[WikiEN-l] The Community vs. Scholarly Consensus

[Phil Sandifer]

Picking up on a thread from the anti-intellectualism thread, WP:NOR  
currently reads " Any interpretation of primary source material  
requires a reliable secondary source for that interpretation. Without  
a secondary source, a primary source may be used only to make  
descriptive claims, the accuracy of which is easily verifiable by any  
reasonable, educated person without specialist knowledge. For example,  
an article about a novel may cite passages from the novel to describe  
the plot, but any interpretation of those passages needs a secondary  
source."

At a number of points, this steps squarely into a decades-long debate  
in literary studies about the nature of reading and of interpretation.  
This is a debate that is still - perhaps permanently -unsettled.  
However the view Wikipedia is taking - that there is some core of  
knowledge that is "descriptive" as opposed to "interpretive" - is  
decades out of the realm of accepted. It's a discredited view.

The counter, which I've seen discussing this on the NOR page, is that  
the language represents community consensus, and that's good enough.

This is troubling to me - most significantly because it suggests that  
the community is empowered to set an official Wikipedia position on  
the nature of language and meaning, and to settle a decades long  
dispute. On the one hand, this seems to me a problem of NPOV - but  
it's also an intractible one, as we can't avoid having some policy on  
the nature of reading.

But on the other hand, surely we do not actually intend to empower the  
community (by which we really mean the people who wrote NOR) to rule  
on issues like this and ignore a huge scholarly debate.

I don't have a good answer here, so I figured I'd ask the list - to  
what extent is the community empowered to set a Wikipedia policy on a  
scholarly debate? How do we square this with NPOV? Is there a clever  
out to the underlying problem in NOR that sidesteps the debate?

Thoughts?

-Phil