[WikiEN-l] The Community vs. Scholarly Consensus

[geni]

2008/12/17 Phil Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com>:
> 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?

Wikipedia policy is written with a certain degree of pragmatism.
Finding secondary sources for descriptive plot mummeries tends to be
rather hard and since wikipedians can generally agree on them there
seems to be little point in preventing them from doing so. Yes
students of literary criticism can argue for endlessly over what
descriptive means but most wikipedians are not students of literary
criticism so the problem doesn't appear.

Sure you can start arguing over the validity of this approach but
those kind of conflicts have been  done so much better by others.

-- 
geni