Interdisciplines is running a forum on "Scientific Publications 3.0", where Kathleen Fitzpatrick speaks to the implications of "Peer-to-Peer Review." Beyond pointing out that I think Citizendium is getting short shrift, I conclude:

In any case, one of the alleged benefits of free and open source software (i.e., Linus' Law) and "Web 2.0" is one of peer review. Consequently, and simply, the question to consider is to what extent has the definition of a "peer" changed? In my work in code and prose I have received excellent feedback from non-credentialed peers. While getting feedback from credentialed peers is extremely valuable, it can be difficult to obtain in a timely fashion. (I appreciate, we are all busy, and these new technologies don't really change that, they might even make it worse.) One of the effects -- if not implicit purposes -- of traditional peer review is to define a discipline: to establish sensibilities, formalize methods, and develop a canon of literature. Therefore, a possible consequence in the opening of what is considered a peer (including colleagues from other disciplines and even expert lay practitioners) is a possible smudging of the disciplinary boundaries.

As I indicated when I posted a draft of a new chapter on consensus, I've been busily working on transforming the dissertation into a book manuscript. I now have a draft that I am fairly comfortable with, including the following changes since the dissertation:

• improved pre-20th century sources, though
• removed historical chapter 3 altogether;
• added a new chapter on consensus decision-making;
• use Chicago foot notes.
• make use of epigraphs from WikSpeak and Laws of Wikipedia. (These "laws" have played an important role in the dissertation, and I have long planned on using them in the book manuscript as epigraphs.)

That doesn't sound like a lot, but it's amazing how much time editing, honing, rewriting, amending, and implementing responses to feedback takes. (John Broughton has been particularly kind in sharing comments.) I feel as if I'm at the top of the S-curve now: making small changes that don't significantly change the word count, but hopefully significantly increase the quality. I've posted the introduction here. The first few pages are similar to the dissertation, but the chapter diverges thereafter. I welcome suggestions, particularly from those with some experience with book publishing (i.e., does it work overall as a book?) or those with substantive expertise (e.g., documentalist history, evolution of Wikipedia cultural norms).

In articles about Wikipedia, former Britannica editor Charles Van Doren is frequently cited as saying "because the world is radically new, the ideal encyclopedia should be radical, too." For example, he is quoted in Daniel Pink's Wired article. And Stacy Schiff's widely read New Yorker article quotes Jimmy Wales citing Van Doren to claim that the new encyclopedia "should stop being safe -- in politics, and philosophy, and science." As I note in my work, an irony of Wikipedia being compared to the staid authoritativeness of Britannica is this progressive essay by Van Doren, and the fact that he was a product of an unsavory new media phenomenon of his own time: the television game show scandal.

The whole Van Doren (1962) essay is available online, but not publicly so. His essay is actually lauding the progressivism of the L'Encyclopedie francaise and argues that all encyclopedias should focus on teaching over informing, art over reference, human over scientific-literary, on serving the "curious average man" and on reformism over the intellectual and status quo. A line that I am fond of is his claim that "If an encyclopedia hopes to be respectable in the year 2000 it must appear daring in the year 1963" (p. 24). If we accept that Wikipedia is daring in its way, by this math, any respectability achieved before 2045 is a bonus.

I'm at that point in the semester where I'm asking students to think about what they want to do for their more open-ended assignment. Rather than simply answering questions I've asked or applying course material to a particular case, I request that they propose a topic they would like to research. This is a source of difficulty and anxiety for some. Granted, there is an element of risk in the openness but I never had much difficulty with choosing a topic myself as a student, so it's difficult to understand how I can best help as a teacher. For example, for a film class I wrote a brief essay on Blade Runner that I really enjoyed working on and am quite fond of. I didn't get the grade I thought I deserved -- and I suspect the instructor didn't "get it", so I appreciate the risk -- but I had no problem conceiving the topic and executing the argument. (Fortunately, the essay would be widely read on the Web, for which I would get a lot of responses and it was even translated into Italian -- not too bad for an undergraduate essay!)

