thewanderer1983 a day ago

As someone who is old enough to remember the start of Wikipedia. Academia originally had issue with wikipedia due to the lack of academic oversight and therefore didn't allow it in citation for academic work. Now they have to defend it?

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betterunix2 a day ago | parent | next [-]

Actually the most significant reason to not cite Wikipedia is the churn -- citations are supposed to give readers enough information to actually find the specific information that is being cited, and that should be possible even decades after a paper is published. Citations to academic journals are generally preferred because journal articles can, in principle, always be found because of the archives maintained by university libraries. Citations to Wikipedia articles would need to include the specific revision being cited and there is no guarantee that any revision of any article on Wikipedia will actually be available 50 years from now.

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econ a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Editors are still not allowed to have credentials. The absurd argument is that credentials can never be validated.

I don't know how scientific journals manage to exist but technically it could be as simple as a link to the user page on the university professors profile page.

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jacobolus 19 hours ago | parent [-]

Wikipedians have all kinds of credentials, which they are allowed to publicize if they want. Many Wikipedians have their full names and links to their personal websites, scholarly work, etc. on their user page.

There are also plenty of pseudonymous Wikipedians with credentials that they keep secret or vague. As long as they don't edit pages where they have an undisclosed conflict of interest, that's also fine.

Credentials can lend someone credibility in discussions. They just don't grant special editing privileges.

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econ 16 hours ago | parent [-]

Linking to something from the wiki is considered irrelevant as it doesn't prove anything.

If an editor is an expert in a field and you can verify it it would be most useful to the encyclopedia to treat them as such. This is not actually a special privilege but how people normally do things.

I can gather citations and glue them into an article but someone with actual expertise knows which parts are important, what isn't and what is missing.

Wikimedia is of course free to have an encyclopedia project to entertain children with to much time on their hands but they will continue to lose good editors. You can't have both.

If you disarm the man before throwing him into the alligator pit he won't survive but it will be great for the alligators.

	▲	jacobolus 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't understand your point. People who are experts in the field are treated as experts. They just don't get to unilaterally make all of the decisions.