On 12/28/06, Gurch matthew.britton@btinternet.com wrote:
David raises a good point. Don't judge Wikipedia articles by the quality of their contributors, but by the quality of the article - and the sources in particular. Never trust an unreferenced article. An article that provides a good number reliable, verifiable sources and is well-written should be considered in the same light whether it's written by anonymous users or long-time contributors. (Virtually all our articles are a mixture of both).
That an article provides quality looking sources is not a good metric for article quality.
Unless the information is disputed or sounds far fetched, we make little effort to ensure that the material in the article can actually be found in the sources, even with inline references and web-accessible sources. ... and far less is checked for offline resources.
It wasn't clear to me if you were saying that people need to go as far as checking the sources themselves if accuracy is important. If you were, I apologise for misunderstanding you.
What are you basing your 'virtually all' claim on?
Last I checked, a large portion of our articles were not formally sourced at all. So I don't see how virtually all could have quality that comes from a mixture of good contributors and well documented quality sources.