On 1/25/07, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/25/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
From my experience on Wikipedia, unsourced articles are very
unreliable
and may have plenty of wrong facts. Most of thse wrong facts are not added due to malice (though that is not uncommon), but they were added by people either from their (inevitable unreliable) memories, from blogs and forums, which, on average have an awful lack of accuracy or they are simply misinterpretations.
From my experience with Wikipedia, unsourced articles are generally very accurate and moderately precise. When I find them in areas for which I'm familiar with the body of knowledge and reliable sources, I will spend time to go find the appropriate citations and sources as time allows, to "back up" the already existing content with appropriate references.
"Accurate" and "reliable" are not synonymous. Just because the article happens to have everything right does not make it reliable, because there is no way for you to know that it has everything right.
There are more citations per article in Wikipedia than in Brittanica. Is Brittanica an unreliable source?
Yes, it is an unreliable source. I would never cite Brittanica in an academic paper, nor would I know how to find a reliable source for something I read in Brittanica. On the other hand, there are lots of Wikipedia articles which can point me towards a source I would use in a paper.
That's what really matters - can an encyclopaedia article give you a good introduction to a subject and point you towards a truly useful source? If it can't, it's just a toy.
I already know that Wikipedia is not completely reliable. Insisting
on source citations isn't going to fix that - someone could put in a citation that's bogus, or put one in that says something other than what they say, or put one in that they misinterpret, because they aren't an expert on the field. All three of these things have happened to articles I have edited at one time or another. I can't trust the citations, because I can't trust the identity and accuracy of the contributors who added them. I'd have to go fact-check every source for an article to be really sure, and that scales pretty horribly.
-- -george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com
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