On 3/4/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 3/3/06, Zoney zoney.ie@gmail.com wrote:
I'll point out that I think it's most sensible to rely only on verified information, but Wikipedia has not in the past seriously implemented such theoretical ideals. If people are going to start doing so, do it across the board please. I don't doubt the encyclopaedia would be a vast amount smaller and less broad if only verified information is left in it! Wikipedia has not succeeded at even beginning to conform to its ideals.
You're confusing "verified" and "verifiable". All Wikipedia requires is that information actually has been published or is otherwise verifiable. We don't do fact checking, per se.
Can anyone answer me why we *don't* do fact checking? Given that we're so big on asking for sources/references (which we're clearly not, yet), who is actually checking them? Or isn't anyone?
Does anyone know of a WikiProject which goes through articles and checks that the references actually say what people are claiming they say? If there's not one, who will start it? I for one would be interested in doing some of this stuff; I have access to at least two good libraries (University & State) and could easily spare an hour a week to do this kind of stuff.
Go forth!
I think the fact-checking phase of Wikipedia in bulk is yet to come -- right now we're in the "add the sources" phase.
Somewhat similar to the images projects -- first we uploaded images willy-nilly, now we're adding copyright information, then we'll start filtering/replacing. I'm waiting for the project to replace photographic images with high-quality original drawings by Wikipedians.