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.