That was the original idea, I agree, but we've moved on from that. We long ago accepted that simply adding what you know doesn't work since there is no way for people to trust it. We now do require people source things, we just aren't very good at enforcing it (I believe it was Jimbo that said people shouldn't be tagging dubious statements with {{fact}}, they should just be removing them completely).
Exactly. The days of unsourced facts, much less articles, being okay to leave unchallenged is long over.
On Feb 1, 2008 4:20 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Good for you. When we update the site code to read "Edit this page if you have source material avaliable" instead of "edit this page" that will be a reasonable expectation to apply to others. The entire project, let's note, was built on people wandering by an adding a fact they happened to know, with the idea that mass untrained peer review would be good enough to get a working project. Citing sources is one of the ways we get to that point, but we have to remember: the project is designed to be editable by anyone in a casual and volunteer manner. We hurt ourselves if we expect everybody to have multiple sources on hand before they edit or create an article.
That was the original idea, I agree, but we've moved on from that. We long ago accepted that simply adding what you know doesn't work since there is no way for people to trust it. We now do require people source things, we just aren't very good at enforcing it (I believe it was Jimbo that said people shouldn't be tagging dubious statements with {{fact}}, they should just be removing them completely).
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