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