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

[Ray Saintonge]

Philip Sandifer 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.
>   

I don't believe that there is such a thing as a reliable source. Most 
people will believe exactly what they want to believe, with a remarkable 
preference for not having their beliefs encumbered by facts. Data from 
the corporate world is presumed to be biased in all of its details.  
While corporations will indeed spin information to their own advantage, 
it's still important to recognize what comes from their own 
documentation as proof of what they say about themselves. If a 
corporation claims that its product is "Made in the U.S.A." that needs 
to be noted, but so too must it be shown if its claim is based solely on 
legal technicalities.
> 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."

It takes a certain degree of sophistication and wisdom to grasp that.  
As a society we manage to support a fallacy of certainty that rejects 
any information that has not been rigorously proven. In Lilla's article, 
"The Tea Party Jacobins" 
(http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/may/27/tea-party-jacobins/?pagination=false 
), he observes:
> Americans are and have always been credulous skeptics. They question 
> the authority of priests, then talk to the dead; they second-guess 
> their cardiologists, then seek out quacks in the jungle. Like people 
> in every society, they do this in moments of crisis when things seem 
> hopeless. They also, unlike people in other societies, do it on the 
> general principle that expertise and authority are inherently suspect. 
In theory the skepticism protects us from quacks and scammers, but not 
without a cost.  In medicine innovative treatments are often rejected 
solely because they have not received rigorous testing, never mind that 
funding for such testing is unavailable because no-one wants to fund 
research into unproven technologies. In areas that are less 
life-critical, such as history, premises are even less likely to be 
questioned. 

There is more to this than simple unwritten information. Expressions 
become idiomatic and remain so long after the underlying context and 
zeitgeist have disappeared. A "tight rein" becomes a "tight reign" to 
those whose buggies are all automotive.

In the preface to "The Annotated Lolita" Alfred Appel brings our 
attention to a point where Valeria, Humbert's first wife, was "deep in 
'Paris-Soir'." If you don't know that this newspaper was a part of the 
sensationalist press of the time, you will certainly be more 
disadvantaged in understanding the situation.  Notwithstanding, the 
story would become laborious if the author had to explain every detail 
in remembrance of lost allusions.

Ec