On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 10:43 PM, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
We very strongly want everything in Wikipedia to be verifiable -- that's why WP:V is policy. However, we realize that providing unimpeachable references for every fact in Wikipedia is extraordinarily difficult. So we don't insist that every fact have an unimpeachable reference this instant.
Or at least, that's my take on it. But this question clearly touches on one of the core divides across Wikipedia, namely the eventualism/immediatism dichotomy.
That's right. Eventualism [1] has long been the general way we've operated, but with the greater focus on quality rather than (solely) quantity lately, this is being challenged.
I think we're still generally operating on an eventualist basis, but lately we've seen that there are certain areas - of which BLP is the clearest - where we switch into an immediatist [2] mode.
-- For those who aren't aware of these already: [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Eventualism [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Immediatism