[WikiEN-l] What is an "expert"?

[Tracy Poff]

On 1/19/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:

> What is your definition of an "expert"?

It's a difficult question, I think in part because there are two
definitions of 'expert' which are related but distinct.

I offer myself as an example: I am an undergraduate student of
mathematics. I've completed all of the undergraduate courses required
for a B.S., and a few graduate courses as well.

Am I an expert? Probably not. There are many people with much more
knowledge than I have about math; in particular, most everyone with a
higher-level degree, and most people who work with particular subsets
of math in other fields.

But, do I have a large amount of /expert knowledge/? Indeed I do. I've
studied things that you probably wouldn't learn without specifically
trying to learn them. I probably know more about combinatorial designs
and rook theory than any hundred random people off the street.
Probably some of those hundred would know more than I do about
history, or languages, or welding, or any number of other topics.

So, the question that remains is: at what point does a person stop
simply having expert knowledge, and become an expert? I don't know the
answer to that; perhaps there is some invisible line that reads
'experts only past this point.' Certainly one standard would be that a
person is an expert if other people consider them an expert: it's a
good approximation of the system we use, I'd say. Whether it's a good
system, I'll leave for others to decide.

Tracy Poff