Thomas Dalton wrote:
If Susan can make the edit from memory, we're good.
No, we're not good. That's the whole point. People's memories were reliable enough when Wikipedia first started and nobody actually used it for anything. That's no longer the case.
So what's changed about people's memories? Have people become so much more stupid in six years' time? If you want a simple answer for why people use Wikipedia you only need compare the size then and now. People looking for information will go where they can most easily find it.
If we want to be a credible encyclopedia, we need our facts to come from reliable sources (citing them isn't the important part, that's just a way to prove the important bit - that the fact came from a reliable source).
We can have a credible encyclopedia without obsessing about it. Your distinction the source and the citation of that source strikes me as more semantic than substantial.
There seems to be a serious misunderstanding of what "source" means. A source isn't somewhere people can go to verify the fact, it is where the fact came from.
Sounds like a good definition for original research.
Citing sources is easy, because you will always have the source with you when you write the article (if you think you don't, then it means the source is your memory, in which case you aren't using a reliable source and shouldn't add the fact). The problem isn't that people aren't citing reliable sources, the problem is that they aren't *using* reliable sources.
Sometimes a memory can be a reliable source; it just can't be verified. What can be more frustrating than to have been at an event 35 years and know that the citations are dead wrong because they relied on contemporary newspaper clippings from publications that were openly hostile to the event when it happened. This often leaves us with sterile articles that ignore the zeitgeiss of the event. There is a level beyond which the demand for sources becomes counterproductive.
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