On Feb 25, 2007, at 5:31 PM, Stan Shebs wrote:
We have a more practical reason to base WP on
secondary sources, which
is that we don't have big-name experts writing the articles, so we
fall
back on amateurs acting as the experts' proxies, via published
works. By
their nature, primary sources are full of traps for the uninformed; in
areas where I'm expert, I can look at a primary source and instantly
know what its defects are likely to be, while a random person not only
doesn't know about them, but doesn't even know that there *are*
defects.
(A falsified birth date in government records? How is that
possible?! :-) )
Absolutely. Primary sources require skill. But the problem is that
writing an encyclopedia entry requires skill. Wikipedia was never
intended to be written by random people and idiots. It was intended
to be written by volunteers. It's not idiot-proof. In fact, it
depends on having experts on articles. The assumption is that someone
who knows something about a topic will go to edit it.
Yes, the system is succeptible to the clueless and the crazy. And the
fix is to use the talk page, get reasonable people to come have a
look at it, etc, etc. In cases where the clueless/crazy are
particularly intractable we have a system whereby intelligent, sane
people are given bansticks. And in bad cases we have the arbcom.
There is no good mechanism to have an encyclopedia written by idiots.
If we do not assume that our userbase is primarily comprised of
reasonably competent people who will follow the principles described
we are screwed.
-Phil