[WikiEN-l] Times article (London)

[George Herbert]

On 8/16/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > "The notion that a false claim to knowledge is wrong is not part of
> > Wikipedia's culture."
>
> This is preposterous.

The claim is made from time to time by those (inside the project and
out) who point to [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:V]] and claim that we don't care
if something is true, only if we can find a reference for it.

There's some truth to that; in many cases, fact checking ends with
"Ok, so-and-so did say that".  However, there are two problems with
it:

One, we should always be referencing possibly questionable but sourced
information in the form "According to xxx in (ref), blah blah...", or
some variant thereof.  We can report that something was
said/written/reported without asserting that the statement itself was
necessarily true.

Two, there are regular if not widely common investigations of deeper
source info, and some sources which meet the minimal "reliable" and
"verifyable" definitions are deemed inaccurate and deleted.

We have people who are lazy a lot, both in sourcing and describing
information on-wiki, but those don't mean that we don't care about the
underlying accuracy.

> > "It combines the free-market dogmatism of the libertarian Right with
> > the anti-intellectualism of the populist Left. "
>
> Nonsense.
>
> It is hard to know how to coherently respond to ignorant ranting which
> appears to make no attempt to even connect at any point with the facts
> of reality.

Aspects of the project can be described that way.  We have libertarian
right-wingers, anti-intellectual leftists, and people of pretty much
every political and social persuasion participating.

But, I don't think he really gets it about us.  We are not a subset of
our parts; we're the sum of them, and then some.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com