Comment by tptacek
4 years ago
Yeah, the second "borderline" is a typo, and should read "open-and-shut" or something. Sorry, message board comments are the log(1.1)th draft of history.
I also stopped contributing to Wikipedia. The places I would have written in are all related to my work, and I found it intensely frustrating to be edited and incorrected by people who knew less about my field but more about Wikipedia's rules. I can see why it's so off-putting! But it later occurred to me that that's as it should be: it's what the project is getting at when it talks about "No Original Research". Wikipedia is a tertiary source; it's a directory of other sources, a map of the available literature. I can't just go into Wikipedia and write how macOS Seatbelt works, because I am not myself a reliable source; I'd be a guidemark on the map pointing to nowhere.
Instead, what I should be doing (to the extent I care about improving the encyclopedia) is writing secondary sources that the encyclopedia can eventually cite. I'm not supposed to be writing on Wikipedia (at least, not in my areas of expertise); I'm supposed to be writing elsewhere.
I've seen that happen a few times, an expert in a field will greatly improve an article, only to have their additions removed or butchered by someone who's far less educated on the subject. The resulting edit war is "won" by the person better versed in Wikipedia's policies, and that's usually not the expert.
The bureaucrat wins, the article gets neutered, and the expert gets so frustrated they never participate in Wikipedia again. To me, it seems like Wikipedia loses more than it gains in this.
And my point is: it's not. The phenomenon you're describing is in fact healthy. Subject matter experts should in fact not cite their own authority when writing in an encyclopedia. They're almost certainly right, whatever they're writing, but that's not the point.
How is that healthy? And what is the point?
I understand the "no original research" policy, there needs to be verifiable sources. What I don't get is the tendency to discourage experts from writing about the subjects they know the best. I'd much rather have someone who is "almost certainly right" have the final say on an article.
Of course, verifying that someone actually is an authority would be a huge ordeal in itself...
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