[WikiEN-l] Anti-intellectualism

[Phil Sandifer]

On Dec 11, 2008, at 10:43 PM, Thomas Larsen wrote:

> You're right--and I guess this issue brings us down to the fundamental
> rhetorical question asked by Larry Sanger: does Wikipedia tolerate
> academic(s| opinions)? The answer tends to be no--because some people,
> who tend to be the most vocal people and ironically seem to have the
> most time on their hands, have got it into their heads that years of
> study don't help someone to become more knowledgeable and to produce
> better scholarship.

I think this is misleading to some extent - we are generally more  
tolerant, i think, of scientists. Part of this is that the standards  
of publication in the sciences are different - my sense is that it is  
normal to, every few years, publish review articles that sum up work  
in an area, and that definitive compilations of existing information  
are considered valuable. Also, scientists tend to have a unitary  
consensus - that is, on the vast majority of science, there is a  
single view about how it works.

Humanities academia is messier - we don't publish overviews of  
existing work nearly as often, so accounts generally need to be  
stitched together from multiple sources. We do not tend to come to  
definitive conclusions - there is no single consensus view of a given  
novel. So the use of sources to provide an overview is harder - there  
are more synthetic leaps that need to be made to create an overview.

Part of this is that our policies were not written with the humanities  
in mind. Another big part is that our policies are shaped heavily by  
who showed up in the early days of Wikipedia, and that means that they  
are shaped heavily by a techno-libertarian philosophy that has been,  
historically, very hostile to postmodernism, and thus, by extension,  
very hostile to humanities scholarship. It is the case, frankly, that  
Wikipedia, on a policy level, has a systemic bias against the  
humanities.

-Phil