".
>>
>
> Well actually, we use newspaper sources very frequently, as well as
> non-scholarly (and therefore non-peer-reviewed) books, so in fact, we rely
> on *printing* (or to put it more kindly, publishing) as a signal for
> peer-review, not peer-review itself. In my opinion, this is a poor signal.


Well realistically, yes, we consider something that has been reputably
published to have a basic level of reliability. But that is not the end of
the test.

This idea of "published" can (and is) relaxed though. Indeed it is my
perception that in many topic areas we rely far too heavily on online
sources - there can be a distinct prejudice against offline source material.

However I am interested in whether you have a specific idea of what you
would change? Can you express a reason for why using the published test is
a poor signal?

Tom