Post the scholastic standards for the Forum

[imhotep06]

I asked a question concerning the "standard" of scholarship and what that means for people posting on the forum and my post was deleted. I am asking again.

It is imperative that when moderators make up a "standard" that they 1) demonstrate it for the public to follow and 2) outline the criteria for that which constitutes scholarship.

As a scholar, I know for a fact that cutting and pasting other scholars' material is not scholarship: it's cutting and pasting. So I want, for the benefit of all the layman visiting the forum, for all the moderators to not copy and paste something they found on the net, but to carefully outline for the public what scholarship is, based on experience, and the research methods allowable on this forum.

One cannot delete posts and move material, shout "scholarship standards" and there is no post to match the criteria against: otherwise the moderators can move the goal post, as they say, at will: changing the "standards" when it suits them best.

In scholastic publications, most scholars begin their papers with a section called METHOD so that the people can follow the epistemological steps taken to come to one's conclusions. It is there that one can see if one's steps can yield convincing results or not. The forum needs a "method" section for which to gauge the so-called "standard" (which none of the moderators cites any standard making body to make such a claim) in which the forum is allegedly guided by. A real scholar would also point out that different disciplines adhere to different scholastic methods to yield results. So the moderators will have to post different criteria for each discipline and the pros and cons to each method.

I await the post from the moderators.

[olehint]

you may not get a proper answer to this question because they not trained as scholars, prolly never published a thing

[zarahan]

I think maybe you need to clarify what you mean by standards.
If you are saying your posts are getting deleted and you want to know what the criteria are for
a good versus a bad post and so on, I can understand that.

But to say "don't copy and paste" is to say 'Don't reference modern electronic research." Today's digital age is built on copy and paste. Why should a forum member spend 2 hours trying to write a synopsis of a big pdf file when he or she just needs to quote a 9 line snippet, also giving the proper credit and citation?

Now if someone is doing original research- fine. Then he or she is free to write all they want, and
provide the needed citations. But even here, modern word processing does not mean every footnote has to be typed from scratch. There is nothing at all wrong with copying and pasting a citation or quote. In fact, compilations and search engines dealing with academic publications have PRECISELY that- program features that ENCOURAGE copying and pasting. Go to EBSCOhost or JSTOR- they have citation features that INVITE users to copy and paste citations- making such listings much more accurate and free
of typos by the way, than doing everything from scratch. Specialized compilation programs used by law students, medical students and others do precisely that with all kinds of information. No law student these days is going to retype the decision in Marbury vs Madison or Plessy vs Ferguson for a research paper.. What modern student or scholar these days retypes long excerpts of a paragraph from scratch when in the digital world - copy and paste is available, with the proper citations also added in the same manner?


As for different methods in different disciplines, there seems no need for any methods section.
Any such section would consume hundreds of pages detailing differences in methods used for
archaelogy, versus DNA research, versus anthroplogy, versus serology etc etc.. not to
mention various statistical procedures like ANOVA.

It is incumbent on various posters to provide such information on methodology WHERE RELEVANT
to the discussion. If skewed methodology is presenting a biased picture of the Nile valley for example,
then all a poster needs to do is point that out. If more technical detail is needed, the poster only need
provide said details himself or link to another source. Forum administrators need provide no treatises on DNA or statistics, etc- subjects which consume several library shelves in themselves.