[WikiEN-l] An expert's perspective - Tim Bray on editing the XML article
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
abd at lomaxdesign.com
Fri Aug 14 01:25:34 UTC 2009
At 08:32 PM 8/13/2009, you wrote:
>Just the opposite.
>We want experts to edit the controversial bits.
>Do you really want a swarm of amateurs who have little-to-no basis in
>the field being the sole people editing the most contentious portions?
>That just sounds upside-down to me.
Yes, I understand. But isn't this a rather extreme view? I.e., this
assumes that no sensible editors are involved, only experts and
no-nothings. "Swarm of amateurs" is the Wikipedia community. If you
are a professional, you have a kind of conflict of interest.
Here is the point. If an expert can't explain the subject to other
editors who are not experts, how in the world are they going to
explain it in the article?
What we absolutely *need* experts for is to check articles. You
cannot write good articles just by looking stuff up in sources.
I'm not suggesting that experts not edit articles at all, but that
when there is conflict, it should be resolved by non-experts, judging
the evidence as presented by experts (who may have conflicting POVs),
following the sources provided. It gets dangerous when an expert is
assumed to know better than others, because, in fact, we don't know
who the experts really are, and experts can have serious biases. They
may indeed know better, but may, very often, present the evidence
that shows what they believe, and not contrary evidence, I've seen it
too many times. There are some experts who are much more neutral than
that, but we can't depend on that, it's actually unusual.
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