[WikiEN-l] Re: WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 27, Issue 10

[Geoff Burling]

On Mon, 3 Oct 2005, Tony Sidaway wrote:

> On 10/3/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 10/3/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Make verifiability a key policy, and egregious edit-warring to insert
> > > unsourced statements a blockable offence.
> >
> > Trying to figure out if a source exists or not is going to be fun.
>
>
>
> I have the phone number of my local library.
>
An even easier solution: the holdings of the Library of Congress is
accessible from the Internet. I would expect that the same could be said
for the British Library, the Biblioteque Nationale (sp?) in Paris, &
the equivalents in Germany, Italy, Japan, & Australia. (However, funding
for such useful projects always seem to be lacking.)

Any citation from a source that cannot be found at one of those sites
is considered invalid; & considering that, by law, a copy of every book
printed in the US or the UK ends up at the respective national library,
one would have to work hard to find a reliable source not in one of
those catalogs.[*]

Using the guideline of [[Assume good faith]], we would assume all
quotations or citations are reasonably accurate. However, if it can
be shown that a given contributor is falsifying their citation of sources
(e.g., claiming Sir Frank Stenton wrote on page 276 of his _Anglo-Saxon
England_ that "Bill Clinton is a weenie"), then we toss him to the ArbCom.
Or to a rabid pack of hyenas. Whichever happens to be in the worse mood
at the moment.

A policy like that ought to keep things simple & easy -- while not
preventing anyone from back-checking citations.

Geoff

[*] ISTR someone mentioning that it is not uncommon for most important
works in at least one field -- railroad history -- to be published by
the author & often not listed in these catalogs. I'd be happy to
include some or all college, public or private libraries with online
catalogs to solve this problem -- but there *needs* to be some easy way
to verify that the work cited does exist.