[WikiEN-l] Citationgate: expertise and verifiability

Sat Sep 30 13:55:06 UTC 2006

"Daniel P. B. Smith" wrote

> I sometimes think that at least some people who object to citations  
> do so because what they really want is to _establish themselves as  
> authorities_ through social interaction with other page editors. That  
> is, they want their Wikipedian colleagues to recognize _them_ as  
> reliable sources, and agree that any fact inserted by  
> [[User:Pantomath]] does not need a citation because everyone agrees  
> that User:Pantomath knows everything.

That sort of thing is not the reason why I don't think that (to take a random sort of mathematical fact) the centre of a group being a subgroup doesn't merit a reference. I do think it would be clutter. I do think, also, that "if you know enough to ask the question, you know enough to answer it". If you understand what is at issue here, you can see that it is a reasonable statement with a quick proof. If not, looking at a book will presumably not help that much.

Also, I have to say that where I come from, priorities are different. Statements with undefined terms in are completely opaque. Therefore, getting pages up with definitions on is the way to increase well-founded knowledge. And until people know what is being talked about, they cannot possibly know whether they are on the right page, at all. This is a crunch issue. The Web contains huge numbers of technical papers with the latest stuff. What you want may be out there, but actually no one is polymathic enough to be able to grok it all. We do a pretty good job here of making technical literature accessible, and that access is more to do, in my view, with demystification of buzzwords, than by fact-checking zealotry. I'm all for purging errors, but not for referencing the bleeding obvious.

Charles

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