[WikiEN-l] Re: Anti-scientific bias has me hopping mad!

Wed Oct 8 20:32:34 UTC 2003

Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:

> [...]
>
> Almost all of Wikipedia is unsourced! If
>you have a question about the source, just ask whoever
>wrote it. That way, they will be a lot quicker to
>respond. I almost never watch articles I write, and if
>someone took off some of my content because it's
>"unsourced", there's little chance I'd go back and
>find it and write the source. If we say that all of
>wikipedia must be sourced, it would be very
>detrimental to the project.
>
For pop culture and trivia, sources don't matter that much, but a
an article without a list of references cannot be taken seriously.
Check out the fine print at the end of Britannica articles, they
are usually quite thorough; Wikipedia should be aspiring to the
same level of quality.

>A Google search will
>almost always find some reference supporting any fact
>in Wikipedia, so long as it isn't made up (if they're
>"wrong" or it's a minority view or something, then it
>should still be preserved). The only time this doesn't
>work is for obscure historical or local stuff.
>
Don't be too trusting of Google - it can only tell you about the
info that somebody went to the trouble of putting into a web page.
I've been comparing Google results with books from the library lately,
and there is a lot of encyclopedic information that is simply not
online, or not being indexed. For instance, most US Navy ships
are well-documented online because the US govt wrote them all
up and made the info PD, so it's been cloned on web pages all
over, while there is little online info for the once-enormous
fleets of Great Britain and France, even though there is plenty
of raw data in the respective governments' archives.

Stan