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

[Phil Sandifer]

On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 2:59 PM, SlimVirgin <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:


> There's a strong consensus that Wikipedia should publish only what
> reliable sources have already published on a topic, so that readers
> can check material for themselves. That is the key idea of the
> encyclopedia.
>
> Wikipedia is most useful as a resource in allowing readers to follow
> its leads. Readers don't swallow wholesale what it says. They look up
> what the Wikipedian has looked up, then they make up their own minds
> about the accuracy of it.
>
> We don't try to impose "the truth" on people, and we don't expect that
> they should trust anything just because they read it in Wikipedia. All
> we do is provide what we hope are the best and most appropriate
> sources, and a surrounding text that sums up what good sources are
> saying, in a way that we hope is readable and that makes readers want
> to know more. We enable them to inform themselves.
>
> That's the difference between us and, say, the Encyclopaedia
> Britannica. We empower readers. We don't ask for their blind trust.
>

None of this is equivalent to "we are not interested in accuracy" or
"accuracy is not a pre-requisite for inclusion." Nobody is seriously
suggesting that verifiability is *not* a requirement. What I'm trying to
figure out is whether anybody is seriously suggesting and/or whether a
consensus exists that accuracy is not *also* a requirement.

The changes in question to the policies were largely yours, albeit from
three years ago. Did you intend to eliminate accuracy as a requirement?
Accuracy was explicitly a requirement in WP:V even after you added the
phrase "not truth, but verifiability" in December of 2004 - accuracy was
explicitly policy until you changed it to "reliability" in August of 2005.

Did you intend to say that accuracy is not a requirement? If so, what made
you think there was consensus for this view?

-Phil