On 1/25/07, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 1/25/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)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(a)gmail.com
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