On Wednesday 14 January 2004 04:58 pm, Ray Saintonge wrote:
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?
This is indeed a problem. I have begun, and plan to continue to in my edit box summaries to indicate the source of the information I add to an article (if that information is non-obvious). Which reminds me that it would be a good idea to _require_ users to fill in the edit summary box.
What worries me every time is when I see an anon change numbers in wikipedia without any edit summary. Eg. changing statistics on the population of spanish speakers in California from (hypothetical) 15% to 40%. It is often impossible to tell whether this is vandalism or a correction.
Best, Sascha Noyes