DanMurphy wrote:
It's always been my opinion that DGG's time as a librarian at Princeton (if memory serves) taught him to despise specialists and the highly educated in general. He is unfailing in treating expertise and the traditional academy with disdain. He's an interesting topic -- older, semi-retired, but an absolute brave-new world koolaid drinker, who devotes a large amount of time to protecting information vandals and seeking to remove those who oppose them from the Wikipedia Battlefield.
He is an interesting case indeed. As long as we're psychoanalyzing him, I would speculate that the fact that he has a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Cal and yet ended up getting an MLS and working as a librarian has contributed greatly to his bitter attitude towards professors and experts. I have this vague, anecdotally based, theory that there are a lot of librarians who couldn't get jobs when they finished their Ph.D.s in other subjects, so went to library school and subsequently spend their careers getting angry at the professors they have to be around who, possibly, weren't especially more qualified than they were at the beginning but, through luck and talent, managed to make careers in their subject area. I've known a couple myself, ironically both from Cal, which is enabling for this career trajectory since they have a library school right there.
Slightly less relevant to the thread, but I found it interesting (I'd never read far enough down on
DGG (T-C-L) to spot this) is his take on copyright violations:
Wikipedia is unreasonably restrictive about many elements of copyright. The effective rationale behind Wikipedia's over-restriction is the need to appear squeeky-clean to those who would oppose us. I accept this, but even so we overdo this. The US courts are quite flexible about what constitutes fair use (as a compensation perhaps for the extreme vigour of the law in other respects, like duration). We could go very far before we came near it. We could for example, justify almost any informative use of a low resolution image. The principle that our material must be free for others, who might be making commercial use which doesn't have as much protection, does not justify it, because a warning is sufficient.
On another tack, if Close paraphrase is thorough enough it is an effective way of escaping the automated copyright detectors, especially if the first sentence is replaced entirely--when it gets detected, is because we're suspicious, or the person involved gets lazy and lets too much stand unaltered. People including those at Wikipedia react the usual way to something wrong that they cannot prevent or catch except occasionally--go overboard with the ones that have been detected.
Even well-done Close paraphrase normally changes the wording, but retains the sequence of ideas. This is wrong in schools, because the entire point of academic writing is to show you can create an original sequence of ideas. But we don't do original research, and copying someone else's formulation does not hinder the purpose of an encyclopedia. The courts are clear that retaining the sequence does constitutes copyvio, but their standards except for creative works are much laxer than ours, on the basis of it not normally having done any actual harm.
