User:Maunus/Wikipedia's biggest problem


 * Social sciences: Of all of the topic areas covered in Wikipedia the coverage of social sciences is the worst. The social science coverage is haphazard: articles are often too narrow in scope, or only include outdated scholarship or give large amounts of undue weight to fringe theories, or most frequently they are written from a naive commonsense perspective. The Naive commonsense perspective is the result of social science articles often being written by editors with no expertise in social sciences, who base their writing completely in everyday understandings of social science concepts. There is not generally a consensus about which topics are the purview of social sciences - while everyone is in agreement that articles on science topics should be written from a scientific rather than a common-sensical viewpoint and about which articles fall under the label "science", there is no such understanding regarding social science topics. Often editors will argue that commonsense viewpoints hold as much authority as scholarly viewpoints, this is never the case in science articles. Often editors will argue that social sciences do not "own the concept of x" and hence common language definitions (often from dictionaries) are used to trump the kind of complex definitions of social science topics. There are too few editors with expertise in social sciences. Many editors with science backgrounds have neither understanding of or respect for the ways social sciences work. Social sciences are disadvantaged because they often question or complicate basic every day assumptions and commonsense understandings of things with which everybody have experience. Social science coverage is negatively affected by systemic bias. Because social sciences often take a view of common social phenomena that is broader than the context of a single country or larger than just the western world, the fact that Wikipedia is dominated by Anglo-American male science students means that social scientists are always fighting an uphill battle to widen perspectives.
 * Examples
 * The article Human is written as a zoology article, following the same template used for other mammals. Clearly written by editors with more expertise in biology than in social sciences or humanities.