An element of our community which gives me hope, is that we are ready to
earnestly engage with any input, even the tendentious. This is getting a
bit repetitive, however, and as Martijn notes is not the best use of this
list.
On Mon, Jun 17, 2019 at 6:06 PM Martijn Hoekstra <martijnhoekstra(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Wikipedia itself can never be more reliable than the
sources it cites. If
it's allowed to cite itself, then there is no "bottom" to lean on, and its
quality would quickly drop.
That you conclude from that that wikipedia is unreliable and therefore
failed is IMO such a silly proposition, that I dont know whether you
seriously think this, in which case we should probably take this off list,
or that you're engaging in sophistry and using arguments you don't think
are reasonable in the first place.
On Mon, Jun 17, 2019, 19:56 Mister Thrapostibongles <
thrapostibongles(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Dennis,
I started this thread to discuss both conduct and content policies on
Wikipedia, and indeed how the two interact. Wikipedia is a project to
build an encyclopaedia. By its own criteria, encyclopaedias are reliable
sources and Wikipedia is not a reliable source; hence by its own
criteria,
Wikipedia is not an encyclopaedia. That is, it
is currently in a state
of
failure with respect to its own mission.
One of the reasons for that state of failure is indeed the failure to
provide a collegial working atmosphere.
Thrapostibongles
On Mon, Jun 17, 2019 at 2:19 PM Dennis During <dcduring(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> "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
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