On 21 April 2013 15:37, Kathleen McCook <[email protected]> wrote: > I think of interest to this discussion list. > > ============= > Luyt, B. (2012). The inclusivity of Wikipedia and the drawing of expert > boundaries: An examination of talk pages and reference lists. *Journal Of > The American Society For Information Science & Technology*, *63*(9), > 1868-1878. > > *Wikipedia* is frequently viewed as an inclusive medium. But inclusivity > within this online encyclopedia is not a simple matter of just allowing > anyone to contribute. In its quest for legitimacy as an encyclopedia,* > Wikipedia* relies on outsiders to judge claims championed by rival editors. > In choosing these experts, Wikipedians define the boundaries of acceptable > comment on any given subject. Inclusivity then becomes a matter of how the > boundaries of expertise are drawn. In this article I examine the nature of > these boundaries and the implications they have for inclusivity and > credibility as revealed through the talk pages produced and sources used by > a particular subset of *Wikipedia*'s creators-those involved in writing > articles on the topic of Philippine history. >
This kind of issue is a bit trickier than it looks. There is a precis of Luyt's argument at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-08-27/Recent_research#The_limits_of_amateur_NPOV_history That argument is constructed along the lines of demographics: "professional historians" versus "Wikipedian amateurs". I have a bit of a problem with the latter. What the community contains are numerous "encyclopedists", as I would see them: those with a good working theoretical and practical knowledge of the kind of material Wikipedia sees as "encyclopedic". This is actually the typical kind of demographic analysis posed in talking about experts on Wikipedia. It hasn't that much to do with inclusivity in the way the WMF would like to pose it, on occasion. It takes the form of a depressing Venn diagram where the subject experts and encyclopedists don't really overlap. There is a further issue: an assumption that "historical reference material" on Wikipedia is comparable to history as written by historians. I work on history all the time now, and it is possible to get this quite wrong. Luyt argues that NPOV is used too aggressively to filter out "historical debates". It has to be borne in mind that [[History of the Philippines]] uses summary style. There are about 23 main articles linked from it. To expect the top-level article to include as much of possibly contentious detail and related debate is to misunderstand the role of such an article. Charles _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
