[WikiEN-l] The Community vs. Scholarly Consensus

[Carl Beckhorn]

Phil,

This is a 

On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 10:01:01PM -0500, Phil Sandifer wrote:
> Yes. I agree. (Though I quibble with your use of interpretation)

It's a general fact of life that Wikipedia talk is out of touch with
critical theory. This is partially because the population
at large is not well educated about it, partially because CT is
stereotyped as pomo navel-gazing by some critics, and partially 
because Wikipedia was founded by an Objectivist. 

So, even if we all know that every act of writing is an act
of interpretation, and that there is no such thing as a 
pure uninterpreted source text, for the purposes of WP 
the terminology in WP:NOR is meant to be read in a naive, 
uneducated sense. This makes some sense, as NOR would not
be improved by adding a long introduction to critical theory
at the top. 

This topic came up on this list a while back, and Jimbo Wales 
posted what I thought was a very reasonable opinion at
  http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2008-April/092995.html

- Carl