[WikiEN-l] Reliable sources— some of these babies are ugly

[Philip Sandifer]

On May 15, 2010, at 10:12 AM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> 
> But I can't say that these points really apply in many cases that we
> appear to be applying them: We would reject as reliable sources many
> hobbyist blogs (or even webcomics) with a stronger reputation to
> preserve, less obviously-compromised motivations, and _significantly_
> greater circulation than some obscure corner of Fox News's online
> product.  What can be the explanation for this discrepancy?

Two reasons. 1) Egregious anti-expert bias. 2) A fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the written record of humanity.

1) Our policies are explicitly and deliberately written to try to allow content decisions to be made without any actual knowledge of the subject. That is, we have actively tried to write policy that rejects any thinking about sources beyond the surface level readings, and that take as a premise that, given a large enough pile of books, anybody can adequately write or edit an article on any topic. This premise is dubious at best.

2) We also make the actively false assumption that all significant knowledge is written down, and that the written record is simply a transcription of human knowledge. Neither statement is true - in virtually every field of knowledge, because fields of knowledge organize around communities, there is a substantial oral tradition of disseminated knowledge that is often crucial to understanding the overall subject. The contents of this oral tradition may be written down, but not in a systemic and organized way, while in practice the oral tradition often is fairly systemic. At its most basic level, this translates to "There are things in any field that everybody knows, and since everybody knows them nobody has bothered to write them down."

The combination results in a badly distended view of knowledge that has wrecked more than a handful of articles on Wikipedia.

Best,
Phil Sandifer