Gwern Branwen wrote:
I see a lot of mindless fetishism
of sourcing here,
Oh, and "mindless fetishsim" about content, too.
Let's remember that
there is a definite mission, which is to write a reference work. It is
not a new idea that encyclopedic works should cite their sources.
but suppose Cunctator resurrected an article and
stuck in a random newspaper article for the claim 'Foo was married in
1967.' Nobody disputed that before; nobody disputed that after; no new
information was added. How *exactly* is the article better?
It is different. It is
certainly not worse. The information about where
to find the information has been added. There is a certain 'presentism'
about the argument, even though you've chosen a date before most
Wikipedians were born. It is (a) not obvious that information about
marriages is undisputed (one of my problem BLPs had just this issue
about whether someone was a wife or not, and (b) not obvious that you
can always find a published source for births, deaths and marriages.
Is it
better because some hypothetical viewer might one day go, hm, I wonder
if he really was married in 1967, and will look at the cite and be
relieved?
Speaking from personal experience on the _Evangelion_ articles: I have
on multiple occasions spent hours or weeks tracking down some fact
widely accepted amongst Eva fans & academic commentators to its
original source and found it. And then felt a sick hollow feeling as
I realize that all I have done is waste my life satisfying RS
standards, when the fans and professors knew it all along because they
trust each other and their forebears and can see for themselves the
consilience of all those commonly accepted facts.
So you have made available to 300 million-odd readers of Wikipedia facts
that were available to the cognoscenti, now in a way that does not
involve "trust". I would probably not spend time in such quantities
fact-checking mathematics, where I have an idea of reputations in the
first place; but I seem to be doing plenty of fact-checking right now in
an area of history where I have little background and don't know whether
the scholarship of what I'm working on is cast-iron. I believe scholars
traditionally got these blues (as well as piles, perhaps not unconnected).
Charles