So while I always liked these type of assignments, some bright students can have difficulties. To address this I do the following:

1. Ask the students to send me a proposal with a sense of the topic, argument, concepts and readings that will be used. (I started this in my second semester of teaching and it yielded better results.)
2. Provide example topics and/or even an example proposal.
3. Encourage students to review their reading responses or bring relevant news items to the attention of the class throughout the semester, so as to build a repository of ideas.
4. Provide a list of themes/concepts at the beginning of the course and highlight them throughout.
5. Encourage them to brainstorm a number of (provocative) arguments they could make as they research and outline their topic.

But, still, some students experience difficulty with choosing a topic. Are there any resources you would recommend in guiding students through the writing of open-ended assignments?

So much time in teaching is spent on trivial but time-consuming tasks. Having taught for a couple of years now, some things have gotten easier, but many chores remain. I've tried various free tools, and there are many proprietary solutions, but none satisfy. The following are personal -- and poorly documented -- hacks that are useful to me.

Grade sheet

I used to use a sophisticated Excel spreadsheet I found on the Web, but the author has since taken it proprietary/commercial, plus it didn't support a simple point system (e.g., 100 points allocated throughout the semester). Also, my sheet now accommodates some of my idiosyncratic policies for class responses and attendance (e.g., dropping the lowest X grades, Y freebie absences).

Grade Reports

This Python script makes use of the XLRD library to read an instance of the above, and generate a report for the whole class or a single student, to the console or as a messages in my drafts mailbox.

Class Calendar

Given the duration of the semester, the days on which a class meets, university holidays, and the class on which an assignment is due, this generates a calendar for the syllabus. (A surprisingly time-consuming manual task.) I hope to incorporate Jewish holidays into this if I can find such a library.

Mailbox Prettyprint

Instead of using the inaccessible and proprietary BlackBoard product, I ask students to e-mail their responses which are automatically sorted into a mailbox. Before class, this script will prettyprint all responses sent since the last class to an HTML page, including (now) MS Word attachments.

I have spent much of the summer working on revising the dissertation into a book manuscript. One of the big changes is a new chapter on Wikipedia consensus. If you would be willing to provide me with feedback, I would be happy to share a draft:

H. G. Wells (1936) thought the "World Encyclopedia" should be more than an information repository, it should also be an institution of "adjustment and adjudication; a clearinghouse of misunderstandings" (p. 921). Wikipedia certainly has its share of misunderstandings, some imported from the conflicted world it documents and some unique to its own undertaking. An example of a contagious real world conflict is the already discussed "Creation-Evolution Controversy" (Wkipedia 2008cec). Also, political and ethnic differences are often mirrored at Wikipedia, prompting the formation of a "Working Group on Ethnic and Cultural Edit Wars" (Wikipedia 2008wgo). There are also plenty of local "misunderstandings," such as whether every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer deserves its own article. I raised this dispute earlier to illustrate two opposing philosophies at Wikipedia: inclusionism and deletionism. This issue, and the proliferation of articles, gave rise to an even more trivial -- though no less bellicose -- debate: If every television show episode has its own article, how should they be named so as not to conflict with other articles? This discussion reveals possible misunderstandings about consensus, and the difficulties of this decision-making practice in an open community.
In this chapter, I identify the difficulties of consensus decision-making, and its meaning and practice at Wikipedia. I consider this relative to insights from literature about consensus in "real life" communities, such as the Quakers, and the collaborators who built the Internet and Web using "rough consensus and running code."

I am indebted to the help I received on comp.text.tex in formatting my dissertation and dealing with bibliography issues. When I turned to the book manuscript, I decided I wanted to move from APA parenthetical citations towards Chicago footnotes. Unfortunately, this is a complex system, and nothing was up to the task. Fortunately, the biblatex package, an absolutely brilliant piece of work by Philipp Lehman for defining bibliographic styles, became available in beta form. Unfortunately, there were very few styles available in this format. Luckily, I found a work in progress by Charles Schaum, and began making my own changes to improve compliance with the Chicago Manual of Style. I worked on this through a number of revisions, but eventually came up short. Now, David Fussner has published an amazing package using and demonstrating the power of biblatex. I don't imagine there is any bibliographic system out there that is as accommodating to the nuances of Chicago footnotes style.

