Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 12/28/06, Gurch matthew.britton@btinternet.com wrote:
David raises a good point. Don't judge Wikipedia articles by the quality of their contributors, but by the quality of the article - and the sources in particular. Never trust an unreferenced article. An article that provides a good number reliable, verifiable sources and is well-written should be considered in the same light whether it's written by anonymous users or long-time contributors. (Virtually all our articles are a mixture of both).
That an article provides quality looking sources is not a good metric for article quality.
Indeed it is not. I said judge by the quality of the *sources*, not the quality of the "References" section. Though even that can tell you something, particularly when there isn't one at all.
Unless the information is disputed or sounds far fetched, we make little effort to ensure that the material in the article can actually be found in the sources, even with inline references and web-accessible sources. ... and far less is checked for offline resources.
It wasn't clear to me if you were saying that people need to go as far as checking the sources themselves if accuracy is important. If you were, I apologise for misunderstanding you.
Yes, that's what I was saying. Because material in a Wikipedia article can come from literally anyone, anywhere, the only way to be certain that anything an article says is correct is to look at the original source. (And then decide if you trust the source itself, of course). If there are no sources, or no source for a particular claim you're interested in, the best you can do is assume it's "probably correct".
What are you basing your 'virtually all' claim on?
Personal experience.
Last I checked, a large portion of our articles were not formally sourced at all. So I don't see how virtually all could have quality that comes from a mixture of good contributors and well documented quality sources.
I didn't say that; I said that virtually all our good articles have been put together by a mixture of anonymous users and long-time contributors. In fact, the same is true for most of our mediocre articles and a good many bad articles, too.