[WikiEN-l] Nuke [[WP:CITE]] and [[WP:RS]]

Sat Jan 27 23:31:13 UTC 2007

On 1/27/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > We are a tertiary resource.  If two Wikipedians used different sources
> > to arrive at the same place it makes no difference in the way that it
> > would for a secondary source.  Your argument is just strange.  It seems
> > to make the specific source more important than the information itself.
>
> I'm not making my point very well, sorry. I'll try again:
>
> *Citing* reliable sources isn't very important. What is important is
> *using* reliable sources.  When someone writes something from memory
> and doesn't cite a source, the problem isn't that they haven't cited a
> source, the problem is that they didn't use one.
>
> Citing sources is just the easiest way to confirm that reliable
> sources were used, it's not the important factor, it's just the way we
> confirm the important factor.
>
> Someone writing an article and expecting someone else to find the
> sources is wasting their time, as the person finding the sources will
> be doing all the work. The actual writing of an article is generally
> the easy part, it's finding the information with is difficult. The
> wiki concept is great at copyediting and making things easier to read,
> and that's the only bit a writer that doesn't cite sources does.
>
> Perhaps we should encourage people to start articles with just bullet
> point facts and let the people that don't like research take over from
> there. (Obviously, if someone wants to write the whole thing, no-one
> will stop them, but we should make it clear that just doing the
> research is useful work that can be done independently of the
> writing.)

I've talked before, about the possibility of an alternate free
encyclopedia, starting with the facts (a database, of fact + reference
+ context / connections), with full tracability of all data in the
encyclopedia.

Would be very useful to AI researchers, some of whom have done similar
things in training AI programs and the like, in addition to a useful
public project.

As I keep saying: Wikipedia is not, has not been, and should not
become that project.  If you want to fork off and do it, I'd
contribute, but I will fight / argue to the last breath to keep you
from turning Wikipedia into that project.  Even if it's a good idea to
do it, it's not the same as WP, and it's necessary to have a WP type
project in the world.

-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com