On Tue, 8 Mar 2005 14:33:22 -0500, Sj <2.718281828(a)gmail.com> wrote:
To provide specific context, consider journals such as
"Infinite
Energy", with a bimonthly distribution of 3000--5000, which are hard
to distinguish in any quantitative fashion from 'reputable' journals.
However, this journal is devotes itself to publishing papers on free
energy, cold fusion, an perpetual motion; and running headlines like
"Einstein: Plagiarist of the Century." I think many of us would agree
that a paper does not become reputable, or any less original research,
for being published in such a journal.
Well, the problem is that any sort of approach to this question, even
the appeal to "many of us," is going to be doing what the
anthropologists call "boundary work."
Without boundaries, we have no realiability and we have no standards.
With boundaries, we will be constantly accused of censorship, bias,
etc. Constantly accused, of course, by the people on the other side of
the boundaries, who we will have already regulated to the category of
"negligible" or "fringe" by our very erection of the boundary.
Trying to come up with a "methodological" approach to the boundary
definition ("only peer-reviewed journals with circulations of X") will
unfortunately just shift the impetus to the interrogation of those
standards once again (anybody can claim they work via peer review, but
can it be verified? Even all that without getting into the question of
the limits of peer review, i.e. the Sokal or Bogdanov affairs).
My take on this: There is no easy resolution, no rule which will work
rigorously. The answer is just to accept that putting forth some
general standards with some amount of flexibility will hopefully work
out for the "best." Problems will be solved in a somewhat ad hoc
manner and there will be compromise involved over things which ideally
ought not need compromise. Some disputes will inevitably occur and
some good contributors will inevitably become too frustrated and will
leave. So what we have here is a system which often privileges
patience over truth. But in this sense Wikipedia is more of a
marketplace than a utopia, and perhaps that's for the better in the
long run.
Again, I think I have maybe elaborated too much, and perhaps my
analytic biases are showing... FF