Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Listening to the show I heard something else, it was put forward that people take wikipedia as the "gospel truth" either because they do not have more time or because they still do not have the skills to do some proper research.
The biggest problem with the "gospel truth" is the number of people who blindly believe the gospel.
I came up with this conclusion: we emphasise on providing the sources for the articles written. This is cool for as far as it goes. However the emphasis should be on where the reader should go next. It is much more productive to state what and where good further reading can be found. The point is that the source for a fact does not necessarily make good reading even though it proves a factoid. It is much more productive to show where to go next.
The crux is that the mentioning of sources make a Wikipedia article credible. It does not point where to go for further research or information. To me this is distinctly different and it is much more important that we encourage people to learn more.
The sources are a place for the reader to go next. In most cases they will contain much more information than what can be provided in an encyclopedia. Even where your distinction may be valid the onus is still upon the reader who wants to know more to track down the cited source. The purpose of references is to make the article verifiable. If the readers don't sometimes do that verification it becomes too easy to just list phoney references.
Ec