The problem is more than just writeups that are
wrong, but also that a lot of factual noding here is not adequately
supported.
The other day I had an interesting exchange with another noder about a certain writeup of his. It's a great writeup, with lots of interesting ideas about linguistics that I hadn't seen before. I had a problem with it though: I don't know if I should believe all of those ideas.
I don't know if I should or can believe him because he didn't give any sign of where I could go to verify what he wrote. I would have liked to see the name of a linguistics text or two that might support his premises. I voted it up, but then i messaged him and asked him about his sources. We went back and forth and it ended up that he basically proclaimed himself an expert, and claimed he had talked to other actual experts in the field, but that he had "no idea what the right texts are". This quite frankly baffles me; How do you become an expert, especially in an academic field like linguistics, without knowing some of the literature of that field? (Is it transcendental knowledge?)
I guess I'm a pretty academic person, or have been lately, reading lots of books where I need two bookmarks, one for where I am in the main text, and one for the footnotes (which nowadays are mostly endnotes, but I still call them footnotes). This despite the fact that I've been done with graduate school for 5 years. I still consider there to be a lot of things I want to learn - which is probably one reason I'm interested in E2.
So that's my bias. I'm interested in knowledge, not just information. I'm interested in verifiable, proven or provable, supportable, cross-referenced, credible, data. Not hearsay, not hypotext, but real, hard, trustable stuff. That's not all that Everything is about, of course (!), and everyone is entitled to their opinion too, of course - but even when you have an opinion, it helps to note why the hell the reader should care: Why should your opinion count?
And I need more of an answer than "I'm an Editor/God/Level 7/etc". Just because you've logged a ton of hours and bytes on this website doesn't cut it in my "credibility scale". And if your homenode says you're specialty is X, that doesn't cut it either. I want to know what books you've read, and/or how many years you've studied, who you studied with, what papers in what journals you've seen. I want to know what department of what university you're faculty on (not that this is neccesary here on E2 - I'm just saying that if you have some kind of commonly-respected credentials in the field, it doesn't hurt to mention them).
If E2 is ever to appeal to more than just a few otaku, it needs to have more attention paid to credibility. This is even more important if the "Node for the Ages" idea is real and not just lip service. In 60 years when many of these writers and the people they know are dead, if E2 is still around readers will want to know who they were and why they should be believed. Probably no one will remember who I am. But maybe they'll remember people and sources that I cite in my writeups.
I can anticipate that an answer to this will be that E2 is "self-contained" and therefore has no need of outside references. This is a pipe dream. Maybe someday it will really include everything, but probably not, even if there were no copyright. However, even if all information was contained in E2, you need something else: all people. E2 would need all of humanity, or at least all of literate humanity, to be members, and to have complete faith in the E2 reputation system and "caste structure". And face it, that ain't gonna happen (at least with the present system).
Let's get real: people who are smart and have good ideas and can support those ideas should be paid attention to, whether or not they're level 1 or level 10. If Larry Wall started noding about perl or Noam Chomsky about linguistics, people would damn well respect them, I reckon, even if they are only level 1. And let's face it, Larry or Noam would never have time to be more than level 2 or so. They've got better things to do, god bless 'em. (Paradoxically,
if all you ever did was node, you wouldn't be much use to Everything, would you?). Realistically, Noam and Larry and millions of other smart people will never even create an account, but luckily, others of us here are able to input some of the valuable knowledge they have created in this world, and, hopefully, attribute it to them.
okay, this writeup has now been cooled 6 times. stop it, please. it's really not that great. in fact, stop even voting for it. thanx.