[WikiEN-l] My views on policies and debates over content

[Fastfission]

Nobody is talking about "truth" here. "Truth" is fought on the
vanguards, in little communities which do nothing but spend their time
producing "facts" and "knowledge" and "understanding", all fitting
into their own sets of standards of what counts as valid and reliable
("regimes of truth"), some of which brutally disagree with each other.

We don't want to play *that* game. That's not the role of an
encyclopedia. We digest those battles and report on them. We sit above
it all. We don't take part in that battle.

You don't turn to Encyclopedia Brittanica to get cutting-edge
information on the latest scientific research. You turn to it for the
basics of what is reasonably established, or the range of opinions
which the reasonably established people in the world consider
possible. You also turn there for references to sources for further
reading, if you want a more comprehensive view of things, or if you
want to take part in those battles for truth.

Our advantages over EB? We can update things considerably easier and
faster -- if tomorrow's patent clerk becomes today's Einstein, all the
better! We'll update it when it happens, but not a moment sooner. And
though I *loathe* the phrase "Wikipedia is not paper" (which never
called out to defend anything I find truly interesting in the world),
it is worth noting that another advantage we have is that we can say a
whole lot about a whole lot more. The "cut" of notability to get into
WP is significantly lower than with EB -- and I think that's a good
thing. But that doesn't mean there shouldn't be a cut at all.

Paul Feyerabend's famous critique of the scientific method was that it
-- and all "methods" -- restrained investigations into the truth,
restrained the ways to which one could approach the world. On that
observation, I think he was dead right.  But I think he errs in
thinking this a scandal: it's that way on purpose! Limiting inquiry to
what are thought to be "solvable" problems at the time using
"reliable" methods (however much they will be laughed at in the
future) allows one to focus manpower, energy, and resources towards
things which are likely to pan out.

Is it a "numbers game" of truth? No more than the world already is one
-- it is about who says what, how much you trust them, and one hopes
that if someone starts saying something "true", it will catch on with
others (though it is generally only "others in their same regime of
truth"). Does it work that way in real life? Only roughly. But
Wikipedia's pretension should only be to accurately summarize and
report on "real life" -- never to create "real life".

We need to ditch the pretension that Wikipedia is the place to
negotiate "truth" -- it isn't, it never has been, it never will be.
Time has shown it difficult enough to simply report on it!

FF

On 6/10/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> This is still treating truth as a numbers game.  Sometimes great
> scientific discoveries have come from people who stubbornly maintained
> their opinions on a discovery.  Verifiability is a more important
> criterion than being the position of a small minority.  Some people who
> held the ridiculous minority notion that the earth went around the sun
> were severely persecuted at one time.
> 
> Ec
> 
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