[WikiEN-l] Re: Jacques Delson and Helga-ism

[Stan Shebs]

Julie Kemp wrote:

>
>Merovingians as not-French is definitely in the radical rethink
>category, and it may be a decade, or a generation, or even longer,
>before it comes to be generally accepted. 
>
>** Why do you think this?  What evidence do you have?  Even Anthere
>admits to the possibilities of what I am saying.
>
Well, your own words bolster my point - "Anthere admits to the
possibility". The mere fact that multiple Wikipedia editors are
doubtful means that, by definition, the assertion is not now
"generally accepted" by the population of Wikipedia editors.

>
>Until then, trying to edit Wikipedia based on the assumption that the
>assertion is true
>is going to be hard; you're going against an army of editors who
>are backed by a horde of published authorities with reputations
>much higher than your own.
>
>
>**Again, that's pretty patronizing.  Did you read at all what I had
>written?  It includes the fact that French people traditionally consider
>Clovis a king of France, but that this is not properly true, in that
>France didn't exist.  In fact, have you read any of the discussions on
>the talk pages (where there are a couple of comments that demonstrate
>that a compromise view makes sense)?
>
Every last bit of it, and twice.  There were certainly a lot of hard
words said before anybody mentioned that the list of British monarchs
already incorporated compromises that have been accepted by consensus.
Doesn't anybody ever consult similar pages when there's a dispute?

>And, since you have jumped into
>the fray ready to tell me that, as nice as they are, my views just don't
>jibe with what "most people know based on published authorities," I have
>to ask you one question.  Why exactly do you think you have enough
>background knowledge on the subject to tell someone who has probably
>read a lot more on the subject for the past 15 or so years, including
>reviews of the books I haven't yet gotten to (which means I have an idea
>of what colleagues think of these newfangled theories) that her judgment
>as to what is accepted and what isn't, is in question?  
>
Well, you have managed to miss my point, although I probably
expressed it poorly.  I've had a little over 20 years of experience
building things with online communities, going back to the earliest
days of Usenet (look for "shebs" in Google archives to see some of
my embarassing noobisms), and you've fallen into the "I'm a
professional" trap.  Empirically, that line never ever works in
an online community.  I'm going to write a separate item about this
later, because while it's good that we have professionals discovering
Wikipedia, the rules of the game are very different from what they
are used to, and even after just a couple of months here, I'm seeing
the same upsets happening over and over.

To take an area where I am an expert, every day I see stuff in the
articles under computer science that just make my stomach churn with
their lameness.  But it would take some adroit writing and citing to
produce something that wouldn't be mangled by the semi-educated eager
to promulgate the wrong things they were told by incompetent and
biased CS professors, so I don't tend to work on those articles very
much. It's an unfortunate weakness of Wikipedia, but no amount of
fulminating about it is going to change things; what you and I
experience in our respective fields is a predictable consequence of
the rules under which Wikipedia operates.  It's motivating me to
ponder ideas for new rules that would address your complaints
better, but it's tricky and I don't have any good ideas yet.

(I'm sorry if all this sounds patronizing; I have screamed at the
screen myself over article content, so I think I have at least some
idea of how you're feeling.)

Stan