I don't often post CFPs and I won't be able to attend WikiSym this year, but I am looking forward to reading the submissions and papers. I've been mulling over what it means when people describe "interdisciplinary" -- or "multidisciplinary" -- research and haven't reached any definitive conclusions, but as Inigo Montoya once said to Vizzini, I sometimes think: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." In any case, I hope this workshop might shed some light on the question in the context of wiki community studies.

Interdisciplinary Research on Wiki Communities, September 8, 2008

The array of approaches to studying wikis is a source of wealth but also a possible source of confusion: What are appropriate methodologies for the analysis of wiki communities? Which are the most critical parameters (both quantitative and qualitative) for study in wiki evolution and outcomes? Is it possible to find effective interdisciplinary approaches to augment our overall understanding of these dynamic creative environments? This workshop intends to provide an opportunity to explore these questions by researchers and practitioners willing to participate in a "brainstorming research meeting".

The Wikipedia Weekly interview with Jimmy Wales turned to a topic dear to my heart: the role of Neutral Point of View in collaboration. Wales explicitly articulated -- in minute 33 -- one of the main themes of my work:

31 Wales: The idea that we should focus on the facts of reality, something I very much believe in, on the other hand, much of Wikipedia tends to focus on which facts of reality, and they tend to be about facts about what other people said. In other words, we are looking for reliable sources and things like that.

32 Wales: Outsources truth? I kind of like that. There's something, a thing that is sometimes said, and I don't care much for it, which is "verifiability not truth." And, the problem I have with that, is that it sort of suggests that we don't care about the truth. We only care about some artificial game of verifiability. What I would say is that we care about verifiability and truth. In other words, the verifiable truth. Things that people with very divergent views can look at and agree. We may not agree with what happened that day, but we can certainly agree on what the New York Times said about it. That is a lot easier to agree on. And it's not that we don't care what the truth is, but we care to write down the truths that we all can agree on.

33 Wales: The whole concept of Neutral Point of View, as I originally envisioned it, was this idea of a social concept, for helping people get along: to avoid or sidestep a lot of philosophical debates. Someone who believes that that truth is socially constructed, and somebody who believes that truth is a correspondence to the facts in reality, they can still work together.

If only I had something like this while working on the dissertation!

... "We here at Mead understand that as students get older and wiser, they need notebooks with increasingly narrow lines," Mead CEO John A. Luke told reporters. "In college, people are at a stage in their education where they require 9/32nds of an inch between each line, which is why we make college-ruled notebooks. But I think we can all agree that grad school is a completely different world than college: a world where 9/32nds of an inch is simply too much room."..."How can we expect graduate students to learn to gather information and construct knowledge independently within their specialized field of study using college-ruled notebooks?" he added. "These students need a narrower-lined notebook, and at long last, they have it."..."Just think: If you are writing a dissertation on elements of thanatopsis and necromimesis as they relate to cacaesthesian themes of mid-20th-century Irish literature, do you really want your notebook lines to be more than seven millimeters apart?" Luke said. "Of course not."..."Gone are the days of graduate students having to tediously pencil in new lines between each existing college-ruled line just to make the notebooks usable," the press release read in part. "And with the time you'll save by not having to flip a page every 33 lines, you could earn your Ph.D. a year early." (The Onion)

Something I learned at the W3C was that a document was never done, there are only milestones and the question of whether you have moved on. For example, the XML security specifications received more "peer review" than any other thing I'm ever likely to work on. It surprised me, and felt great, when people from other countries who I never spoke with would send in an interop report based on the specification and test suite. Even so, the specifications continued to receive errata two years after they were published as Recommendations. I still receive questions about them, but I've given that work little thought in well over five years, so I've "moved on" and can answer only the most trivial questions.

