On 12/28/06, Gurch <matthew.britton(a)btinternet.com> wrote:
David raises a good point. Don't judge Wikipedia
articles by the quality
of their contributors, but by the quality of the article - and the
sources in particular. Never trust an unreferenced article. An article
that provides a good number reliable, verifiable sources and is
well-written should be considered in the same light whether it's written
by anonymous users or long-time contributors. (Virtually all our
articles are a mixture of both).
That an article provides quality looking sources is not a good metric
for article quality.
Unless the information is disputed or sounds far fetched, we make
little effort to ensure that the material in the article can actually
be found in the sources, even with inline references and
web-accessible sources. ... and far less is checked for offline
resources.
It wasn't clear to me if you were saying that people need to go as far
as checking the sources themselves if accuracy is important. If you
were, I apologise for misunderstanding you.
What are you basing your 'virtually all' claim on?
Last I checked, a large portion of our articles were not formally
sourced at all. So I don't see how virtually all could have quality
that comes from a mixture of good contributors and well documented
quality sources.