On 1/24/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Absolutely - that *was* the whole idea. Unfortunately, that idea didn't lead to an encyclopedia people trusted, so now, in order to be credible, we have to reference everything. It's unfortunate, but unavoidable, I think.
Actually, I think most of the criticism leveled at Wikipedia isn't because it's not trustworthy. The criticism is because it *pretends* to be.
Do you read the site as if it were a completely authoritative, flawless source of information? Of course you don't. We Wikipedians are always on the lookout for vandalism, bias, and falsehood. But to the outside world, the project is presented as an "encyclopedia", which most think of as an authoritative source of reliable information. Then they look up something that's dear to them and find an error, and get all bent out of shape and badmouth us.
Instead of changing all the rules every week and restricting what people can do and restricting what people can say and restricting what you can enter without references and adding policies and guidelines and Reliable Sources and stable version and on and on to try to make the project 99.9999999%reliable, why don't we just make it very clear to newcomers how the site works? That most of the content is reliable and trustworthy, but keep your eyes peeled for errors? In fact, if you find one, you can fix it yourself! But most newcomers don't even realize how the site works until ''after'' they've found an error and then tried to figure out who's responsible for this horrible mess of a website oh my god it's an outrage.
That's why I was trying to get the tagline changed to say "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit", or "the community-written free encyclopedia" or some such. We even got Jimbo's attention for a few minutes ("something which is neither too long nor too boring nor too timid, but which helps the reader understand that Wikipedia is a work in progress"). But, alas...