[WikiEN-l] Verifiability

Thu Dec 15 21:02:24 UTC 2005

Steve Bennett wrote:

> 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.

I sometimes write something off the top of my head then Google for any
tolerable reference that'll do for the moment ;-)

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

Some sort of referencing should be possible. For TV or movie synopses,
the text itself as an implicit reference is obvious and sufficient, for
example.

> 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.

If there's nothing else, that's fine again IMO. Any usable reference is
better than none.

(Though that's not to say that really crappy references will do just
because they're on the net somewhere. One has to use that thing called
"editorial judgement.")

- d.