[WikiEN-l] The Community vs. Scholarly Consensus

[Jay Litwyn]

Mathematics: Can't get enough original research or validation or exceptions, 
and please state your assumptions.
Physics: No perpetual motion machines, please. Original research in nuclear 
science is covered by treaties and your local American army base.
Biology: Please restrict your original research to photographs.
Chemistry: This department actually has a policy regarding notability and 
what you can say about compounds that hav not been synthesized.
Biochemistry: No man's land. There's big pharma, there's governmental 
collusion, cover-ups, smear campaigns, drug promotions and oodles of tobacco 
funding. Wanna meet spooks and Britain's future king? Then make a name for 
yourself in this field.
Arts: um...anything goes...sorta...but not here...we just write about arts 
like policy making and other methods of screwing you, here. We try to make 
it artful, anyway, just so you do not forget. If I bored you to tears, then 
I am sorry. Stay away from [[vagina]]. No man will ever be happy until his 
wife is there.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Phil Sandifer" <snowspinner at gmail.com>
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, December 17, 2008 10:30 AM
Subject: [WikiEN-l] The Community vs. Scholarly Consensus


> 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
>
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