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@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@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@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@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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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