Thursday, January 25, 2007, 9:38:50 PM, George wrote:
Here's the problem. Academic rigor - which I understand, having done refereed papers for conferences and such - is all fine and good for scholarly original research papers.
For an encyclopedia, the vast bulk of what we're trying to do is to simply convey the top level survey of a field to the general public.
You are arguing that for an encyclopedia, unlike for the academia, reliability and fact-checking are not important.
The academic rigor exists not just due to their elitism: that's how the Academia mentains their high standards of its publications.
From my experience on Wikipedia, unsourced articles are very unreliable and may have plenty of wrong facts. Most of thse wrong facts are not added due to malice (though that is not uncommon), but they were added by people either from their (inevitable unreliable) memories, from blogs and forums, which, on average have an awful lack of accuracy or they are simply misinterpretations.