steven l. rubenstein wrote:
I believe that Verifiability and No original research are two policies essential to the future of the project, which is to produce a high-quality encyclopedia. If other encyclopedias are not rigorous on these matters, it is because their articles are generally written by PhD.s or graduate students, and are peer-reviewed. I do not want our articles to have to be written by PhD.s or go through mandated and rigorous peer-review. Therefore, I think these two policies are necessary. And hand-in-hand with them, our Cite sources guideline is just as important.
It's particularly important for Wikipedia because the articles may have hundreds of authors. Since all the reader has is the text, having references right there is *really* important for us.
Specifically, it is our articles that must comply with these standards. This I think is important for one simple reason that gets at the heart of our project: it is a collaborative work in process. If Wikipedia is as I believe it is and ought to be a collaborative work in process, then our policies are ideals to which we expect our articles to aspire, but no one editor can bear the full responsibility of achieving this.
Precisely.
That said, I also insist on the corollary: our collaborative process should be dedicated to producing articles based on verifiable sources. A collective process requires a collective commitment.
Yep. It's hard to enforce this with policy; we need to make it a cultural expectation.
- d.