On Dec 12, 2008, at 6:09 PM, George Herbert wrote:
Even a superlative college paper is only rarely notable or significant criticism. Grad students' product might be, professors or professional critics moreso. But there are plenty of out-in-left-field reviewers and critics who lie outside the body of normal academic criticism et al.
Our criteria for sources have to include enough guidance for filtering that we can filter out random not-notable commentary. What line are we trying to draw - and why. We have to draw the line, otherwise we do become Cruftpedia. We're not here to collect 101 million grade school essays on "Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret" in the article on the book.
There certainly are loonies in the field, but I'd say more papers get rejected from journals for being boring than for being wrong. Which is to say, there's a lot of stuff that is very fundamental and obvious that you'd see in college papers, but not in published essays.
Which is part of the problem. There's a lot of stuff that, in academia, we just consider too obvious to publish.
-Phil