[bawolff]

And that's a good thing.

Wikipedia prioritizes verifiability over completeness. Are there downsides to that trade-off? Absolutely. But i would rather that over trusting random people on the internet to know what they are talking about.

[dragonwriter]

Note that Wikipedia has this policy focussed on being a tertiary source; Wikiversity, another Wikimedia project, welcomes original research.

A lot of what people complain about Wikipedia ruling out is in scope for either Wikiversity or Wikibooks; it's not a “we don't want that” issue but a “we have structure, and within that structure there is a better place for that”.

[bawolff]

Yeah, but realistically wikiversity doesn't have much to show for it.

[dragonwriter]

> Yeah, but realistically wikiversity doesn’t have much to show for it.

Because people don’t really want a public wiki to publish original research, they just want to vandalize Wikipedia because of its social impact and use their claims of personal expertise as an excuse to evade Wikipedia’s existing content policies.

[eternityforest]

It's sad that wikibooks and Wikipedia have almost nothing interesting that's complete.

[bawolff]

Wikipedia and wikibooks have plenty of interesting things. Wikiversity less so.

[eternityforest]

Oops, I meant wikibooks and Wikipedia.

Wikibooks has a few things, but almost nothing seems actually complete and hardly anyone seems to work on in, compared to Wikipedia

[jakemauer]

I didn't know about Wikiversity, thanks for sharing.

[throwawaylinux]

You really think a self-proclaimed expert coconut picker would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies about their alleged profession?

[saghm]

No, but I definitely think people would lie about being an expert coconut picker, and I think the number of trolls on the internet who would find it funny to try to get false information into articles vastly outnumbers the number of coconut picker experts who don't have any way to verify their credentials.

[mardifoufs]

Yeah while I don't personally like the extreme over reliance on just secondary sources to the point where it leads to driving out actual experts, I can't imagine how bad it would be with just even less strict sourcing rules in general. Actually I can, that was pretty much wikipedia until the big clean ups that happened at the end of the last decade and I'm glad we are past that... interesting early stage.