On 4/7/08, Phil Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 2:59 PM, SlimVirgin
<slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
There's a strong consensus that Wikipedia
should publish only what
reliable sources have already published on a topic, so that readers
can check material for themselves. That is the key idea of the
encyclopedia.
Wikipedia is most useful as a resource in allowing readers to follow
its leads. Readers don't swallow wholesale what it says. They look up
what the Wikipedian has looked up, then they make up their own minds
about the accuracy of it.
We don't try to impose "the truth" on people, and we don't expect that
they should trust anything just because they read it in Wikipedia. All
we do is provide what we hope are the best and most appropriate
sources, and a surrounding text that sums up what good sources are
saying, in a way that we hope is readable and that makes readers want
to know more. We enable them to inform themselves.
That's the difference between us and, say, the Encyclopaedia
Britannica. We empower readers. We don't ask for their blind trust.
None of this is equivalent to "we are not interested in accuracy" or
"accuracy is not a pre-requisite for inclusion." Nobody is seriously
suggesting that verifiability is *not* a requirement. What I'm trying to
figure out is whether anybody is seriously suggesting and/or whether a
consensus exists that accuracy is not *also* a requirement.
But we have no idea most of the time whether what our sources say is
accurate. All we can do is try to make sure we use good sources; use
in-line attribution wherever appropriate; and make sure our readers
can trace our line of reasoning so they can judge it for themselves.
The changes in question to the policies were largely yours, albeit from
three years ago.
This has been an evolutionary process on one of the most watched pages
on Wikipedia, with lots of people joining in to help change it, or
defend it against changes. The result is never going to be perfect
(and, as you know, I'd have preferred one page, WP:ATT, to summarize V
and NOR), but it's a policy that helps to keep nonsense out, and it's
really very easy to stick to it.
Did you intend to eliminate accuracy as a requirement?
Accuracy was explicitly a requirement in WP:V even
after you added the
phrase "not truth, but verifiability" in December of 2004 - accuracy was
explicitly policy until you changed it to "reliability" in August of 2005.
Did you intend to say that accuracy is not a requirement? If so, what made
you think there was consensus for this view?
I didn't add that phrase to V. Someone suggested it in 2004 during a
reorganization of NOR, and I added it there. (But they suggested it
because it is what we were already doing.) Then someone else moved it
to V. But why does it matter who first suggested it or added it? The
point is that it was strongly supported and still is. We don't do
truth. We report what good sources are saying, and we leave it to the
readers to decide what to believe.
Sarah