K P wrote:
At some point, though, Wikipedia has to decide what it is, a reliable source of information on the Internet, or a place for its editors. At one of the top 10 sites, it should be leaning towards the former, with, eventually, all information reliable and sourced.
I think that misses the whole point of Wikipedia. We're here primarily to create the content for reuse by other people, it's why we use a free license rather than something site-specific.
Mirrors who publish Wikipedia's content already cull out stuff like talk pages and old versions of articles, they can cull out the uncited stuff too if it's really a problem for them. I'm hoping version flagging will help with this as well once it's implemented.
Right now there is a place for some unsourced information, namely in articles tagged that they're unsourced, or "let the reader beware."
According to the disclaimer linked to on every Wikipedia article the reader should beware of _everything_ in Wikipedia to some degree or another. The site is a work in progress, not a finished product. If being one of the top 10 sites is hindering that then perhaps "being a top 10 site" is the problem in need of fixing.
A lot of the obvious solutions (all information has to be sourced) detract from what I see as the primary Wikipedia force that will eventually make it THE most useful site on the Internet: anyone can edit.
Indeed. Sourced information is an improvement over unsourced information, but unsourced information is still usually an improvement over a blank space.