[WikiEN-l] Verifiability

Fri Dec 16 01:13:28 UTC 2005

I quite agree, see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Wilkes 
%2C_Wyss_and_Onefortyone/Proposed_decision#Sources_for_popular_culture

There are different ways of working, I follow your way too. But I  
don't argue when someone who has done research contradicts me.

Fred

On Dec 15, 2005, at 8:05 AM, Steve Bennett wrote:

>> 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
>
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