We talk about both verifiability and reliability.
You are not the end authority on Wikipedia.
On 12/8/06, charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com>
wrote:
"Thomas Dalton" wrote
> But Cunc dealt with this.
'Verifiable' is an in-principle thing. It is
distinct from saying everyone
can do homebrew fact-checking on anything
mentioned. Verifiability on Wikipedia can't simply be a sceptics' charter:
that really would be a problem.
Verifiable means we can actually verify it to be
true. Not in
principle, but in practise. The whole point of verifiable sources is
that we can be sure we don't have things stated on Wikipedia that
aren't true - some vague kind of hypothetical verifiability doesn't
help that.
No, that's not what we mean, and has never been what we mean. And you seem
to be conflating things. We don't talk (much) about "verifiable sources":
we
base everything on "reliable sources". We talk about verifiable edits,
really: we want to constrain editors into only adding material that is
verifiable, from reliable sources, accessible to them. Some of the most
reliable sources, in the scholarly sense, are some of the least accessible
to the general public. (And, frankly, reliability of newspaper reports can
vary inversely with circulation. And scholarly monographs with the best
information on particular matters are apparently now printed in runs as low
as 300.)
So when you say "Verifiable means we can actually verify it to be true",
that is not the kind of statement on which so much can be built.
Charles
-----------------------------------------
Email sent from
www.ntlworld.com
Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software
Visit
www.ntlworld.com/security for more information
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l