On Mar 31, 2007, at 7:24 PM, Kelly Martin wrote:
On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
- The idea of an error-free encyclopedia is a pipe dream. No
sourcing requirements, no matter how onerous, will render us error- free. Pursuit of an impossible goal at the expense of achievable ones is foolish.
This is a false dialectic. It's not a binary choice; please stop presenting it as one. Nobody expects an error-free encyclopedia, but a lot of us would like one with fewer errors than the one we have now.
Did you actually read the rest of my e-mail? Yes. Obviously we want to reduce errors. But trying to create iron-clad procedures is just going to cause more problems. "Let's remove all the unsourced information/delete all the unsourced articles" isn't an attempt to reduce error. It's an attempt to eliminate it, and it will backfire grotesquely.
-Phil