On Dec 11, 2008, at 11:01 PM, Thomas Larsen wrote: > I agree with you here--I feel, though, that our way of dealing with > academics who violate NOR/RS/etc. should be slightly more sensitive. > Saying "that's our way of doing things, do it this way or leave" > obviously is very offputting to academics and, quite understandably, > deters them from becoming contributors. Far more constructive is a > calm approach that explains _why_ NOR/RS/etc. are good principles for > an encyclopedia. > > Most true academics (excluding fake people who claim to be academics, > of course) know encyclopedic standards pretty well, I think. After > all, original research doesn't tend to get into Encyclopedia > Britannica ...
On the other hand, it could do to shore up some of our standards in this area too. As it stands, there are parts of NOR that are absolutely laughable from a literary studies perspective, most obviously the part that says that primary sources can be used for descriptive claims but not interpretive claims. (Many literary scholars - indeed, probably most who are at all prominent in the field these days - would hold a view that there is any sort of reading that is not also an interpretation, so banning interpretation is nonsense.) We also do have to recognize that our standards of use of primary sources are, in general, far, far past what most academics would consider "original research." There are many, many observations I could make about works of fiction that would be considered far too obvious to be worth publishing in any journal, but that still fall afoul of NOR. That's a problem when it comes to soliciting academic contributions. Though some of this is that we are unusually hostile to humanities academics, for, I think, structural reasons. (Very few of our policies were written with humanities topics in mind) It's an area where we could definitely improve. -Phil _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
