[WikiEN-l] While we're at it, NOR line-by-line

[Delirium]

David Gerard wrote:
> On 08/04/2008, Wily D <wilydoppelganger at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>   
>>  Everything is contraversial, and every article has cranks &
>>  the passionate trying to push junk into it.
>>     
>
>
> See, this is actually entirely false. Almost no articles on Wikipedia
> are actually that controversial. (Greg Maxwell and Kim Bruning ran the
> numbers on this in January 2006.)
>
> As I said, this appears to be a damage limitation exercise on the
> extreme cases - and is problematic in that it's messing up things for
> the vast majority.
>   
I don't see how it messes things up for the vast majority, though. In 
uncontroversial cases, meticulous sourcing is still quite useful, as it 
lets the reader trace back claims to their source. This is nice if you 
want to do follow-up research, or to cite the fact in some context where 
citing Wikipedia isn't sufficient.

Plus, many claims turn out to be more controversial than the original 
author might have thought---I can't count how many hundreds of articles 
on ancient people I've come across that present particular dates as 
fact, when the chronology for many is controversial. At least when a 
date presented as fact is footnoted with a source you can figure out who 
to attribute the estimate to.

-Mark