"Daniel P. B. Smith" wrote
a) Most of the unreferenced material in Wikipedia is
accurate. What
do I mean by "most?" 90%? 95%? 99%? Something like that.
My thinking has shifted a bit after three years at the coal face. Strange errors do get
in. And, as one of the world's great historians of science convinced me, the
historical truth is just about always stranger than you'd imagine.
But I say citation practices should go 'horses for courses'. The 'course'
is per topic area, not per article, naturally.
c) Everything in Wikipedia should eventually be
referenced or
removed.
Nah. There's even an interesting reason, which is that with exponential growth the
boundary (wild wiki frontier) is always of size very significantly large with respect to
the central 'core' of must-have articles. What we actually need is a _targeted
drive_ to bring up the quality of the core articles, and that must include fact-checking
and all the other good things. Tagging just everything creates work, and implies work only
likely to be done sporadically.
Wikipedia has been on a billion-second spree (roughly). What is needed is a kind of
kneading or churning motion where editors don't just follow the ribbon development.
Charles
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