On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 11:45 AM, Phil Sandifer <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Dec 12, 2008, at 10:27 AM, Fred Bauder wrote: > >> No, I mean a journal of opinion which IS peer reviewed, and an >> authority >> whose literary criticism has passed such review. In other words, >> considered sound, or at least interesting, by a committee. > > This is such a complete misrepresentation of what peer reviewed > academic journals are that I don't think there's really an answer for > your question, Fred. The issue seems to be that you don't consider > scholarship in the humanities to be legitimate scholarship, research, > and knowledge. Which, ummm, I would hope that Wikipedia would not be > so presumptuous.
I think you're overreacting to Fred here, Phil. I don't think he's trying to diminish the role of humanities. Just acknowledge that some of it is less fact based than the hard sciences. Literary criticism, while well founded, is not as fact-based as Chemistry or Physics. I know professional, academic literary critics focused on popular culture and science fiction, for example - there's at least one major annual conference of speculative fiction literary critics, whose papers are peer reviewed and do serious analysis. But those people know that they're based on intellectual constructs and opinion, not underlying physical truth. I would happily accept any of their appropriate and topical work as commentary to put into a Wikipedia popular culture article. But neither they nor I would assert that it's as unambiguous as say a chemistry experiment. -- -george william herbert [email protected] _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
