[WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

[Jake Nelson]

On 2/24/07, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/25/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> > No. It's not. It never has been, it never will be, it never can be.
> > Reliable sourcing is fundamentally a more complex issue than a black
> > and white guideline could ever portray.
>
> This is going to come as a serious shock to all those lecturers
> teaching the subject

Something that everyone, Wikipedian or not, needs to understand - and
that good teachers inform their students of - is this:

There is no such thing as a reliable source.

No single source of information can ever be trusted, and no set of
sources, no matter how complete, can ever be trusted completely. All
sourcing should reflect that "source 1 says A, source 2 says B" -
leaving the veracity of their claims up to the reader's trust of said
sources. Now, I'm not fond of having a footnote after every word in an
article, so much of our content becomes "a rough consensus of persons
who have recently edited this article says A" (which I would hope
readers have a suitably low trust of, but is sufficient for
uncontroversial data).

-- Jake Nelson
[[en:User:Jake Nelson]]