Haukur Þorgeirsson wrote:
I'd rather not spend much more time
discussing this. Our differences in
opinion are somewhat academic anyhow.
In practice we all agree that Wikipedia's
articles need more and better references.
Absolutely.
But I personally think that trying to make
every fact "checkable" through references
at the bottom of the article is a chimera.
In practice people don't fact-check articles
by getting the books at the bottom and
reading them through. People fact-check
articles by seeing something that they
think is wrong and then looking up the
correct fact in a work of their choosing.
That's our actual model of arriving at
the truth and it works well most of the time.
If people aren't checking these sources, or alternate sources, at all
that means that I could invent a totally fictitios reference and have it
accepted. That's scary.
A fact on a bird species I supply through
an Icelandic ornithology book is only very
marginally "more checkable" to 99.9% of
Wikipedia's editors if I supply the name
of the book. You're better off looking the
relevant bird up in a book of your choosing.
To make the example more concrete here's the
edit I'm thinking off. I was editing out of
town (watching birds) a month ago and hadn't
logged in:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Arctic_Tern&diff=16117224&…
As you can see I *did* supply the source in
the edit history though I didn't find it worthy
of the article itself. Interestingly no other
editor has supplied any source at all.
Who would ever look in the edit history for a reference? I think it
would have been an excellent reference to put at the bottom of the
article. I have too many other things to occupy my time here without
getting distracted by birds, but my inclination for fact-checking was to
reach for Godfrey's "Birds of Canada". That would give a different
perspective, and I could add that as a further reference. An American
could give a view about the bird in Alaska; a Russian or Norwegian could
also provide sources in those languages, and we would still have room
for references from the Southern Hemisphere.
The choice of
what to mention as a reference should not presume what the
reader will or will not understand or what may or may not be easily
avaiable to him. That is the beginning of dumbing down. If you used an
Icelandic book that's fine; say so. Making things checkable does not
imply easily chackable.
I thing that the idea to make everything on Wikipedia
"checkable" through references is a chimera. To begin
with - when was the last time you fact-checked an
article through the references at i
In en:wiktionary where I spend most of my time, I frequently check
online references, or look for other listings of the word before I start
arguing with the contributor that it appears to come from his
imagination. Unfortunately many of these entries are from IPs that we
may never see again.
Making something checkable, even through a rare reference, is the
responsibility of the contributor. Actually checking it is the
responsibility of the reader. If the reader does not fulfill his
responsibility it's not your fault.