On 3/1/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)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