Wikipedia talk:Recognise and respect competence

I have clarified my Contribute where qualified essay; the finished result may be found at Recognise and respect competence.

The point of the C.W.Q. essay was to say, "Contribute only to topics that you know enough about to write about fluently." This (for very obvious reasons) doesn't prohibit editors from creating redirects to articles that they know nothing about, or from carrying out copyediting on such articles, but it strongly discourages editors from writing an article from content found via Google if they don't have any knowledge of the topic. Any editor who does so is probably a fool, and is probably trying to increase their edit count instead of improve the encyclopedia.

As for GRuban's creation of many articles in the two-year requested articles backlog, I question the immediate need for those articles – quality is more important than quantity, and perhaps those articles could have waited until someone competent in the subjects of those articles came along, saw a need, and created them?

Editors can learn about a subject while reading about it, but I shudder to think of the consequences of editors writing significant content about a topic they know nothing about – the content is simply too prone to mistakes, misrepresentation, and bias (even if this was not intended). At the very least, editors writing about a topic they are unfamiliar with should run their proposed changes to content through an article's talk page and submit them to substantial peer review.

Good sourcing is simply a means of providing readers of content with a way to verify that the content they read is correct. I don't buy into the "verifiability, not truth" concept, as it implies that verifiability is a replacement for truth; verifiability is simply a way in which readers of content can, well, verify that claims made are true or presented truthfully. I would strongly suggest rewording the statement made on Verifiability, "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth," to "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is accuracy and the verifiability of that accuracy; readers should be able to verify for themselves that content presented in Wikipedia is accurate."

While I intended the term "qualifications" in the context of my C.W.Q. essay to relate to personal knowledge and self-recognition of one's own personal knowledge, it was seen by many as referring to academic qualifications. I apologise; I wrote in a manner that was potentially unclear. However, I see many of the comments that "qualifications are irrelevant" as totally against the English Wikipedia's philosophy and purpose. Qualifications are not, and should not be, a requirement for contributing, but they are, and should be considered, a benefit to contributing.

Can we avoid the usage of terms such as "stuck-up academics", please? I can think of many non-experts who are stuck-up, self-serving characters, and academics are no more inherently stuck-up or arrogant than anybody else. Why are most community members inherently anti-academic? Because they failed their degrees, perhaps? This stupid anti-academic philosophy is ridiculous, it is harming the English Wikipedia (look at how many experts contribute to Citizendium instead of Wikipedia), and it is almost akin to some form of racism. I would prefer a project full of stuck-up academics than a project full of stuck-up idiots; at least we might then get some decent content written. For reliability's sake, and the sake of our project, stop this ridiculous, unfair, unjust discrimination against experts and academics now. If there's anybody who should be discriminated against, it is those who seem to be wanting to turn the English Wikipedia into a social networking site instead of a solid, reliable encyclopedia.

Wikipedia is a really cool project; however, if we cannot persuade the wider academic community to join, contribute, and participate, we are akin to roast potatoes without salt :-).

"Editing with humility" is a great principle (thanks, Lampman and OldakQuill), and I encourage – no, challenge – all editors to adopt it as a best practice; hence, I write on my new essay:

Recognise and respect your own competence and that of others, and be willing to refer or defer to others who are more competent than yourself. Contribute and participate in a humble manner; do not be arrogant; be open-minded; be graceful about your own competence; respect that expertise is a benefit but not a requirement for contributing or participating; and collaborate and cooperate with all your fellow community members as much as possible.

Perhaps all of us, experts and non-experts, could do with a little more humility and a little more recognition of the limits of our own abilities.

Best and friendly regards, – Thomas H. Larsen 23:38, 30 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Although the good-will behind this, and the former essay by Thomas is in no doubt. I fail to see what is new about this proposal that seems to patch together the ideas that already exist and are completely standard in the community - principally Assume good faith and Civil.


 * As a separate point from the proposal I find it galling and insulting to the community to be told by Thomas, who styles himself as ...probably one of the more philosophical Wikimedians, that I should "...participate in a humble manner; do not be arrogant...".


 * Humble Indeed! Witty Lama 11:06, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

How do we judge competence?
What is competence? How do we judge it in ourselves? How do we judge it in others? Some contributors here like to state their "credentials", particularly during content disputes ... yet are those credentials relevant? Is a surgeon necessarily competent to write about the history of surgery, or about surgery outside her own specialty? Is a subject expert necessarily the most qualified to write about that subject? What if the expert is so mired in the jargon and accumulated intellectual history of the subject that her writing makes no sense to anyone else? As far as I know, encyclopedias are not written by subject experts; they are written by people who have good writing skills, a broad education, and the willingness and ability to do "research" in a library. On Wikipedia the ugliest content disputes I have seen involve subject experts fighting over an article where each expert's expertise is in a niche so specialized that the experts have little knowledge in common about the subject; in contrast, the very best collaborations I have seen involve subject experts with exactly the same lack of shared knowledge, yet an understanding of and tolerance for the sometimes messy process of collaboration. Anyone can edit Wikipedia and that is as it should be because everyone is an expert in something. Rather than "respect and recognize competence", I think our objective should be to "welcome the otherness of other editors". Wikipedia is an extreme case of Blind Men and an Elephant, but where that parable leaves off this essay begins: do we blind men fall into divisive fighting, in the process dismembering the elephant;  or do we come together and, collectively, describe the elephant in all its myriad parts and celebrate its integral whole? In other words, every editor has a POV and that is okay. An article should not have a POV, however, and to achieve NPOV it is desirable, if not essential, to bring editors with diverse POVs together to work on an article. --Una Smith (talk) 02:29, 31 May 2008 (UTC)
 * As far as I know, encyclopedias are not written by subject experts; they are written by people who have good writing skills, a broad education, and the willingness and ability to do "research" in a library. - I believe this is incorrect, at least in the United States. I used to work for a company who produced encyclopedias. They hired professors (i.e. subject-area experts) to write all of their entries. I was responsible for calling all of these professors to remind them to send in their entries! :) Awadewit (talk) 16:36, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
 * I can second Awadewit's experience. At the Dictionary of Sydney, an Australian online encyclopedia where I currently work, we most certainly commission experts on particular subjects to write articles. Witty Lama 06:25, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Gets my vote!
"You may follow it or not, at your discretion." Very well written. I hope that I can follow these principles. --Dan|(talk) 19:32, 4 July 2008 (UTC)