Andre Wrote:
Reacting on Stephen Gilbert's "possible
bug report", I went through searching
for other pages that also contain w: links. As such I got to
[[Wikipedia:Cite your sources]]. And from the page talk it seems that
everyone
but 24 agreed with it at the time. Nowadays I see _noone_ citing sources on a
regular basis (or even an irregular basis). Would it not be time to remove
this 'Rule to consider', or else at least change the 'Talk' page such
that
it is clear that it is not a majority opinion nowadays?
Wikipedia and "cite your sources" have an uncomfortable history. AFAIK,
it's mostly a tool used against minority opinions, esp. left-wing ones.
I've used it myself on occasion, and had it used against me. I can
understand why no one cites sources for e.g. the value of pi or the fact
that the earth revolves around the sun, but if we're going to update the
policy, we should first think hard about whether we want to admit that we
value sources most when something in the article challenges our own
inherent assumptions. It takes the work off us and puts it on the person
making claims we disbelieve. That's valuable, I guess, since in some
regards it's a bar against original research, and wikipedia is not a place
for original research. But the result is also that it tends to favor
mainstream views, and NPOV is still imperfectly applied at wikipedia.
Personally, I would like to see articles on e.g. green criticisms of
capitalism, communist criticisms of socialism, etc., provi!
ded they are done from the NPOV. Of course doing it would not be easy,
and not necessarily be anything I wanted to take part in.
Personally, I'm quite certain that we've often used "cite your sources"
as
a means to silence minority opinions. (But, really, 24 was left of me
politically and I was in the chorus asking for sources so I'm just another
hypocrite). :-/
There may be other (more legitimate) reasons for valuing sources most in
controversial articles, and if so, we should state them: everything
"aboveboard," as it were. Certainly the policy needs to be revamped.
kq
When I wrote [[Great Salt Lake]] I got most of the facts out of an issue of
High Country News. I put that down at the bottom of the page, but for my
trouble got a rather persistant inquiry as to whether I had copied the
article from there, i.e. wasn't this a copyright violation and had to spend
time saying no, I had just extracted the facts from there. Then they
removed the information that that was the source of the information. So I
kind of got out of the habit after that. That's kind of petty since
information on Great Salt Lake is kind of common. Now, especially if I work
from a book I just put it in '''Further Reading'''. It would help
in lots
of cases for checking information if we all did get into the habit of
citing sources though. Sometimes it can be kind of ephemeral like a NPR
interview, but even then at least one might know.
Fred