On 10/27/12 2:28 AM, George Herbert wrote:
Our standard is not to try and attain a perfect level of only totally truthful information. Nobody could realistically do that. Our standard is to aim for and have quality controls to not be worse than the world at large in a given field. I.e., we accept on first assertion that external fields' internal peer review is "good enough", though we will usually at least listen to counterarguments that some sources may in fact be better or worse than that.
The way I usually think of it is that Wikipedia's end result, if it were successful, would be an accurate summary of the current consensus in all fields of human knowledge. Our physics articles would reflect the current state of physics research; our history articles the current historical consensus on each era (with discussion of significant dissenting views and uncertainties); and so on. Now whether any of those are *right*, that's a whole other problem. It's hard to enough to produce a complete summary of the current state of physics and historical research without also attempting to *fix* anything that might be wrong with the current state of physics, and *revise* historical understanding of various subjects. That's just not in our scope.
Beyond practicality, I think that's actually a useful result. When I read Wikipedia on 14th-century France, I want a capsule overview of what historians currently think about 14th-century France, not a revisionist take that a group of Wikipedia editors thinks is more truthful. As a tertiary source, an accurate summary of the current state of the literature is what I want and expect to read.
-Mark