On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 2:59 PM, SlimVirgin slimvirgin@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