[Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

[Peter Damian]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Anthony" <wikimail at inbox.org>
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 03, 2010 4:46 PM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?


On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 11:14 AM, Peter Damian
><peter.damian at btinternet.com> wrote:
>> But in certain areas it has not succeeded at all - philosophy in 
>> particular,
>> and to a certain extent the humanities. The question is why is that so.

>"The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not
>truth—whether readers can check that material in Wikipedia has already
>been published by a reliable source, not whether editors think it is
>true."

>In philosophy, as well as in the humanities, there's a lot of
>information which is verifiable but not true (unless you're going to
>define "a reliable source" as a source which doesn't contain false
>information, anyway).

How does that address my point that Wikipedia has not succeeded in certain 
areas?  My criterion of success is that the philosophy articles should be 
well-written and should comprehensively reflect reliable sources. The 
problem is that they don't.  I gave a list of problematic articles.  Here is 
one of them again.

http://ocham.blogspot.com/2010/08/argumentum-ad-baculum.html

Against reliable sources (any elementary logic textbook will do) will tell 
you that article is very wrong.  So it is not verifiable.

Give me any philosophy article at random and I will probably be able to find 
three bad mistakes.