That section on WP:V is very bad, that actually promotes using only english language references. That is why the en.wikipedia will always stay biased. Also most people will only allow internet sources unfortunately. Because of our majority rules concept (whether you like it or not the major decides what is true on wikipedia if they know about the subject or not. This has been the reality for years now) it is impossible for someone with a couple of good books/referenced works about a subject to win a disagreement with someone who uses one dodgy website as a source. Simply because the books are not available to all the people (because they would have to buy them, or they are printed in a third country) while all of them can base their opinion on that one dodgy website as all of them can access that.
This is why after editting since 2003 I gave up thinking that wikipedia could ever be unbiased or that articles can become of a really high quality. If someone puts a lot of time in something referencing and stuff out of books. It will eventually be editted to a comatose state by the mass because hey ..... it is on the internet so it is true! No matter how hard we try we will never ever get around this. Wikipedia will be mediocre at best.
Waerth
The wording of the section about foreign-language sources (in [[WP:V]]) is ambiguous. It needs to state that foreign-language sources are allowed, and even encouraged.
Most Chinese speakers come from mainland China, where Wikipedia is banned. Open proxies are the only way to bypass such censorship, but we have a policy against editing from open proxies. However, discussion about this issue belongs in another thread.
2007/8/11, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se:
Milos Rancic wrote:
I used "scientific" in very exact sense of "scientific method", not as a marketing.
But the scientific method defines how to do original research, something Wikipedia has sworn not to do. I'm just saying this, toungue in cheek, to point out how hollow and vague the claim for being "scientific" can be. *We* should be scientific whenever we can, but the resulting *encyclopedia* can not always be. However, the word "scientific" with respect to encyclopedias is so loaded as a marketing buzzword, that it becomes practically useless.
The word encyclopedia, I'm told, is composed of Greek enkyklios (all-round) and paideia (education). These are the two areas where I think we should focus, but instead so much energy goes into requiring citations (verifiability) and weeding out irrelevant topics (notability). Of course, education implies solid, scientific knowledge, not superstition, propaganda or self-promotion. But it also means bringing out that knowledge in an efficient and useful way.
Since raw size is no longer a problem for (the English) Wikipedia, I think we should start to ask how all-round it really is. The other day I found a "best-selling author" who didn't yet have an entry in Wikipedia (so I wrote one). And this author is American and contemporary, not a best-seller in Japan in the 1920s. And Wikipedia is still very good on popular culture, such as music, literature and movies. I think there are many other areas where we have far more left to do. (Jimmy Wales made a good comment recently about 19th century mayors of Warsaw.) We know the raw size in numbes: 2 million articles. But how can the all-roundness be expressed in numbers?
The next issue is education: How pedagogic or "efficient in teaching" is Wikipedia really? Are articles well written, well structured and easy to find? Do we care whether it answers peoples questions? This is where actual research can be applied. That is: Original research should not be documented in the articles, but original research can be used in WikiProjects as a support for improving articles. Paris is the capital of France. That simple statement is an efficient way to bring out knowledge. Loading the text with references to literature doesn't necessarily improve the encyclopedia's purpose in that case.
The biography I wrote for a best-selling author does improve the all-roundedness of Wikipedia. It's short, but well structured and easy to read. Unfortunately, we have no good system for indicating this progress. But now the article is flagged with {{unreferenced}}, as that is the main activity going on. Nobody questions the facts expressed in the article, neither its notability. It's just the lack of <ref> tags. It would be easy (and tempting) to fake that by making up a source somewhere. Just add a <ref> tag, and all is back to scientific again.
-- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
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