From: Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com
On 6/6/05, JAY JG jayjg@hotmail.com wrote:
Folk with eccentric points of view such as splinter political
parties
often maintain websites and sometimes even publish books.
But when there is a source for some fringe idea at least we can attach the source, so people can judge the quality of that source themselves, rather then leave it 'some people'.
Attaching sources doesn't require that we judge the sources, but our lack of judgement doesn't prohibit our readers from judging the source.
There is a source for every idea you can imagine, and many you can't imagine. Just because you can source an idea doesn't mean it is encyclopedic. Policy is clear on this; extreme fringe views can find
some
other venue for promoting their bizarre notions. The goal is that
Wikipedia
become an encyclopedia, not a collection of the POVs of everyone who
ever
managed to put up a webpage or self-publish a book.
I think we're talking past each other here. Nowhere did I suggest that we need to include every idea, just that there is nothing about the fact that you can cite crazy people that lessens the advantages of citing sources.
You said "Attaching sources doesn't require that we judge the sources, but our lack of judgement doesn't prohibit our readers from judging the source." In fact, it's our responsibility to judge sources all the time, and (despite continued claims to the contrary) it's often a very tricky to do, which is why content dispute resolution of some sort or another would be quite helpful.
Jay.