On Jan 25, 2007, at 2:42 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
If Susan can
make the edit from memory, we're good.
No, we're not good. That's the whole point. People's memories were
reliable enough when Wikipedia first started and nobody actually used
it for anything. That's no longer the case. If we want to be a
credible encyclopedia, we need our facts to come from reliable sources
(citing them isn't the important part, that's just a way to prove the
important bit - that the fact came from a reliable source).
There seems to be a serious misunderstanding of what "source" means. A
source isn't somewhere people can go to verify the fact, it is where
the fact came from. Citing sources is easy, because you will always
have the source with you when you write the article (if you think you
don't, then it means the source is your memory, in which case you
aren't using a reliable source and shouldn't add the fact). The
problem isn't that people aren't citing reliable sources, the problem
is that they aren't *using* reliable sources.
You are advocating the complete abandonment of the principles that
underly Wikipedia.
"You can edit this page right now." That's the mantra. That's the
key. That's what got us where we are. It's foolish to give up on the
thing that made us succeed where other things (Nupedia) failed.
-Phil