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