We are a tertiary resource. If two Wikipedians used
different sources
to arrive at the same place it makes no difference in the way that it
would for a secondary source. Your argument is just strange. It seems
to make the specific source more important than the information itself.
I'm not making my point very well, sorry. I'll try again:
*Citing* reliable sources isn't very important. What is important is
*using* reliable sources. When someone writes something from memory
and doesn't cite a source, the problem isn't that they haven't cited a
source, the problem is that they didn't use one.
Citing sources is just the easiest way to confirm that reliable
sources were used, it's not the important factor, it's just the way we
confirm the important factor.
Someone writing an article and expecting someone else to find the
sources is wasting their time, as the person finding the sources will
be doing all the work. The actual writing of an article is generally
the easy part, it's finding the information with is difficult. The
wiki concept is great at copyediting and making things easier to read,
and that's the only bit a writer that doesn't cite sources does.
Perhaps we should encourage people to start articles with just bullet
point facts and let the people that don't like research take over from
there. (Obviously, if someone wants to write the whole thing, no-one
will stop them, but we should make it clear that just doing the
research is useful work that can be done independently of the
writing.)