I'm about to submit the final copy of my dissertation, successfully defended on March 5, which is a big milestone. And I still do think about it, and the improvements I could make. In fact, I am caught between my desire to make it freely available and a desire (a necessity even, in the academic context) to see it published as a book. So, for the present I am making the first chapter and bibliography publicly available and hope to do more after discussions with publishers. However, I would like to share it with interested colleagues and sources (see acknowledgments and references): I expect more correction, criticism and commentary -- public even, here or elsewhere -- will provide further value to any book that might result.

——

Reagle, J. (2008).In good faith: Wikipedia collaboration and the pursuit of the universal encyclopedia. PhD thesis, New York University, New York, NY. [ http://reagle.org/joseph/2008/03/dsrtn-in-good-faith ]

@phdthesis{Reagle2008,
   author = {Joseph Reagle},
   title = {In good faith: {Wikipedia} collaboration
        and the pursuit of the universal encyclopedia},
   year = {2008},
   address = {New York, NY},
   url = {http://reagle.org/joseph/2008/03/dsrtn-in-good-faith},
   month = {May}, 
   school = {New York University},
}

Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia anyone can edit," has caught the attention of the world. Discourse about the efficacy and legitimacy of this collaborative work abound, from the news pages of "The New York Times" to the satire of "The Onion." So how might we understand Wikipedia collaboration? In part 1 I argue that Wikipedia is an heir to a twentieth century vision of universal access and goodwill; an idea advocated by H. G. Wells and Paul Otlet almost a century ago. This vision is inspired by technological innovation -- microfilm and index cards then, digital networks today -- and driven by the encyclopedic compulsion to capture and index everything known. In addition, I place Wikipedia within the history of reference works, focusing on their (often fervent) creators, and the cooperation, competition, and plagiarism encountered in their production. In part 2, I conceptualize Wikipedia as a technologically mediated "open" community; through ethnography I identify the norms, practices and meanings of Wikipedia culture including "Neutral Point of View," good faith, and authorial leadership. In particular, I use the metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle to explain the operation of Wikipedia's collaborative culture: "Neutral Point of View" ensures that the scattered pieces of what we think we know can be joined and good faith facilitates the actual practice of fitting them together. Finally, in part 3 I focus on the cultural reception and interpretation of Wikipedia. I argue that in the history of reference works Wikipedia is not alone in serving as a flashpoint for larger social anxieties about technological and social change. I try to make sense of the social unease embodied in and prompted by Wikipedia by way of four themes present throughout the dissertation: collaborative practice, universal vision, encyclopedic impulse, and technological inspiration. I show that the discourse around Wikipedia reveals concerns about how new forms of technologically mediated content production are changing the role and autonomy of the individual, the authority of existing institutions, and the character (and quality) of cultural products.

Despite my apathy toward Scientology, I viewed the recent attacks by Anonymous with a similar indifference. I don't view Anonymous' attempts to bring down Scientology websites in the same like I do earlier geek engagements with Scientology, or other actions like the anti-DMCA protests I participated in. Both Anonymous' means and ends are objectionable. As described by Jaclyn Friedman (2008) in "Wack Attack: Giving the Digital Finger to Blog Bandits" Anonymous is a "loosely organized cybermob" that attacks various sites and people for laughs on lulz message boards. While I sometimes share a dislike for their targets (e.g., Scientology, molesters) the frequent misogynistic attacks by this larger cultural movement on women are offensive, and their methods are contrary to the liberal values of free speech and open discourse.

The culture of lulz is saturated with juvenile, racist, misogynistic, and homophobic language and imagery. They use "fags" and "foggot" as blanket insults, make jokes about raping your mother, and define rape as, among other things, "black sex." (p. 46)

I began to get a sense of this phenomenon when Kathy Sierra was attacked. Being a fan of all things productive and organized, I had subscribed to her blog feed a few years ago -- her gender was not something I even remember being aware of. This changed when I saw the passionate and unreasoned hate that poured down on her for no reason other than because she was a woman. Similarly, in following Wikipedia, I noticed the type of criticism was changing: in addition to those with specific concerns or complaints, communities of derision, of "haters," were forming.

