Sascha Noyes wrote:
Attribution is always good. I don't have a problem with the opinions of others, if they are in any way founded on some evidence. What I do have a problems with is people pushing unfounded opinions on others. By unfounded I mean "making an assertion as to the truth of a proposition without giving any evidence to support this assertion."
I agree that being able to trace the source of information is important. The problem is not just with "pushing" opinions; sometimes a simple innocuous statement is entered as though it were a fact. It is not about a contentious issue, nor is it about something that people are likely to concern themselves. Including such unfounded material can have a long term effect on the credibility of Wikipedia.
In [[Académie française]] there is the statement "a musician named Gourville, who named it the Académie française". Another established contributor and I both independently looked for some kind of substantiation for this statement; neither of us was successful. At the same time we did not find any information indicating that someone else was responsible for the name. This particular piece of data was contributed by an anonymous contributor on December 31, 2002. The last contribution of any sort by him was on April 12, 2003. He may still be with us, and with a real identity, but I can't know that.
What do I know about 17th century musicians. I found a contemporary Gourville who was in a position to exercise such influence, but no evidence to connect him with the issue. Fact-checking is a painstaking and tedious process, and tracing the type of thing that I used as an example could take hours, and may require material that is not on the internet. Wikipedia's credibility depends on it. Everybody knows to expect bias in a hotly disputed topic like Israeli/Palestinian relations, and is on alert for that bias. This is not so with obscure little details. A credibility test for Wikipedia might be to take a random selection of obscure details and attempt to verify them, or at least find some source. How well would we do?
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