I'm afraid that sources like the Brittanica are not free of this. Tim . . .
Thursday, January 25, 2007, 9:38:50 PM, George wrote:
Here's the problem. Academic rigor - which I
understand, having done
refereed papers for conferences and such - is all fine and good for
scholarly original research papers.
For an encyclopedia, the vast bulk of what we're
trying to do is to
simply convey the top level survey of a field to the general public.
You are arguing that for an encyclopedia, unlike for the academia,
reliability and fact-checking are not important.
The academic rigor exists not just due to their elitism: that's how
the Academia mentains their high standards of its publications.
From my experience on Wikipedia, unsourced articles are very unreliable
and may have plenty of wrong facts. Most of thse wrong facts are not
added due to malice (though that is not uncommon), but they were
added by people either from their (inevitable unreliable) memories,
from blogs and forums, which, on average have an awful lack of
accuracy or they are simply misinterpretations.
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