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I beg to differ. This about says it all:

OK, I opened the door, so I'm going to allow the followup.

I didn't say Wikipedia was perfect. I said "They do good work".

This is important: Wikipedia gives people who were actually there the chance to publish first-hand information about subjects that they actually were involved in creating or changing. Having access to the people who _made_ the history is a privilege that only the Internet could provide, and Wikipedia is a major vehicle for carrying this important work forward.

It is, of course, only part of the picture. Any historian or biographer will tell you that people's memories are imperfect and that we'll all prone to spin our recollection of events. Wikipedia gives a wide audience the ability to correct others' accounts of events in a way that improves the accuracy of the record.

It's not perfect: Nothing is. If you had the choice of _asking_ Jimmy Carter why he didn't mention "Bedtime for Bonzo" in the debates with Reagan, or reading notes from someone who was in a meeting at the time, years after his/her death, which would you choose?

Bill Horne Moderator

On Nov 24, 3:03 pm

I agree, they do good work, all things considered.

Yes, since it is user contributed, errors of fact and omission do creep in and some of them are maliciously planted. It is not a resource I would depend on to decide whether or not to have ... surgery.

But it is a good resource for background or miscellaneous information and the footnotes allow for further research.

I plan to contribute.

Then it permits idiots who weren't there to completely rewrite what they said and replace valuable information on actual physics with references to comic book characters.

--scott

On Thu, 24 Nov 2011 12:03:39 -0800, John David Galt said, in Message-ID: :

No, Wikipedia is not a place for first-hand information or original research. It is a place for referencing, summarizing, and curating information that is already available, either in print, online, or elsewhere. It has sister projects, such as the Wikimedia commons and Wikisource, where source documents can be posted. See

No Original Research is one of the core policies of Wikipedia:

Wikipedia articles must not contain original research. The term "original research" (OR) is used on Wikipedia to refer to material, such as facts, allegations, and ideas, for which no reliable, published source exists.[1] This includes any analysis or synthesis of published material that serves to advance a position not advanced by the sources. To demonstrate that you are not adding OR, you must be able to cite reliable, published sources that are directly related to the topic of the article, and directly support the material as presented.

The prohibition against OR means that all material added to articles must be attributable to a reliable published source, even if not actually attributed.[1] The verifiability policy says that an inline citation to a reliable source must be provided for all quotations, and for anything challenged or likely to be challenged, but a source must exist even for material that is never challenged. That "Paris is the capital of France" needs no source, because no one is likely to object to it and we know that sources exist for it. The statement is attributable, even if not attributed.

-- Michael D. Sullivan Bethesda, MD

My point, which I didn't express very well, is that /primary/ sources are available to confirm or deny what is published, and even if a "non fact" has appeared in a dozen other publication, Wikipedia has a feedback mechanism that allows for corrections from those who have more accurate information.

I'm closing this thread after today: this is a subject for another forum. I still think they do good work, but everyone has to make up their own mind about that.

Bill Horne Moderator