[WikiEN-l] Verifiability

Thu Dec 15 21:15:00 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.
>
If you're not changing any facts, then there's nothing to worry about,
go have fun. But how sure are you about that snippet of general
information you want to add? There have been a couple times where I
was *sure* about some claim, and yet it turned out my memory was
faulty. There were probably readers of the Seigenthaler article that
probably thought "hmm, didn't know he was implicated in the
assassination, but I remember seeing the name when reading about it
one time", and so it wouldn't occur to them to be suspicious of the
prankster's claim.

I actually enjoy tracking down the sources of facts, and many of my
edits are simply to add a reference or two. So if you do the
wordsmithing (which I tend to find tedious), and flag anything
that seems true but is unsourced, I'll come along later and see if
I can come up with something to cite.

Stan