On Mon, 3 Oct 2005, Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 10/3/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/3/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@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.