[WikiEN-l] Verifiability

Thu Dec 15 21:07:12 UTC 2005

steven l. rubenstein wrote:

> I believe that Verifiability and No original research are two policies
> essential to the future of the project, which is to produce a
> high-quality encyclopedia.  If other encyclopedias are not rigorous on
> these matters, it is because their articles are generally written by
> PhD.s or graduate students, and are peer-reviewed.  I do not want our
> articles to have to be written by PhD.s or go through mandated and
> rigorous peer-review.  Therefore, I think these two policies are
> necessary.  And hand-in-hand with them, our Cite sources guideline is
> just as important.

It's particularly important for Wikipedia because the articles may have
hundreds of authors. Since all the reader has is the text, having
references right there is *really* important for us.

> Specifically, it is our articles that must comply with these standards. 
> This I think is important for one simple reason that gets at the heart
> of our project: it is a collaborative work in process.
> If Wikipedia is as I believe it is and ought to be a collaborative work
> in process, then our policies are ideals to which we expect our articles
> to aspire, but no one editor can bear the full responsibility of
> achieving this.

Precisely.

> That said, I also insist on the corollary: our collaborative process
> should be dedicated to producing articles based on verifiable sources. 
> A collective process requires a collective commitment.

Yep. It's hard to enforce this with policy; we need to make it a
cultural expectation.

- d.