On 1/4/07, Robth robth1@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/4/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/4/07, Robth robth1@gmail.com wrote: And
the article they write will be, as a result, bad and inaccurate.
Why so?
Evidence?
Bad, inaccurate sources=bad, inaccurate article. To pick an example I'm familiar with, here's are the first five non-Wikipedia google results for the first major article I ever did for Wikipedia, [[Epaminondas]] (filtering out totally off-topic or near-duplicate results).
<snip>
You could write an article from these sources. It would omit numerous important points, and would probably also include numerous untruths. Such an article would be, in my opinion, worse than nothing.
And I
have seen sites like these used as the basis history articles; here's one of my favorites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Methuselah&oldid=71757344 -Article bloated with dubious speculations drawn from the internet (not all of them directly cited, but google shall reveal for those that aren't) and of course, the requisite In Popular Culture section. And actually, looking back, my rather timid cleanup probably wasn't sufficient.
That's obviously a pretty susceptible article, but it isn't the only example, just the one that jumped to mind for me, and I can't convince myself that the belief (inherent in the edits that produced that page) that Wikipedia is a place to put information you found on the internet doesn't in some part stem from the fact that we have a number of articles that are, well, a place to put stuff you found on the internet.
Thanks for the serious response.
What I would say is that Wikipedia has worked remarkably well by letting people who are not experts (i.e. just some internet guys) write imperfect but well-intentioned articles at first.
Over time articles improve.
Sure, everyone's better off the better articles begin, but experience has demonstrated that the seeds generally flower well, no matter how ugly they look at first.