Larry Sanger believes that the solution to make Wikipedia more credible are with experts. You can see a good article descriping his criticisms here ( http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/03/144207&tid=95&tid=1 ) posted on Jan 3, 2004.
I think the easiest way to make Wikipedia more credible is with a Fact and Reference Project, which the community has been developing over a period of more than a few months now: ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_Check ).
The thing holding this project back, and ultimately Wikipedia from sheading the skin of being 'noncredible' is the lack of intelligent foot/end notes. A way to format an article with autonumbering endnotes for crossreferencing is lacking. I am sure with this feature programmed in this project can be on its way to cross referencing all facts on Wikipedia. You can see some examples offoot/endnote formatting template here. JesseW has put much effort into trying to create a formating guide here ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Footnotes ) and another guide here ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Cite_sources ). Examples are here ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_Check/... ).
How credible will Wikipedia be if each fact is crossreferenced with 5, 10, 20 external sources like academic journals, encyclopedias, books? Very.
Please feel welcome to use (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_C...) as an area for us to discuss this issue.
Shaun MacPherson
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