[Foundation-l] Organization on Wikipedia that deals withcontent issues.

Sun Aug 29 20:11:35 UTC 2010

On 08/29/2010 10:25 AM, Peter Damian wrote:
>
> Do you mean the problem of experts being generally discouraged?  I was
> talking about the problem of there being serious errors in articles,
> particularly in the humanities.  I agree with David that when it comes to
> facts and figures, Wikipedia is pretty good. For many of the hard sciences,
> also good.  But it's a disaster zone in the humanities. That's the problem I
> am referring to.
>    

Purely my personal take, but I've noticed problems on both the expert 
and non-expert sides in the humanities more than in science-related 
articles. On the one hand, people seem to more naturally understand that 
they need good sources in science, that a newspaper article needs to be 
used carefully (and weighted relative to better sources), etc. People 
don't always seem to sufficiently realize that, say, philosophy or 
sociology should also be treated similarly.

On the other hand, though, I've noticed science and especially math 
experts to be generally more friendly in working with non-experts, 
though there are plenty of exceptions. I've *very* rarely seen a math 
professor resort to credentialism or looking down on inexpert 
contributors, even though we have some very well-credentialed 
mathematicians. Some have nearly saintly patience in explaining their 
edits and why the article should be changed in the manner they propose. 
But I've noticed depressingly many "ugh, as a PhD in [thing], I can't 
believe I have to argue with these idiots" elitist huffs from humanities 
professors and grad students.

-Mark