[WikiEN-l] Academic, peer-reviewed sources (was NPOV and credibility)

Fri Dec 10 22:39:11 UTC 2004

Jimbo wrote:

> Our current article on Extra-Sensory Perception, for example, is quite
> bad.  And the reason is precisely the lack of _credible_ sources.
> These exist, but the current article appears to be written by people
> who would prefer for these not to be named.

This is a problem we have with a certain class of articles.

Over at [[surrealism]], we have a determined edit warrior who has stated
that "art historians are not qualified to write about surrealism," and
"mainstream sources regarding surrealism are useless because they are
written by art historians."  So, well-researched contributions get
shouted down and the article remains an embarrasment.

In like fashion, there is an ongoing edit war at [[cult]], with one side
maintaining that peer-reviewed articles about cults written by
sociologists merely parrot the views of the "anti-cult movement," which
they characterize as fringe.  I cleaned up the article some time ago and
added some well-referenced material, which is now gone; the references
themselves are orphaned at the end of the article amidst a sea of links
to cult-sponsored and cult-apoligist sites.

Some of the alternative medicine articles have the same problems.

The difficulty is political.  The people who care deeply about
[[surrealism]], and [[cult]], and ESP are willing to expend
considerable effort and political capital to get their way, while for
me, each is merely one of many interests.  