The phenomenon of virtual antagonism is not new. We've all heard of "flaming" and "trolls"; I even had a friend who ran a warboard BBS in the 80s -- and, yes, we were in middle school. While I didn't understand the appeal even then, on a warboard the "hate" was largely limited to the others who joined. What seems to be novel about the new haters is the community and cultural aspect. Just as I highlight the importance of a "good-faith" collaborative culture in the Wikipedia community, we are moving beyond the individual angry cloud. To be buzzword compliant, we might call it "Bully 2.0" or the "culture of hatefuck."

After a presentation of my chapter on "encyclopedic anxiety" Alice Marwick recommended David Foster Wallace's "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage." I find the essay to be maddeningly frustrating: based on claims I absolutely agree with, he manages to find lines of argumentation that I think are very wrong. My notes from this essay are full of lengthy annotations. I agree that some works such as a usage dictionary or writers guide serve us well by being prescriptive: guiding us as to what is effective and accepted. (I'm slowly working my way through reading all of the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, and enjoying it too! It is informative, pragmatic and useful in helping this writer address difficult questions.) However, this doesn't mean there's no room for descriptive reference works: telling us what is said or thought regardless of whether it is right or wrong according to someone's standard. Wallace is not willing to accept that description and prescription can coexist happily because he fears the Descriptivists then taint the larger culture and deprive SNOOTS such as himself the ability to tell others what is proper. He then makes a complete muddle of science:

If a physics textbook operated on Descriptivist principles, the fact that some Americans believe that electricity flows better downhill (based on the observed fact that power lines tend to run high above the homes they serve) would require the Electricity Flows Better Downhill Theory to be included as a "valid" theory in the textbook -- just as, for Dr. Fries, if some Americans use infer or implied, the use becomes an ipso facto "valid" part of language. Structural linguists like Gove and Fries are not, finally, scientists but census-takers who happen to misconstrue the importance of "the observed facts." It isn't scientific phenomenon they're tabulating but rather a set of human behaviors, and a lot of human behaviors are -- to be blunt -- moronic. (Wallace, p. 11).

He would also appreciate (and possibly hate) Wikipedia's NPOV which is descriptive in the way that he describes and objects to. In any case, he is confusing the method (i.e., scientific description) with a particular phenomenon (i.e., deterministic laws of physics, or less predictable patterns of human behavior). However, one might take a varied and subjective view of deterministic physical phenomena (e.g., a nonscientific poem about a falling acorn) or a scientific approach to more complex phenomenon (e.g., statistical inferences about human behavior, or complex nondeterministic phenomena).

On his point of stupidity, consider that to maintain that the earth is flat today might be considered moronic, but I don't go to Wikipedia (a largely descriptive undertaking) because it will tell me what is true -- you must look for that elsewhere -- but to understand what is understood about that theory including the contours and history of the flat-eathers. However, this doesn't mean Wikipedians must pretended that the earth is flat just to make some minority happy. Instead, one can also have completely descriptive statements that the theory is no longer supported by scientific authorities via references to authoritative sources. (And, here, Wikipedia does have a prescriptive bias in favoring references to authoritative sources within the materialistic/scientific worldview.) So, his metaphor seems backwards: the descriptive approach seems appropriate, and to some extent necessary, because human language is biased, and not a "law" in the same way that gravity is. To assume that the operation of gravity might reverse a century later violates a fundamental presumption of physics; but there is no such certainty in language use. Therefore, sometimes I might hear a word that I would never use myself for fear of giving offense, but I still might want to know its meaning: there is a role for a balance between prescriptive and descriptive.

The import of the use of reference works in court cases is frequently misunderstood, and in this case Wikipedia is no different. Wikipedia has been used as a source across culture (e.g., in cartoons, on TV), by governments -- for different reasons -- and a lot of attention is given to examples of Wikipedia as a court source. Seemingly, if a court cites a reference work it connotes authority and legitimacy upon the source. However, the legal meaning is quite different: the principle of judicial notice applies to information introduced into the court record that is so commonplace that it cannot be refuted. It is not a case of authoritative or expert evidence being recognized, as it is often misunderstood to be, but closer to a recognition of popular notability.

