On 8/16/07, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
George Herbert wrote:
On 8/16/07, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
"The notion that a false claim to knowledge is wrong is not part of Wikipedia's culture."
This is preposterous.
The claim is made from time to time by those (inside the project and out) who point to [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:V]] and claim that we don't care if something is true, only if we can find a reference for it.
That's very different from denying that a false claim to knowledge is wrong. Indeed, it is the opposite. It is saying that claims to knowledge have to be backed up.
It isn't that we don't care if something is true. It is that we need facts that can be confirmed, not opinion.
Right. This is a key distinction... one lost on that columnist, and to some degree some participants.
To some degree this plays into the push to reference everything. Though this is a legitimate need, we're likely to spend the next (couple of years?) sourcing everything in the encyclopedia much better, and then the next (couple of years?) after that dealing with finding stuff where there were inaccurate or unreliable sources used in places.
The latter problem is arguably better to have and likely far smaller than the current widespread lack of sources.