On 2/20/12 10:39 AM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
As Mark has said, some subjects are highly vulnerable to recentism, but one shouldn't expect that with a historical article about events from 1886.
I agree it's more of a problem in some areas than others, but I think it also often applies as a heuristic to history as well: many revisionist proposals never succeed in revising the mainstream historical narrative. The fact that they're published in a journal simply means that several peers thought it was a legitimate proposal worth publishing, not necessarily that it's going to become the new majority view.
I even ran into a recent example in classics while editing on Wikipedia. A paper was published in 1985 challenging the standard account of a Roman fellow's death, [[en:Marcus Marius Gratidianus]], which I dug up and suggested we use it to revise our (older) traditional narrative. But then some more searching dug up late-1980s and early-1990s papers that defended the traditional narrative, and from what I can tell that 1985 paper is now considered an intriguing suggestion but unlikely to be correct, or partially correct at best.
But what if the year were 1985 and those responses hadn't come out yet? How do we determine if that paper's new findings are the new mainstream narrative, or just an interesting proposal, worth mentioning as a minority view, but ultimately unpersuasive? In hindsight, updating the article in 1985 to anoint this as the new scholarly view would've been premature, because it never did get accepted by the rest of the field. The only real answer seems to be "wait a few years and let it percolate through the literature", and my only guess at a faster alternative is to have experts in the field who can make some kind of educated guess as to which revisionist proposals are likely to ultimately succeed. I think it's a hard problem in general.
-Mark _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
