On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 10:13 AM, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
I've been working on figuring out the history of this bit of wording, since it's, on the surface, transparently untrue (we, in fact, do want to provide truth as well - not necessarily big-T absolute truth, but certainly the little-t truth that is a synonym for "accuracy" - i.e. the word as normal people use it).
Originally, WP: V explicitly called for accuracy: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Verifiability&oldid=... . The term was removed in a language tweak in 2005. The phrase "verifiability, not truth" came from a draft revision of WP:NOR in December of 2004.
As far as I can tell, there has *never* been a consensus discussion of the phrasing "verifiability, not truth," nor was there a discussion about removing the statement that Wikipedia strives to be accurate from WP:V. These changes were inserted, albeit years ago, without discussion, and long-standing principles were pushed to the side and minimized in favor of increasingly context-free restatements of the changes. But I cannot find *any* evidence that the position "accuracy is not a primary goal of Wikipedia" has ever garnered consensus.
Is anyone aware of a discussion to this end that I am not? Is there actually a point where we clearly and deliberately decided that the goal of Wikipedia is not accuracy?
-Phil
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You're asking to open up a huge can of worms with anything else. "Well I know the source says that, but you see, I know it's not actually true, so I can still edit war over putting it in the article even though I've got no sourcing that says otherwise." We're a tertiary source, we mirror sources, not second-guess them. If a source made an error, find a better or more recent source that disagrees with them, or ask them to correct. Many will, and that has the benefit of correcting the erroneous source as well! If they refuse to correct despite having an obvious and glaring error, inform their competitors instead.