Andre Wrote:
Reacting on Stephen Gilbert's "possible bug
report", I went through searching
for other pages that also contain w: links. As such I got to
[[Wikipedia:Cite your sources]]. And from the page talk it seems that everyone
but 24 agreed with it at the time. Nowadays I see _noone_ citing sources on a
regular basis (or even an irregular basis). Would it not be time to remove
this 'Rule to consider', or else at least change the 'Talk' page such
that
it is clear that it is not a majority opinion nowadays?
Wikipedia and "cite your sources" have an uncomfortable history. AFAIK,
it's mostly a tool used against minority opinions, esp. left-wing ones. I've used
it myself on occasion, and had it used against me. I can understand why no one cites
sources for e.g. the value of pi or the fact that the earth revolves around the sun, but
if we're going to update the policy, we should first think hard about whether we want
to admit that we value sources most when something in the article challenges our own
inherent assumptions. It takes the work off us and puts it on the person making claims we
disbelieve. That's valuable, I guess, since in some regards it's a bar against
original research, and wikipedia is not a place for original research. But the result is
also that it tends to favor mainstream views, and NPOV is still imperfectly applied at
wikipedia. Personally, I would like to see articles on e.g. green criticisms of
capitalism, communist criticisms of socialism, etc., provided they are done from the NPOV.
Of course doing it would not be easy, and not necessarily be anything I wanted to take
part in.
Personally, I'm quite certain that we've often used "cite your sources"
as a means to silence minority opinions. (But, really, 24 was left of me politically and
I was in the chorus asking for sources so I'm just another hypocrite). :-/
There may be other (more legitimate) reasons for valuing sources most in controversial
articles, and if so, we should state them: everything "aboveboard," as it were.
Certainly the policy needs to be revamped.
kq