[WikiEN-l] WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 41, Issue 153

[charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com]

Sarah wrote
> Charles, anyone in the English-speaking world should be able easily to
> fact-check our material, and this is the English-language Wikipedia,
> so that has to be our priority. 

No. that's wrong, which is why I'm arguing the point. Our 'priority' is the encyclopedia mission, and this 'anyone' stuff is getting in the way. 

>Your argument seems to be that because
> everyone in the world can't fact-check it, no one should be able to,
> and that we should instead leave the writing and research to
> self-selected Wikipiedia "experts," many of whom are anonymous and may
> have no expertise at all, or if they do, may not be highly regarded by
> other experts in the field.

You should notice that of the three places I selected, two (Kerala in India, and Kampala in Uganda) are substantially anglophone places. 

And what is this "we should instead leave the writing and research to self-selected Wikipiedia "experts," many of whom are anonymous and may  have no expertise at all, or if they do, may not be highly regarded by other experts in the field."? I said nothing of the sort.

Einstein writes a paper a century ago. In German, in old-fashioned mathematical notation, using concepts that will only later be tidied up by the mathematical physicists such as Minkowski space. We want to do the thing an actual expert would do fluently: not repeat Einstein verbatim, but to state the import in a style that is going to make sense to the reader, and is compatible with the rest of the physics articles. This is likely to take as read elementary algebraic manipulation (if not calculus), and logical moves - for anyone who really wants to check it against the original. (Of course there will be textbook treatments, but there are other fields which are not served as well). The fact is that Joe Public will not usefully be able to fact-check all, in the typical case. Does this matter? Not really. Some subjects just are hierarchically ordered like that. 

> I agree wholeheartedly that we should make the cream of
> reliable-source material globally available, but I strongly disagree
> with allowing Wikipedians to insert their own opinions and
> interpretations between those sources and our readers.

I'm not saying they should be. I'm saying that the 'populist' view is, if taken to extremes, asking for too much verbatim quoting. If readers raise objections to some basic massaging for readability, they can go elsewhere and see if they really like the original sources that much better. The whole point about writing articles in technical areas is that almost everyone would hate treatments that are really faithful to the initial formulations.

Charles

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