From: Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com
On Sep 18, 2006, at 10:00 AM, Carl Peterson wrote:
Perhaps the slogan should be "verified truth" or "verifiable truth." This puts them both on an equal plane and requires both.
I was thinking of something like "truth is ensured by verifiability," actually.
-Phil
Verifiable sources do not ensure truth. (It's not clear to me that there's any way to ensure truth... you know, observer A says it's a wave, observer B says it's a particle... blind men... elephant... etc.)
What verifiable sources do is to enable the reader to _make a judgement_ of the probable truth of the fact.
That's why it's much more important to have _a_ source, _any_ source, than to have a reliable source. As long as there's some kind of source _the reader can judge its reliability._ Of course, the better the source, the more readers will judge that the fact is probably accurate, so the more reliable the source, the better.
On Sep 18, 2006, at 8:52 PM, Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
From: Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com
On Sep 18, 2006, at 10:00 AM, Carl Peterson wrote:
Perhaps the slogan should be "verified truth" or "verifiable truth." This puts them both on an equal plane and requires both.
I was thinking of something like "truth is ensured by verifiability," actually.
-Phil
Verifiable sources do not ensure truth. (It's not clear to me that there's any way to ensure truth... you know, observer A says it's a wave, observer B says it's a particle... blind men... elephant... etc.)
Which, when you're invested in NPOV, is truth, since our goal, at least on subjects where there's dispute, is not to say "It's an elephant" but rather "This is what seven people say about it."
-Phil
Phil Sandifer wrote:
On Sep 18, 2006, at 8:52 PM, Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
Verifiable sources do not ensure truth. (It's not clear to me that there's any way to ensure truth... you know, observer A says it's a wave, observer B says it's a particle... blind men... elephant... etc.)
Which, when you're invested in NPOV, is truth, since our goal, at least on subjects where there's dispute, is not to say "It's an elephant" but rather "This is what seven people say about it."
Indeed... it's often missed that Wikipedia aims "only" to be an accurate *documentation* of the current state of human knowledge, not a community of researchers that *advances* the state of knowledge. If the world as a whole is confused and divided about some issue, we just write that down---it's not our job to clear up the confusion or arbitrate the dispute.
-Mark