[WikiEN-l] Verifiability

Thu Dec 15 15:05:46 UTC 2005

> When I do serious editing I am usually working from a book or  
> newspaper article and I have the reference at hand. It would 
> often be  
> very hard for someone else to find that passage just going from  
> whatever I put into a Wikipedia article. So it is easy to put in  
> exact references.

I, by contrast, almost never do such editing, and often work with
articles of low quality (eg, in the fields of skiing, snowboarding, rock
climbing, computer games...).  There is often a lot that can be done to
improve the article by restructing, rewriting, removing POV or adding
snippets of general information - even with limited or no knowledge of
the subject.  People like me would probably throw their hands in the air
and stop working overnight if required to find references for
everything.

The thing is, for many people, editing is *fun*. I actually honestly
gain pleasure from taking an unstructured 1000 word article and turning
it into a 500 word structured one. Finding references is *work*. If you
know something to be true, to find a reputable refernce to back you up
is simply hard work in many cases.  "no original research" says that if
something is true, it should be easy to find a reputable reference -
well, it isn't always.

There really should be different sourcing guidelines for different
fields in Wikipedia - popular culture is just "different" to history,
science or geography.

I also suspect that a guideline could say somewhere that if it's
possible to verify something on google, then that may be good enough in
some circumstances.  As opposed to making a claim that cannot be
verified even by someone searching the entire internet.

Steve