"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@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