Quote:
|
I believe Wikipedia is not a source: it's a REsource. It's a place to use as a starting point to learn about a subject and find additional information. That's why the citations are so important to the information that gets placed on the site.
|
there's something kinda strange about this distinction. of course, how strange it may be is a function of the discipline that you work in, but still...
as a preamble, since others are giving them, i'm trained as a historian and taught for quite a few years and may do it again...
when you start out in this kind of game you are presented with a bunch of assumptions about how academic infotainment operates that get less and less obvious the more you think about/have experience of what they actually entail.
the idea of an "original source"---what exactly does that mean?
what exactly does the presence or absence of footnotes get you? what do you do with the footnotes you encounter? typically, if you are not yourself researching a topic similar to what you're reading about, you won't chase the footnotes: you'll simply see in them some kind of guarantee of some kind of legitimacy...but on what basis? just because you're told that's what footnotes let you see? citations add a certain degree of transparency to a text, but if you think about it, it's actually less transparent than are questions of method and/or procedure, which are generally somewhere in the machinery of the text itself.
you could say, and folk do, that cites are a way to acknowledge what you appropriate--but if you think about it, everything is appropriated (for example, it's not like you're inventing logic when you use it; it's not like you're inventing anything in terms of sequences of words that you make....), so what they amount to is an acknowledgement of particular types of appropriation--what you can remember; what positions your work socially within a particular academic context. and this seems more the function of citations---positioning within a particular discourse or set of discourses---not a guarantee of anything.
it's easy to imagine that someone can develop entirely absurd interpretations littered with citations. it happens *all the time*....
for example, it's not as though the fact that you cite a bunch of sources means that you're not cherrypicking. this too happens *all the time*...
what exactly is original research? in history, the standard mythology involves a heroic Explorer heading into an Archive to wrest a text or image from the Obscurity of a box. the "original research" element consists in the integration of this New Tidbit back into the grid of already available tidbits. if you push at this---or the notion of "original research" in most any field--things start to dissolve.
peer review seems useful as an editorial process, but doesn't guarantee anything about the quality of a piece or the interpretations advanced in them--what it does function to guarantee is that whatever's in a piece conforms to the perceptions particular to the reviewers of what is or is not the state of the field at that moment. in it's detail---in what you get back from a reviewer for example---you can get tremendously helpful (or destructive) information--this is important because typically you do not get a whole lot of feedback about what you publish out there...i'm continually surprised that anyone's read any of my stuff because from what i hear back, it might as well not exist...so the texts might be better edited and maybe better overall for the editorial side of the review process---but as a guarantor of anything, as a process that one points to and says "x is a scholarly journal" because "it is peer reviewed"---i think it's pretty much meaningless.
you aren't off the hook for critical reading. there's no way off of it.