On 3/1/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
I don't see why they should get so confused about that. "Verified" and "verifiable" are clearly distinct concepts. The latter only means "capable of being verified". It does not imply that anyone has in fact gone there to make that verification.
But strangely enough, "verifiable" wasn't actually a policy at the day to day level. For something to be "verifiable", it would have to be referenced. But we didn't have a firm requirement that everything had to be referenced.
Take an (unreferenced) statement like "Wànsuìtōngtiān was emperor of China from 696 to 697 AD." Is it verifable? No - there is no immediate way of determining its veracity, short of researching from scratch. Is it attributable? Yes - we could certainly find someone else who had said that.
So it sounds like we are making clearer the distinction between: * the absolute necessity that everything we say be already said by someone else first * the preference (and in libel situations, necessity) that we cite those someone elses.
Steve