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

[Carcharoth]

On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 4:44 PM, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

While I don't think content decisions should be made from a position
of ignorance about a subject, I would disagree with your last
sentence. I think it *is* possible for a reasonably educated person,
given a reasonably large pile of books, to write an *adequate* article
on most topics (there are exceptions). Not the best article, and not
an error-free article, but a good enough start that it shouldn't be
rejected out of hand. Where the article goes from there is another
matter, and in many cases some form of expert peer review is needed to
have reasonable confidence in stating that an article is in any way
"good". The key is that the layperson writing the article needs to
*welcome* input from others. When people try to protect the article
they have written and exclude others, and refuse to discuss changes,
then you start to get problems.

> 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."

This I agree with.

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

Some examples may help.

Carcharoth