The point is not about any one example in particular. Sascha's example would be a relatively easy one to check, but who would think to check it if he had not used it as an example. There are countless such unnoticed details in the 'pedia. Ec
Nikos-Optim wrote:
just visit a government statistics page and check.
--- Sascha Noyes sascha@pantropy.net wrote:
On Wednesday 14 January 2004 04:58 pm, Ray Saintonge wrote:
In [[Académie française]] there is the statement
"a musician named
Gourville, who named it the Académie française".
Another established
contributor and I both independently looked for
some kind of
substantiation for this statement; neither of us
was successful. At the
same time we did not find any information
indicating that someone else
was responsible for the name. This particular
piece of data was
contributed by an anonymous contributor on
December 31, 2002. The last
contribution of any sort by him was on April 12,
- He may still be
with us, and with a real identity, but I can't
know that.
What do I know about 17th century musicians. I
found a contemporary
Gourville who was in a position to exercise such
influence, but no
evidence to connect him with the issue.
Fact-checking is a painstaking
and tedious process, and tracing the type of thing
that I used as an
example could take hours, and may require material
that is not on the
internet. Wikipedia's credibility depends on it.
Everybody knows to
expect bias in a hotly disputed topic like
Israeli/Palestinian
relations, and is on alert for that bias. This is
not so with obscure
little details. A credibility test for Wikipedia
might be to take a
random selection of obscure details and attempt to
verify them, or at
least find some source. How well would we do?
This is indeed a problem. I have begun, and plan to continue to in my edit box summaries to indicate the source of the information I add to an article (if that information is non-obvious). Which reminds me that it would be a good idea to _require_ users to fill in the edit summary box.
What worries me every time is when I see an anon change numbers in wikipedia without any edit summary. Eg. changing statistics on the population of spanish speakers in California from (hypothetical) 15% to 40%. It is often impossible to tell whether this is vandalism or a correction.
Best, Sascha Noyes