Ryan Delaney wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Haukur Þorgeirsson wrote:
The difference is that some people actively argue that the earth is not a sphere, whereas those who argue that Paris is not the capital of France so far have kept their activities secret.
If a fact is contentious, then it should be backed up with a cite.
How many religious fundamentalists does it take to make a fact contentious? How actively do they have to argue? Where are you going to draw the line? And why should we privilege the points of view that happen to be held by people alive today?
Wikipedia would be a parody of an encyclopedia if it held that the approximately spherical shape of the Earth is contentious. People expect an encyclopedia to be written from a scientific point of view - and, for the most part, that's how Wikipedia is written.
It's not a matter of the number of religious fundamentalists, or how persistently anyone argues, or lines being drawn. I certainly don't believe that today's points of view should hold sway over historical ones.
When we put forth these intuitive truths as examples of the need for citations we put up a straw man that is there to be knocked down. There is a presumption that any statement is true unless and until it is challenged. Of course the more ridiculous and outrageous statements will be challenged very quickly. Statements about the near-spherical shape of the earth may not be challenged at all.
The "scientific point of view" would be fine if it meant rigorous adherence to the principles of scientific method; it is not fine if it means support for the prevailing prejudices of mainstream scientists.
Some people may very well expect an encyclopedia to be written from that mythical "scientific point of view"; others may expect it to be from a "religious point of view" of some sort. We still need to stick to a neutral point of view. Implicit to the neutral point of view is the dynamic of questioning everything.
My big problem with this is that very frequently, especially in fields like science and philosophy, commonly held beliefs might be very different from the "correct" beliefs, or the consensus among learned experts. But because of the format of Wikipedia, some extremely wrong beliefs are inserted into articles because they are commonly held, even if they wildly contradict the research that professionals in the field are doing -- and I mean this is just as bad as saying the Earth is flat. The only difference is that the roundness of the Earth is common knowledge, but there are some things in science that are just as obvious to professionals but completely unknown to the general public.
"Commonly held beliefs", "'correct' beliefs", and expert consensus are three different frames of mind, and all three can still be wrong. Often, but certainly not always, the professionals have it right; that's reason enough to leave open the avenues for criticizing science. "Correct" beliefs are often promulgated by people with a political end in mind, and they have no qualms about bending facts if it will help their cause The general public, and thus our editors are often in the difficult position of having a limted basis for making a decision. The need to cite sources should apply equally to the scientists and to those who express commonly held beliefs; the scientists have an advantage here because that practice has been a part of their experience.
Science is very poorly reported to the general public. An understanding of what's going on is incompatible with the 15-second sound bite. Look at the evolution of a long established publication like "Popular Science". In its early days, shortly after the US Civil War it had a lot of articles designed to get everybody to think about science; since then it has managed to evolve into something far more gadgety. Much of science has retreated into the ivory tower. This is great for the protection of scientific sinecures, but is terrible for the promotion of scientific understanding by the general public.
One of the greatest things that Wikipedia could accomplish would be to produce a generation of critical thinkers with both the tools and the confidance to question any kind of established truth wherever they can find it.
The [[Race and intelligence]] article is a perfect example of this phenomenon. People who know nothing about the research done in this field have many times gone into that article and edited it mercilessly in the name of NPOV because the established scientific opinion presented (and extensively referenced) in the article is very contradictory to the "politically correct" opinion. In my view, Wikipedians need to have more respect for references and experts to prevent this kind of thing from happening. The usual Wiki philosophy usually works in other cases, but in such an emotional subject as [[Race and intelligence]], people tend to go way overboard, and the NPOV and "everyone's equal" policies only make them more convictional about their right to push their POV over that of the academic consensus.
It's a challenge. The statistics say what they say - nothing more, nothing less. The statistics thenselves are unconcerned about how anyone misinterprets them. People don't usually understand what statistics are all about, and are quick to draw conclusions that are not warranted. This subject matter is a good example where we can look for creative ways to build consensus. Simply telling the public that they are wrong and that they should pay attention to their academic betters will get us nowhere except into a never ending flame war. Somewhere along the way the scientists dropped the ball. Lewis Terman was respected as a scientist in his day when he worked to develop the Stanford-Binet intelligence tests. He wrote in his 1916 book, "The Measurement of Intelligence" (pp. 91-2) --
"It is interesting to note that [the two subjects] represent the level of intelligence which is very, very common among Spanish-Indians and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the familyn stocks from which they come. The fact that one meets this type with such extraordinary frequency among Indians, Mexicans, and negroes suggests quite forcibly that the whole question of racial differences in mental traits will have to be taken up anew and by experimental methods. The writer predicts that when this is done there will be discovered enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture.
Children of this group should be segregated in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical. They cannot master abstractions, but they can often be made efficient workers, able to look out for themselves. There is no possibility at present of convincing society that they should not be allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding."
Terman was from the academic community. How is a general public that has been instilled with the principle of respecting scientists to deal with such comments? For other academics to say, "He's not really a scientist," doesn't help us with a public that may only see that as bickering between scientists. If either side in that debate is believed, respect for academics will have been undermined. If Terman's view are to be criticised on the basis that they reflect thinking from 89 years ago the public deserves an explanation of how we got from there to here.
In these cases, I don't think that any amount of voiciferous objecting and arguing should be considered relevant. I think that even if the consensus of Wikipedians editing the article disagrees with it, that consensus should lose, unless they can find some evidence that the article is wrong. This obsession with consensus has a real possibility of going terribly wrong. I think the emphasis should be on having Wikipedia advance _correct_ beliefs, not popular ones.
"Correct" too easily becomes "politically correct". It's too easy to become emotionally attached to one's "correct" beliefs. There is great normalizing power to effective consensus building. Scientists would do better by judiciously planting seeds in Wikipedia's great fractal Mendelbrot.
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