The Cunctator wrote:
On 3/4/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email)
<alphasigmax(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 3/3/06, Zoney <zoney.ie(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
I'll point out that I think it's most
sensible to rely only on verified
information, but Wikipedia has not in the past seriously implemented such
theoretical ideals. If people are going to start doing so, do it across the
board please. I don't doubt the encyclopaedia would be a vast amount smaller
and less broad if only verified information is left in it! Wikipedia has not
succeeded at even beginning to conform to its ideals.
You're confusing "verified" and "verifiable". All Wikipedia
requires
is that information actually has been published or is otherwise
verifiable. We don't do fact checking, per se.
Can anyone answer me why we *don't* do fact checking? Given that we're
so big on asking for sources/references (which we're clearly not, yet),
who is actually checking them? Or isn't anyone?
Does anyone know of a WikiProject which goes through articles and checks
that the references actually say what people are claiming they say? If
there's not one, who will start it? I for one would be interested in
doing some of this stuff; I have access to at least two good libraries
(University & State) and could easily spare an hour a week to do this
kind of stuff.
Go forth!
It's a daunting task if there's no co-ordination and no place to say "I
have fact-checked revision XYZ of article Foobahbaz".
I think the fact-checking phase of Wikipedia in bulk
is yet to come --
right now we're in the "add the sources" phase.
Somewhat similar to the images projects -- first we uploaded images
willy-nilly, now we're adding copyright information, then we'll start
filtering/replacing. I'm waiting for the project to replace
photographic images with high-quality original drawings by
Wikipedians.
Except for cases where we're replacing "fair use" images, why should we
remove perfectly good photographs? Um, ok, and also for cases where a
photograph is likely to offend... hrm, some religions believe that any
depiction of /anything/ is idolatory, so maybe we should just remove all
images "so as not to offend"?
Alright, now I'm thoroughly confused. Why do you want to replace
photographs with drawings? Should we also replace all our current sound
files with vocal interpretations of them?
--
Alphax -
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