just visit a government statistics page and check.


--- Sascha Noyes wrote:
> On Wednesday 14 January 2004 04:58 pm, Ray Saintonge
> wrote:
> > In [[Acad??mie fran??aise]] there is the statement
> "a musician named
> > Gourville, who named it the Acad??mie fran??aise".
> 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,
> 2003. 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
> --
> Please encrypt all email. Public key available from
> www.pantropy.net/snoyes.asc
> _______________________________________________
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