On 4/7/08, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 07/04/2008, SlimVirgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Uh, the history of [[WP:RS]] is *precisely* an attempt to impose such upon the reader. Canonicalising given sources is training wheels for sourcing at best - it's a limited rule to teach beginners right at the introduction to the subject. Not a basis for going on.
RS has always been a troubled guideline. It's wavered between versions with long instructions about how to identify reliable sources, and versions that are basically just a repeat of WP:V.