[WikiEN-l] "Reliability" and "usefulness"

[Daniel P. B. Smith]

> From: Eugene van der Pijll <eugene at vanderpijll.nl>

> This is part of a wider trend towards
> "reliability" at the cost of "usefulness". By deleting uncontroversial
> but unsourced statements and articles, of course we increase  
> Wikipedia's
> reliability, because a part of this unsourced information is not true.
> But most of that deleted material is true, and useful for the  
> reader of
> that article.

The Battle of Hastings was fought in 1064.
The Battle of Hastings was fought in 1065.
The Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066.
The Battle of Hastings was fought in 1067....

Applying reductio ad absurdam, and cribbing from the Kurd Lasswitz  
story "The Universal Library," we can maximize the "usefulness" of  
Wikipedia by having a computer generate every possible combination of  
English words and submitting it as an article.

This procedure will guarantee that Wikipedia contains _every_  
possible item of true information, and thus be more "useful" than any  
other encyclopedia.

It will, of course, also contain every possible erroneous and  
misleading item of information, but no matter. We can, if we wish,  
solve  that problem by having the computer tagging every sentence as  
needing a citation, and by supplying an appropriate disclaimer.

Readers, can, of course, always distinguish the accurate article by  
consulting the convenient [[List of accurate articles]], which this  
universal Wikipedia is guaranteed to contain, if, of course, they can  
figure out which of the googol or so articles entitled [[List of  
accurate articles]] is actually the real list of accurate articles.

No, a mix of accurate and inaccurate information is not very "useful."

It is like Lewis Carroll's clock that does not run at all and is thus  
right twice a day. Such a lock is not very useful because there is no  
way to tell _when_ it is right.

The "law of recycling" states that the value per pound of a mixture  
of recycled material is equal to the value per pound of the least  
valuable material in the mixture. To at least a first approximation,  
the value of Wikipedia is set by the value of the least accurate  
material in Wikipedia.