[WikiEN-l] Re: How much?

Wed Jan 14 21:58:15 UTC 2004

Sascha Noyes wrote:

>Attribution is always good.  I don't have a problem with the opinions of 
>others, if they are in any way founded on some evidence. What I do have a 
>problems with is people pushing unfounded opinions on others. By unfounded I 
>mean "making an assertion as to the truth of a proposition without giving any 
>evidence to support this assertion."  
>
I agree that being able to trace the source of information is important. 
 The problem is not just with "pushing" opinions; sometimes a simple 
innocuous statement is entered as though it were a fact.  It is not 
about a contentious issue, nor is it about something that people are 
likely to concern themselves.  Including such unfounded material can 
have a long term effect on the credibility of Wikipedia.

In [[Académie française]] there is the statement "a musician named 
Gourville, who named it the Académie française".  Another established 
contributor and I both independently looked for some kind of 
substantiation for this statement; neither of us was successful.  At the 
same time we did not find any information indicating that someone else 
was responsible for the name.  This particular piece of data was 
contributed by an anonymous contributor on December 31, 2002.  The last 
contribution of any sort by him was on April 12, 2003.  He may still be 
with us, and with a real identity, but I can't know that.

What do I know about 17th century musicians.  I found a contemporary 
Gourville who was in a position to exercise such influence, but no 
evidence to connect him with the issue.  Fact-checking is a painstaking 
and tedious process, and tracing the type of thing that I used as an 
example could take hours, and may require material that is not on the 
internet.  Wikipedia's credibility depends on it.  Everybody knows to 
expect bias in a hotly disputed topic like Israeli/Palestinian 
relations, and is on alert for that bias.  This is not so with obscure 
little details.  A credibility test for Wikipedia might be to take a 
random selection of obscure details and attempt to verify them, or at 
least find some source.  How well would we do?

Ec

>