[Foundation-l] The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia (from the Chronicle) + some citation discussions

[Delirium]

On 2/20/12 10:39 AM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> As Mark has said, some subjects are highly vulnerable to recentism, 
> but one shouldn't expect that with a historical article about events 
> from 1886.

I agree it's more of a problem in some areas than others, but I think it 
also often applies as a heuristic to history as well: many revisionist 
proposals never succeed in revising the mainstream historical narrative. 
The fact that they're published in a journal simply means that several 
peers thought it was a legitimate proposal worth publishing, not 
necessarily that it's going to become the new majority view.

I even ran into a recent example in classics while editing on Wikipedia. 
A paper was published in 1985 challenging the standard account of a 
Roman fellow's death, [[en:Marcus Marius Gratidianus]], which I dug up 
and suggested we use it to revise our (older) traditional narrative. But 
then some more searching dug up late-1980s and early-1990s papers that 
defended the traditional narrative, and from what I can tell that 1985 
paper is now considered an intriguing suggestion but unlikely to be 
correct, or partially correct at best.

But what if the year were 1985 and those responses hadn't come out yet? 
How do we determine if that paper's new findings are the new mainstream 
narrative, or just an interesting proposal, worth mentioning as a 
minority view, but ultimately unpersuasive? In hindsight, updating the 
article in 1985 to anoint this as the new scholarly view would've been 
premature, because it never did get accepted by the rest of the field. 
The only real answer seems to be "wait a few years and let it percolate 
through the literature", and my only guess at a faster alternative is to 
have experts in the field who can make some kind of educated guess as to 
which revisionist proposals are likely to ultimately succeed. I think 
it's a hard problem in general.

-Mark