"One (and not the most important) pieces of evidence for Wikipedia being in
a failed state is precisely that
it does not, by the community's own admission, constitute a reliable source
"
You have made this argument more than once. That might be a piece of
evidence seems both wrong and not relevant to the sense in which people
here as saying WP has failed, which is as a welcoming, "safe" environment
for contributors and would-be contributors.
It is good policy to make sure that contributors reach out to other
sources, even when one believes that Wikipedia is as reliable as the
average tertiary source we allow as a reference. It prevents us from
relying exclusively on what can easily turn out to be a very narrow set of
points of view. Does/did the Encyclopedia Britanica cite other EB articles
as references rather than include them as "see alsos"?
On Mon, Jun 17, 2019 at 8:27 AM Mister Thrapostibongles <
thrapostibongles(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Vito
This rather tends to support my point. One (and not the most important)
pieces of evidence for Wikipedia being in a failed state is precisely that
it does not , by the community's own admission, constitute a reliable
source:whereas "Reputable tertiary sources
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:TERTIARY>, such as
introductory-level university textbooks, almanacs, and encyclopedias, may
be cited". So Wikipedia fails in its aim of being an encyclopaedia on one
of the most important tests one could imagine, namely reliability. And a
reason for that is its lack of effective content management policies and
mechanisms to put them into effect (in the old days we called that being an
editor, but that word on Wikipedia now is more or less a redundant synonym
for contributor).
Now suppose that Wikipedia had effective editorial policies and processes
that allowed it to assume the status of a reliable source, just like the
encyclopaedia it aims to be. You say that even in that situation, it would
be easy to manipulate. On that assumption, how much easier it must be to
"trick" it today when it has no such effective policies and processes in
place!
Thrapostibongles
--
Dennis C. During