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

[Delirium]

Philip Sandifer wrote:
> On Apr 10, 2008, at 1:48 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
>   
>> A sad case in point being the scientologist driven campaign to shut  
>> down
>> The anon.penet.fi server. The Observer was spoofed by them into  
>> reporting
>> that 90% of child porn on the internet is trafficed by the server.  
>> Even though
>> The Observers own readers wrote in in huge volume that that was quite
>> preposterous, espescially as Julf had put severe restrictions on the  
>> size
>> of emails that could be sent through penet, and yet, The Observer  
>> never
>> admitted it had erred, but merely pedaled down the story by noting  
>> that
>> "Johan Helsingius had consistently denied the allegations." Which is a
>> very poor form of apology for getting the story wrong.
>>     
>
>
> To my mind, this settles the issue. There are clearly instances where  
> accuracy and truth are pre-requisites for material. We simply do not  
> report absurd slanders like this. Anybody who does not understand this  
> should find a different project.
>   
That still leads us to the initial question---how do we determine 
accuracy and truth? Generally, we determine it by consulting and citing 
sources, rather than doing original research ourselves. For example, if 
through consulting archival documents I determine that the standard 
attribution of some ancient Greek poet to the 4th century BC is actually 
incorrect, and the truth is that he lived in the 2nd century BC, it 
would still be appropriate for Wikipedia to report that he lived in the 
4th century BC, unless I get my new estimate published in a classics 
journal first.

The problem with this seems to arise mainly with recent things where 
good sources don't actually exist. In that case, I'd argue it's not an 
issue of us doing insufficient original research, but of placing too 
much trust in marginally reliable sources. A single report in a 
newspaper is only a very marginally reliable source, so if a 
particularly surprising allegation has only the support of one newspaper 
article, maybe we shouldn't report it at all, unless it itself becomes a 
newsworthy allegation where other sources start reporting on the 
controversy, or is corroborated by other sources.

This is distinguished from sources like a full-length biography of a 
person written by a respected author---especially in the case where a 
person has multiple full-length biographies available, I would argue 
that the article *must* always be based exclusively on such sources, not 
on a Wikipedian's original research into "accuracy and truth". But where 
no such sources exist, some judgment in excluding probably-wrong 
allegations with marginal sourcing can work.

-Mark