Britannica was quite famous for its misleading and sentimental advertisements in the 1950s and 60s including an exaggerated claim about the courts, as Harvey Einbinder discusses:

The educational director of the Britannica supplied a good illustration of these dubious claims when he asserted in an advertisement in the Library Journal (November 1, 1954): "It is so universally accepted as an authority that courts of law admits ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA as evidence."... However, it is an elementary legal principle that judicial notice can only be taken of scientific facts or matters that are generally or universally known, and which therefore can be found and encyclopedias, dictionaries or other reference works. These facts must be matters of common knowledge -- and not questions where a difference of opinion exists. Thus the scientific treatise is and encyclopedias may be consulted by judges, but they are not evidence. One reason for this rule is that they cannot be placed under oath and cross-examined. Another is that citations in one book may be contradicted by other books unknown to the court. (Einbinder 1964:314-315)

So, first, Wikipedia is not the first reference work to be used, or misunderstood, in this way. Second, the interesting thing that is happening here is the degree to which a reference work's selections are an appropriate proxy for judicial notability, and a reliance upon Wikipedia perhaps indicates a more up to date, but also much more expansive, scope: print encyclopedias rarely ever exceeded a hundred thousand articles, the English Wikipedia has millions.

I have over 1000 primary sources in my Wikipedia research mindmaps. In accumulating some of those sources, I have already been confronted with their ephemerality. (And these are public sources only; I know lots of e-mails I would've liked to have access to by the likes of Wales, Sanger, and Stallman that apparently no longer exist.) So, doing a quick check-link analysis of the largest mindmap I find the following: 941 of those resources are "OK"; 21 are "404" (no longer there); and 10 "Timeout". So, just within a few years ~2% aren't readily available. For example, the link to Sanger's 2005 information about his (then) new Digital Universe project is already broken; but I must say news sites are the worst. Then, there are the URLs that don't have what they use to, those that are now password protected, and those that have new URLs because of a site reorganization -- blogs seem to be the worst on this front. Of course, I don't know if this rate is a linear trend and I would be interested in any research that shows longitudinal decrepitude rates of an existing corpus of links.

In any case, I expect my own modest historical inquiries are only the beginning; I think people will be writing histories of Wikipedia and the larger free culture movement decades in the future, though I am not sure how much of what we have today was still be there for them. I was surprised, and happy, to find that someone else is already making use of my Nupedia-l archive, so I thought it would do something similar for my other sources. I don't think this would be of much use to anyone today, and is somewhat "tainted" in that it is my own analytical take and selection of sources -- absent summaries, annotations and excerpts -- but it might be of use in the future.

This archive includes the HTML versions of two mindmaps and a copy of the online resource to which they link to. If you do make use of it, you can continue to refer to it as part of the "Reagle Wikipedia Archive."

This collection wp-sources.tar.bz2 was made by placing the HTML version of the mindmaps (wikip-primary.html and field-notes-cat.html) on a Web server and then issuing:

wget --restrict-file-names=windows -c --recursive --level=1 --span-hosts --convert-links --execute robots=off -t 4 http://reagle.org/joseph/2008/02/wp-srcs/field-note-cats.html

Since beginning my work at NYU the majority of my focus, obviously, has been on Wikipedia. However, some research I began almost 4 years ago has finally been published as: Joseph Reagle. Bug tracking systems as Public Spheres. Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, 11(1), 2007. URL http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/SPT/v11n1/pdf/reagle.pdf

Based upon literature that argues technology, and even simple classification systems, embody cultural values, I ask if software bug tracking systems are similarly value laden. I make use of discourse within and around Web browser software development to identify specific discursive values, adopted from Ferree et al.'s "normative criteria for the public sphere," and conclude by arguing that such systems mediate community concerns and are subject to contested interpretations by their users.

