[WikiEN-l] History of "Verifiability, not truth"

[Todd Allen]

On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 10:13 AM, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been working on figuring out the history of this bit of wording,
>  since it's, on the surface, transparently untrue (we, in fact, do want
>  to provide truth as well - not necessarily big-T absolute truth, but
>  certainly the little-t truth that is a synonym for "accuracy" - i.e.
>  the word as normal people use it).
>
>  Originally, WP: V explicitly called for accuracy: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Verifiability&oldid=1230684
>  . The term was removed in a language tweak in 2005. The phrase
>  "verifiability, not truth" came from a draft revision of WP:NOR in
>  December of 2004.
>
>  As far as I can tell, there has *never* been a consensus discussion of
>  the phrasing "verifiability, not truth," nor was there a discussion
>  about removing the statement that Wikipedia strives to be accurate
>  from WP:V. These changes were inserted, albeit years ago, without
>  discussion, and long-standing principles were pushed to the side and
>  minimized in favor of increasingly context-free restatements of the
>  changes. But I cannot find *any* evidence that the position "accuracy
>  is not a primary goal of Wikipedia" has ever garnered consensus.
>
>  Is anyone aware of a discussion to this end that I am not? Is there
>  actually a point where we clearly and deliberately decided that the
>  goal of Wikipedia is not accuracy?
>
>  -Phil
>
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You're asking to open up a huge can of worms with anything else. "Well
I know the source says that, but you see, I know it's not actually
true, so I can still edit war over putting it in the article even
though I've got no sourcing that says otherwise." We're a tertiary
source, we mirror sources, not second-guess them. If a source made an
error, find a better or more recent source that disagrees with them,
or ask them to correct. Many will, and that has the benefit of
correcting the erroneous source as well! If they refuse to correct
despite having an obvious and glaring error, inform their competitors
instead.

-- 
Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.