Comment by tptacek
4 years ago
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...
The discouragement experts get on Wikipedia is being forced to cite --- to Wikipedia's standards --- points that they would not need to cite in their own writing. They're used to writing for their peers, with much of what they have to say being accepted common knowledge. That doesn't work on WP, at least not under scrutiny. For an expert, writing on WP is much more tedious than writing anywhere else. A Wikipedia editor goes in expecting the exercise to be about organizing citations; a subject matter expert goes in expecting the exercise to be about (say) science communication. The subject matter expert should write articles that WP cites, not WP pages.
What I think people miss in these arguments is that Wikipedia is about the citations. It's a directory of sources. If it says something important, that thing needs to be footnoted to something readers can go find and read directly. That is the point.
Lots of people see other things Wikipedia could be about. They're not wrong: it could be about those things. But it's not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...
I don't have an example handy, but I disagree that Wikipedia is about the citations. It _should_ be about the citations, but I often come across pages (usually medical/health related) that have citations where the Wikipedia page says something completely different from the source that is cited.
If Wikipedia were about the citations, I would expect to see a larger effort in verifying that page content reflects what the source says.
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