[WikiEN-l] The vexed issue of sources

[charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com]

"Thomas Dalton" wrote

> > But Cunc dealt with this. 'Verifiable' is an in-principle thing. It is distinct from saying everyone can do homebrew fact-checking on anything mentioned. Verifiability on Wikipedia can't simply be a sceptics' charter: that really would be a problem.
 
> Verifiable means we can actually verify it to be true. Not in
> principle, but in practise. The whole point of verifiable sources is
> that we can be sure we don't have things stated on Wikipedia that
> aren't true - some vague kind of hypothetical verifiability doesn't
> help that.

No, that's not what we mean, and has never been what we mean. And you seem to be conflating things. We don't talk (much) about "verifiable sources": we base everything on "reliable sources". We talk about verifiable edits, really: we want to constrain editors into only adding material that is verifiable, from reliable sources, accessible to them. Some of the most reliable sources, in the scholarly sense, are some of the least accessible to the general public. (And, frankly, reliability of newspaper reports can vary inversely with circulation. And scholarly monographs with the best information on particular matters are apparently now printed in runs as low as 300.) 

So when you say "Verifiable means we can actually verify it to be true", that is not the kind of statement on which so much can be built. 

Charles

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