[WikiEN-l] Expert editors

[Delirium]

Kim van der Linde wrote:
> George Herbert wrote:
>
>   
>> Well, to some degree, there are legitimate reasons for using 
>> consensus: even within experts in the field, there often is not yet 
>> full agreement on the validity of newly developing science or 
>> technology.
>>     
>
> Science works on arguments. Not by popular vote (Intelligent design and
> creations would be true in that case!). It is not consensus what is
> important, but the description of all relevant point-of-views based on
> their relative scientific importance based on scientific sources. To 
> much is based on popular POV-sources, or pieced together quote mining.
>
>   
No, I can say quite confidently, as a scientist active in academic 
publishing, that when reviewing a field (which is what encyclopedia 
articles are), science works on consensus, unless you are specifically 
writing a "critical review" unapologetically from a particular point of 
view.  If you're claiming to be writing a review article that fairly 
represents the current state of the string-theory debate, for example, 
you must write a consensus article that represents all major camps.  If 
you write an article representing your view of the "truth", then it 
isn't a review article representing an accurate consensus about the 
current state of the debate, so must be labelled as something else.

The only difference from your creationism/intelligent-design example is 
that review articles generally review controversies *within* a specific 
field rather than across or outside of them.  Encyclopedia articles, of 
course, must take a broader view, and review the general state of debate 
among society at large---including between scientific fields, between 
scientific and humanities fields, and between academics and 
non-academics.  The point is not to get at "truth", but to present a 
fair summary of the current state of the debate.

If anything, highly focused specialists are a major enemy of that 
endeavor, because many tend to see their view as the "right" view and 
hamper writing broad summaries---for example, a statistician who thinks 
all artificial intelligence is either statistics, badly done statistics, 
or crap.

I have my own opinions on many areas I'm an expert in, but I hardly 
object that Wikipedia doesn't document the truth as I see it, since that 
isn't its job.

-Mark