[WikiEN-l] William M. Connoley, admin? (was: Running the asylum)

Sat Jul 16 21:49:47 UTC 2005

Fred Bauder wrote

> If the problems William M. Connoley presents were temporary, I would  not 
> have objected to Administrator status for him. He believes a  Wikipedia 
> article should prominently feature the "truth." While this  sounds ok on 
> its face, in practice any method of arriving at the  truth though 
> reference to expert editors such as himself presents  prospects of 
> sustained conflict. Our references need to be to  reputable published 
> information.

One of the odd things about Fred's formulation (WMC is addressing some 
others) is this: Nupedia was proposing to give money to experts, qualified 
as William is, to write articles on the 'truth' basis (what else?).  There 
are the arguments:

(a) ah, but WP articles can come out even better, because the 
rough-and-tumble of wiki debate is clarifying;
(b) oh, but then there will be conflicts because you'll get argument from 
authority slipped in.

Now both of these would seem to have some sort of general plausibility.  Why 
they should be thought particular relevant to the climate change issue is 
beyond me.  That is high-profile science with plenty of funding.  I would 
think that, as an area, it is a much less plausible case for such arguments 
than, say, medecine.

I'm not against the formulation of Fred's final sentence: if one reads it as 
'WP articles are survey articles', then that's a solid enough point to make.

Charles