It's very simple. Wikipedia policy requires you to cite your sources,
see [[Wikipedia:Cite sources]].
Fred
On Jul 19, 2005, at 2:37 PM, Haukur Þorgeirsson wrote:
If people
aren't checking these sources, or alternate sources, at all
that means that I could invent a totally fictitios reference and
have it
accepted. That's scary.
Wikipedia is based heavily on trust and
assuming good faith. I trust other editors
not to invent references and I don't do it myself.
But if a sufficiently sophisticated troll were
to try it I imagine it could go unnoticed for a
very long time indeed. Eventually an expert on
the topic would stumble on the nonexisting reference,
be puzzled and try without success to look it up.
And - to any aspiring trolls out there - *please
don't try this*. Let's just assume you could, okay?
I mean, even articles on fictitious topics can stand
unnoticed on Wikipedia for years. I've found several
examples in Norse mythology articles - articles on
gods apparently invented out of whole cloth. I don't
think that is a troll-driven phenomenon, presumably
most of these stem from fantasy literature which
someone has in good faith mistaken for authentic
mythology.
Who would ever look in the edit history for a
reference? I think it
would have been an excellent reference to put at the bottom of the
article. I have too many other things to occupy my time here without
getting distracted by birds, but my inclination for fact-checking
was to
reach for Godfrey's "Birds of Canada". That would give a different
perspective, and I could add that as a further reference. An
American
could give a view about the bird in Alaska; a Russian or Norwegian
could
also provide sources in those languages, and we would still have room
for references from the Southern Hemisphere.
An important difference is that your bird book
is in English, like the encyclopedia we're writing.
In any case, if I thought that the observation on
the arctic tern which I added from the book was
somehow unique to Iceland I would have added the
book as a reference. Since I assume it isn't I didn't.
If I had created a reference section and put my book
there, alone, it would have been misleading since it
would imply that the article was written using this
book as a source - not so, I only added one sentence
and didn't really fact-check the rest. It would also
imply that it is for some reason appropriate to cite
an Icelandic source here. That is not so, in my
opinion, since good English sources are available.
Making something checkable, even through a rare
reference, is the
responsibility of the contributor. Actually checking it is the
responsibility of the reader. If the reader does not fulfill his
responsibility it's not your fault.
Well, I wouldn't exactly be very helpful by
supplying a source in a language which the
typical reader of the article doesn't understand.
And I disagree with the model of references
as something intended to protect the writer
from accusations of making things up. I see
them primarily as an aid to the reader in
finding more information.
And again I'd like to emphasize that we probably
agree more than we disagree on this. In most
reference related situations we'd probably both
do the same thing. I'm certainly never happy
with an article until it has good references,
even if it is short. Look at [[Lofn]] for an
example.
Regards,
Haukur
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l