Gerard Meijssen wrote:
I will tell you why we are different. We are different
because we are
not a professionally produced publication. We do not have the pretence
that we know it all. We invite everyone to contribute and these other
publications do not. When you, and here I repeat myself, do not care
for the people who have never cited anything and make them out to be
wrong as a consequence, you do not understand why we are different.
This is absolutely fundamental to what we are doing!
Again, citations have their place but do not quote
your sources
relating subjects like religion because they are all hopelessly point
of view. The only thing you can achieve there is that you show that
someone published a point of view. Citations and sources are a double
edged sword, they either allow you to clear up disputes or they allow
you to destroy what differentiates Wikipedia from these "normal
published textbooks, including encyclopaedias".
In other words citations should be used to help the reader make up his
own mind, not as tools for making up his mind for him.
> Jim wrote:
>
>> The policy says: "The goal of Wikipedia is to become a complete and
>> reliable
>> encyclopedia. Verifiability is the key to becoming a reliable
>> resource, so
>> editors should cite credible
>>
sources<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Cite_sources>so that
>> their edits can be easily verified by readers and other editors."
>
Sometimes this kind of debate seems to be between those who understand
rules without reading them and those who read rules without
understanding them.
Ec