From: "Steve Bennett" stevagewp@gmail.com
On 11/30/06, Daniel P. B. Smith wikipedia2006@dpbsmith.com wrote:
From: "Steve Bennett" stevagewp@gmail.com
I don't think deleting accurate, high-quality, unreferenced material is in Wikipedia's best interests. Asking for a source, yes. Adding sources, yes. But *deleting* good material? No.
Unsourced material is not high-quality material.
I'll interpret that as "Uncited material can by definition never be considered 'high-quality material'."
Please don't.
And then I'll strongly disagree. Newspapers, encyclopaedias and many other sources of high-quality information regularly do not cite their sources. If we take one of our best featured articles and remove the references section, it is still much better than a shorter article that does cite its sources. And streets ahead of an article which false cites its sources...
What I meant is that _in Wikipedia,_ uncited material is not high- quality material.
_In Wikipedia,_ that's indeed by definition, and the "definition" in question is Wikipedia's verifiability policy.
The New York Times and the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ don't have such a policy.
Uncited material in The New York Times or the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ is high-quality material, because their mechanism for insuring quality is different. It involves a web of trust in which I trust these sources because I believe the editors make informed judgements on the credentials of contributors. It's not 100.000% true, but I assume that the Britannica only assigns articles to knowledgeable people--not to volunteers who walk in off the street attracted by an arch over their entrance that says "Edit this page." I assume that the New York Times accepts articles people with credentials as "journalists," earned by past performance on increasingly important assignments and/or training in a journalism school and/or adherence to a code of ethics.
Wikipedia is different, because Wikipedia does not select or judge the competence or credentials of its editors.