The Mangoe wrote:

On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 3:28 AM, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:

...

Reputation is a false God that I have no intention of worshipping. Most of it is an excuse for POV pushing.

BIG objection here. Reputation is our reliability; if we aren't in some sense reliable, our work has no reason for existence. Listening to external criticism is essential.

No, accurate information is the foundation of reliability. Reputation is about what the neighbours think. If an article about a Pokémon character is accurate within its own context, that's as much as we can expect of it. Sure we listen to external criticism, and I do take their criticism of deletionist shenanigans seriously, but that has nothing to do with reliability. Whether an article might be considered by some as trivial or lacking in notability says nothing about its reliability.

More than anything criticisms of Wikipedia's reliability have relied on the prejudicial premise that something put together by a gang of amateurs can't possibly be reliable. The reaction of many Wikipedians to that has led to a massive campaign of overcompensation. A public reputation of reliability can only be built eventually over time. If some elements of the public are so tied to their preconceptions of unreliability they are not about to waste a lot of time on anything where they would prove themselves wrong. I suppose the overcompensators are cut from the same cloth.

Ec