On 09/12/12 2:32 AM, Thomas Morton wrote:
However; it's a bad hack because in many fields you need to be an expert to
be able to properly write about the subject.
I have a deep interest in religious history; you couldn't call me an
expert, but I have studied the subject to undergraduate level in my spare
time. I look at the editors working on religious history topics on
Wikipedia and they are, often, incapable of scholarly authorship, or driven
by their own viewpoints.
This is just one data point.
The "all editors created equal" thing is a misnomer; being an admin people
*do* defer to me, even though I try to avoid it. I see many admins using
their authority.
So perhaps it is time to allow experts to be seen as such.
I think a lot of what happens on Wikipedia is a result of the computer
science mindset where everything can be reduced to a series of zeros and
ones. In the humanities young editors too easily fall into the trap of
a the first year university student who has taken a Psychology course
and is ready to analyze everyone around him.
Ec
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