Delirium <delirium@...> writes:
David Russell wrote:
While I support the option of expert review of Wikipedia article revisions, I think Delirium misunderstood the point of referencing. ...continued below...
Delirium wrote:
They certainly don't look the same, unless the person "reviewing" the article utterly lacks any competence to review the article, in which case they should kindly refrain from doing so. Anyone who has even very basic competence knows what is an uncontroversial statement that appears in numerous textbooks in their field.
I don't agree with the expert-centric approach Larry Sangers advocates, but we don't have to have only people who have *no* idea what they're doing editing our articles either.
We are talking about /readers/ here, not Wikipedia editors. If a /reader/ sees a particular unreferenced statement on Wikipedia, they do not know whether the statement is unreferenced because: a) Some idiot has made it up without any factual basis b) It is 'widely accepted as a fact'
Your 'people familiar with the field will recognise it as a well-known fact' argument doesn't really wash in this situation. The reason a person would be reading a Wikipedia article on a subject is because they _don't_ know enough about the subject. What may appear as a 'widely accepted fact' to someone writing a Wikipedia article on a subject may be nothing of the sort to an uninformed person seeking to use Wikipedia to expand his/her knowledge (which is, after all, what we're for).
Well, that's why I think we *should* have review processes of some sort. Then if a reader sees an unreviewed article, they are indeed in the situation you describe. But if a reader sees an article that has been reviewed as at least "pretty good" by people who know something about the field, then they can rest assured that nothing obvious is wrong about it. For what it's worth, I do think we should have a different process of reviewing than good/featured, but that's been talked about at length before.
In any case, given references doesn't solve the problem you describe either, because then the reader still can't determine without some background knowledge whether this is a mainstream/reliable reference, or a reference to a book written by someone with a decidedly minority view.
Not exactly, no. To determine if a fact is "well known to be true" requires subject specific knowledge; to determine if a source is mainstream requires more general skills at judging sources *in general*; while subject familiarity is one way to judge a source's reliability it is not the only method. With the exception of deductive or indutive logic, subject specific knowledge is the only way to verify a specific fact. That's why I think we should help readers out by having people
with at least some knowledge in the area the article's about give the reader some indication of how good the article is---delegating all the fact-checking to every individual reader simply doesn't work.
In any case, having expert review or not is a distraction from the purpose of referencing. The most important point of referencing, for our readers, is to allow them to tell *where* our claims come from. Even if a lay reader can't tell if "Prof. John McManins, published in the National Dynamic Society Journal" is a reliable source, if they tell someone who does know the subject - "X is true because McManis said it." the knowledgable person will have something to go on. If they just say "X is true because Wikipedia said it." this is useless; there's nothing further to say. Referencing encourages our readers to pay attention to where something comes from, not just take it on faith. This is critical.
References shouldn't be *required* - I think the GA and FA requirements of references are more or less misplaced (esspecially in the case of GA), but any amount of references should be *allowed*, and appreciated.
Jesse Weinstein