Gwern Branwen wrote: > I see a lot of mindless fetishism > of sourcing here, Oh, and "mindless fetishsim" about content, too. Let's remember that there is a definite mission, which is to write a reference work. It is not a new idea that encyclopedic works should cite their sources. > but suppose Cunctator resurrected an article and > stuck in a random newspaper article for the claim 'Foo was married in > 1967.' Nobody disputed that before; nobody disputed that after; no new > information was added. How *exactly* is the article better? It is different. It is certainly not worse. The information about where to find the information has been added. There is a certain 'presentism' about the argument, even though you've chosen a date before most Wikipedians were born. It is (a) not obvious that information about marriages is undisputed (one of my problem BLPs had just this issue about whether someone was a wife or not, and (b) not obvious that you can always find a published source for births, deaths and marriages.
> Is it > better because some hypothetical viewer might one day go, hm, I wonder > if he really was married in 1967, and will look at the cite and be > relieved? > > Speaking from personal experience on the _Evangelion_ articles: I have > on multiple occasions spent hours or weeks tracking down some fact > widely accepted amongst Eva fans & academic commentators to its > original source and found it. And then felt a sick hollow feeling as > I realize that all I have done is waste my life satisfying RS > standards, when the fans and professors knew it all along because they > trust each other and their forebears and can see for themselves the > consilience of all those commonly accepted facts. > So you have made available to 300 million-odd readers of Wikipedia facts that were available to the cognoscenti, now in a way that does not involve "trust". I would probably not spend time in such quantities fact-checking mathematics, where I have an idea of reputations in the first place; but I seem to be doing plenty of fact-checking right now in an area of history where I have little background and don't know whether the scholarship of what I'm working on is cast-iron. I believe scholars traditionally got these blues (as well as piles, perhaps not unconnected). Charles _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
