Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 12/28/06, Gurch
<matthew.britton(a)btinternet.com> wrote:
David raises a good point. Don't judge
Wikipedia articles by the quality
of their contributors, but by the quality of the article - and the
sources in particular. Never trust an unreferenced article. An article
that provides a good number reliable, verifiable sources and is
well-written should be considered in the same light whether it's written
by anonymous users or long-time contributors. (Virtually all our
articles are a mixture of both).
That an article provides quality looking sources is not a good metric
for article quality.
Indeed it is not. I said judge by the quality of the *sources*, not the
quality of the "References" section. Though even that can tell you
something, particularly when there isn't one at all.
Unless the information is disputed or sounds far
fetched, we make
little effort to ensure that the material in the article can actually
be found in the sources, even with inline references and
web-accessible sources. ... and far less is checked for offline
resources.
It wasn't clear to me if you were saying that people need to go as far
as checking the sources themselves if accuracy is important. If you
were, I apologise for misunderstanding you.
Yes, that's what I was saying. Because material in a Wikipedia article
can come from literally anyone, anywhere, the only way to be certain
that anything an article says is correct is to look at the original
source. (And then decide if you trust the source itself, of course). If
there are no sources, or no source for a particular claim you're
interested in, the best you can do is assume it's "probably correct".
What are you basing your 'virtually all' claim
on?
Personal experience.
Last I checked, a large portion of our articles were
not formally
sourced at all. So I don't see how virtually all could have quality
that comes from a mixture of good contributors and well documented
quality sources.
I didn't say that; I said that virtually all our good articles have been
put together by a mixture of anonymous users and long-time contributors.
In fact, the same is true for most of our mediocre articles and a good
many bad articles, too.