----- Original Message ----- From: "Phil Sandifer" <[email protected]> To: "English Wikipedia" <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, December 12, 2008 4:44 PM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Anti-intellectualism
> > On Dec 12, 2008, at 6:09 PM, George Herbert wrote: > >> Even a superlative college paper is only rarely notable or significant >> criticism. Grad students' product might be, professors or >> professional critics moreso. But there are plenty of >> out-in-left-field reviewers and critics who lie outside the body of >> normal academic criticism et al. >> >> Our criteria for sources have to include enough guidance for filtering >> that we can filter out random not-notable commentary. What line are >> we trying to draw - and why. We have to draw the line, otherwise we >> do become Cruftpedia. We're not here to collect 101 million grade >> school essays on "Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret" in the >> article on the book. > > There certainly are loonies in the field, but I'd say more papers get > rejected from journals for being boring than for being wrong. Which is > to say, there's a lot of stuff that is very fundamental and obvious > that you'd see in college papers, but not in published essays. > > Which is part of the problem. There's a lot of stuff that, in > academia, we just consider too obvious to publish. > > -Phil > That's about where my review of Mark Purdey's book (about BSE) would go. Purdey's *remotely* plausible explanation of a mechanism is far shy of Occam's Razor, which is so strange coming from a guy who explicitly likes Occam's Razor. Heavy metal poisoning is a very old subject; Roman pathology. So, why all the complications about another metal falling into the category of having limits on exposure and causing [[manganism]]. I wish Purdey's brother Nigel well in preparing another edition of the book. Hoh boy. Yah...then I guess I should look a Brown's book, especially since I agree with him on the point that burning cattle might've been a good idea. Purdey (deceased) did not. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
