----- Original Message ----- From: <WJhonson(a)aol.com> To: <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Sent: Monday, September 20, 2010 8:14 PM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005? It depends. On the Salmon talk page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Nathan_Salmon , Salmon writes, quite correctly "the demand for citations to substantiate what are uncontroversial and widely known facts (e.g., about the writings of Kant or Quine, etc.) is excessive". One huge weakness of Wikipedia is the way that every trivial claim is festooned with citations. An expert would understand which facts are "known to those who know" and which aren't. Please note that I followed up later with "Nathan, this is perfectly well-known among philosophers but Wikipedia is a general interest encyclopedia and a reference would be helpful". Just so you see where I am coming from. Another weakness is that, as I have remarked here http://ocham.blogspot.com/2010/06/avicennian-logic.html it is easy to circumvent the 'citation laws'. "The editor always provided reliable sources for their claims. However, examination revealed either blatant misrepresentation of the source, or a selective interpretation that went far beyond the author's meaning. For a long time no editors bothered to check these. The problem was amplified by his frequent use of scholarly works not available on the internet. Most of Wikipedia's editors are amateurs who have no access to a university library. Thus they cannot check a source from a journal, or an old or obscure book that would only be found in a library. Typical of his technique is this edit where he claims that "Avicenna developed an early theory of impetus, which he referred to as being proportional to weight times velocity, which was similar to the modern theory of momentum" citing Aydin Sayili (1987). "Ibn Sina and Buridan on the Motion of the Projectile", Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 500. Yet the source attributes the theory to the fourteenth century French philosopher Buridan, not Avicenna. People trust Wikipedia because they believe the system of 'anyone can edit' allows for cross-checking and verification of references by a large group of users. Clearly, they should get out of this habit." Note that most of this rubbish is still there: it would take a huge task force to clear it up. I didn't use the word 'expert' in the post you quote, except in scare quotes. The difference is the training in how to use citations properly (which most Wikipedians in my view do not understand at all), in being able to summarise appropriately, in being able to provide cogent and coherent evidence for a statement instead of blind ranting, of organising an article in a way that threads the information into a coherent whole, rather than a laundry list, and so on. As well as quite basic stuff like not using commas in strange ways, not attaching adjectives of one sort to nouns of another (this is a very common error - I bet I could find one in any Wikipedia article > 20 words that you selected at random). If this http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Margaret_of_Hungary&oldid=383… is anything to go by, the answer is, no you can't. Sorry :( With every kind wish. Peter