On Sep 17, 2006, at 9:51 AM, <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com>
<charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
I see I'm on #499 of my technical articles on mathematics. A high
proportion of those were actually written straight out of my head,
as I saw the need. I do have books to hand, Google at need, and so
on. Of course it all used to be more free-wheeling.
And, let's note, it used to be better. Jimbo has previously noted
that the things we've done to open Wikipedia more (Semi-protection)
have worked better than the things we've done to close it off
(Prohibiting anonymous page creation). Our source fixation has served
to close us off substantially, and it hasn't worked.
People should not be made afraid to add information because they
remember being told it in class last semester, or because they know
it's somewhere in that book, but they don't really want to find the
page number, or because they read it in Rolling Stone a few months
ago. Our attitude should be "add information first, and if the
information looks dodgy we'll challenge it."
Which is surprisingly consonant with [[WP:BOLD]]. Remember that
policy? Those were the days...
-Phil