[Foundation-l] Enforcing WP:CITE the Soi case

[Daniel Mayer]

--- Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Now here is the rub, when you insist that all our articles need to 
> provide sources, you will lose our stubs. You will make the composition 
> of the content different. When you only consider only the English or the 
> German language wikipedia you may be of the opinion that it has enough 
> content. For projects that are in its infancy like the Swahili Wikipedia 
> it would be a killer. It would be a killer because we do not have the 
> vibrant community that we wish for it.

Smaller language versions of Wikipedia need to emphasize growth over quality, true. But larger
language version (not projects! Wikipedia itself is a project) do not and would be greatly
improved by requiring sources. 
 
> It is indeed great to strive to be better than other encyclopaedias. 
> There biggest achievement is in the relevancy that they had in the past. 
> Encyclopaedias were the embodiment of knowledge. Many people grew up 
> with them and acquired knowledge that way. Wikipedia is young and its 
> relevancy is something that can only be judged in the future. 

And yet many millions of people are using the larger language versions of Wikipedia as reference
sources RIGHT NOW. We have a responsibility to do what we can to increase the chances of actually
serving them accurate content. Creating a culture of sourcing material to good references in the
larger language versions of Wikipedia will help a great deal in that regard. 

-- mav


		
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