On Wednesday 14 January 2004 04:58 pm, Ray Saintonge wrote:
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?
This is indeed a problem. I have begun, and plan to continue to in my edit box
summaries to indicate the source of the information I add to an article (if
that information is non-obvious). Which reminds me that it would be a good
idea to _require_ users to fill in the edit summary box.
What worries me every time is when I see an anon change numbers in wikipedia
without any edit summary. Eg. changing statistics on the population of
spanish speakers in California from (hypothetical) 15% to 40%. It is often
impossible to tell whether this is vandalism or a correction.
Best,
Sascha Noyes
--
Please encrypt all email. Public key available from
www.pantropy.net/snoyes.asc