Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Fri, 9 Nov 2007 04:19:47 -0500, "John Lee" johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
Wait, we have a rule saying only English sources are acceptable now? Or do you just mean that an article should never rely on non-English sources alone?
I don't think it's unreasonable that on the *English* Wikipedia, the English-speaking community should be able to verify at least the core facts.
I do. There are plenty of subject areas we cover where non-expert readers can't verify the core facts and have to rely on experts to "translate" them into plain English. I'm that way on many esoteric mathematics topics, for example; if I come to an article that describes some intricate aspect of tensor matrix whachamacallits and all of the references are to journal articles that make my head spin, I trust that out there among our thousands of editors are a couple of mathematicians who are capable of understanding that stuff and verifying the article's statements for me.
Same goes for foreign languages. I'm not fluent in any but I know there are plenty of English/Foreign bilingual editors around who can do the verification for me. In many cases I can even fall back on Babelfish to give me a vague idea of what the sources are saying, something I can't do for mathematics.
I did do a Google search for English-language coverage and all I could find that was usable was this: http://www.freemedia.at/cms/ipi/freedom_detail.html?country=/KW0001/KW0002/K...
So that means Wikipedia is the largest and most complete English-language source of information available about this newspaper? Woohoo! Why is this a bad thing?
IMO, "non-notable" subjects are an area where Wikipedia can really excel. Every encyclopedia worth its salt is going to have a big, comprehensive article summarizing General Relativity or the American Civil War, but only Wikipedia has the resources to have comprehensive articles about every wee town or minor band or whatnot. As long as our policies are met - verifiability, NOR, NPOV - this is a good thing. With the ever-more-imminent introduction of version flagging it'll become even easier to maintain these small topics.