[WikiEN-l] Nuke [[WP:CITE]] and [[WP:RS]]

[Ray Saintonge]

Bogdan Giusca wrote:

>Thursday, January 25, 2007, 9:38:50 PM, George wrote:
>  
>
>>Here's the problem.  Academic rigor - which I understand, having done
>>refereed papers for conferences and such - is all fine and good for
>>scholarly original research papers.
>>    
>>
>>For an encyclopedia, the vast bulk of what we're trying to do is to
>>simply convey the top level survey of a field to the general public.
>>    
>>
>You are arguing that for an encyclopedia, unlike for the academia,
>reliability and fact-checking are not important.
>
You are overstating his case.

>The academic rigor exists not just due to their elitism: that's how
>the Academia mentains their high standards of its publications.
>
Academic rigor is a learned skill.  For some students it may take the 
better part of their freshman year to grasp the idea. Demanding this 
rigor on one's very first article attempt is akin to asking the its full 
extent on the first day of a freshman class.  New editors need to be 
sympathetically guided through the process rather than punished for not 
getting it right on the first try.

>From my experience on Wikipedia, unsourced articles are very unreliable
>and may have plenty of wrong facts. 
>
Some do; some don't.  Your anecdotal observation does nothing to 
establish how extensive this problem is.  If we are to adopt rigid rules 
about sourcing information should we not be equally rigid about applying 
scientific methods to measure accuracy?  Of course some articles have 
wrong facts; that's inevitable in a project this size, but don't delude 
yourself into believing that just because an article is sourced it will 
magically cease to include wrong facts.

>Most of thse wrong facts are not
>added due to malice (though that is not uncommon), but they were
>added by people either from their (inevitable unreliable) memories,
>from blogs and forums, which, on average have an awful lack of
>accuracy or they are simply misinterpretations.
>
Cited sources are just as susceptible to misinterpretation.

Ec