I recently read Andrew Ross' "No Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs: Behind the Myth of the New Office Utopia" in remembrance of my own brief time as consultant in New York's "Silicon Alley" during the booming 90s. I even had a few meetings at Ross' study site: the ever-cool design/strategic/Web firm RazorFish. I like Ross' portrayals of American culture, including the "Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney's New Town," but I encountered him first in the Sokal Hoax affair -- and was disappointed with his defense of accepting a Po-Mo goobly-gook hoax submission to the prestigious Social Text journal. I expect I am sympathetic to Alan Sokal in this affair because as a former computer scientist I've been acculturated with the maxim of K.I.S.S.: Keep It Simple Stupid. This sensibility persists into my engagement with humanities and social sciences -- though it sometimes causes me to feel alienated and distressed. Similarly, I've always been fond of physicist Richard Feynman's freshman principle regardless of the discipline: if something can't be explained in a freshman lecture, it is not yet well understood. (He was quite a character, and is also alleged to have said that the philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.)

So reading Ross again prompted me to peruse his Wikipedia article, which then led to the Sokal hoax article, and then to a wonderful list of similar hoaxes in other disciplines, including the fascinating tale of the Bogdanov brothers:

The Bogdanov Affair is an academic dispute regarding the legitimacy of a series of theoretical physics papers written by French twin brothers Igor and Grichka Bogdanov (alternately spelt Bogdanoff). These papers were published in reputable scientific journals, and were alleged by their authors to culminate in a proposed theory for describing what occurred at the Big Bang. The controversy started in 2002 when rumors spread on Usenet newsgroups that the work was a deliberate hoax intended to target weaknesses in the peer review system employed by the physics community to select papers for publication in academic journals. While the Bogdanov brothers continue to defend the veracity of their work, many physicists have alleged that the papers are nonsense, considering this evidence of the fallibility inherent within the peer review system. The debate over whether the work represented a contribution to physics, or instead was meaningless, spread from Usenet to many other Internet forums, including the blogs of notable physicists and both the French and English Wikipedia encyclopdia projects.

While perhaps not as common, the natural sciences too can suffer from incomprehensibility masquerading as erudition. In fact, some of the worst excesses in the humanities go hand in hand with speculative takes on cosmology and quantum physics. And, I am putting aside the interesting issues of the efficacy of peer-review and the extent to which a discipline can trust its members not to flat out lie -- such as the case of disgraced Korean stem cell researcher Hwang Woo-suk. My main point here is to the extent that we should strive, and hold others accountable to, a standard of simplicity, or as Einstein said "as simple as possible, but not simpler."

For my own purposes I've come to view that which is incomprehensible to me as perhaps like medieval Scholasticism -- famously parodied with the question of "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?". Thomas Aquinas and Peter Lombard were no doubt far smarter than me, but if one starts with particular set of assumptions (e.g., textual inerrancy), fetishize a logic over a broader rationality (e.g., dialectics, be they Christian or Marxist), and lack an understanding of how we fool ourselves (e.g., confirmation bias) I feel we can end up with brilliant nonsense. (Frederick Crews is famous for his criticism of Freudianism along these lines and his latest book is aptly titled "Follies of the Wise.")

And I now have a new term for describing those works that are manifestedly learned but for which I'm confused as to whether I'm too dumb to understand or they are simply incomprehensible. Herman Kogan (1958), in the "The Great EB: the Story of the Encyclopaedia Britannica," writes of the Britannica's editors difficulty with the "Algebraic Forms" article which was so complex that it was referred to different experts to assess whether it was sensible. In the final review, Simon Newcomb of Johns Hopkins University wrote, "It's magnificent, although I am not sure it is all clear to me but it's really magnificent." Consequently, the editor rejected the article as being "too magnificent" (p. 90).

In Harvey Einbinder's excellent "The Myth of the Britannica" he includes some of the advertisements used to sell Britannica around 1960 including this one: "HOW CAN YOU EXPRESS THE INEXPRESSIBLE LOVE YOU FEEL FOR YOUR CHILD?" The actual copy, contributed to Dr. D. Alan Walter is not by an eminent child psychologist or educator, but one of the Britannica's salespersons.