This, I think, is one of the biggest dogmas Wikipedia "should" be able to fight. Let me explain. The best thing about wikipedia is that anyone can contrib. You don't have to be some prof or have published a book on the subject to be able to write about it. I remember writing something on wikipedia which was immediately contested because i didn't provide reference. But why on earth should i? It seems as if you can declare that the moon is blue, as long as you reference it. My grouch against this is that everyone is human (well, mostly) and even some super prof can make mistakes. On the other hand, having lots of people contributing makes more sense. Without getting into the finer details of Epistemology, to me it makes more sense to have a document stating what the majority of people believe, rather than the academic ramblings of some hermit-like professor....
To get beck to my example, basically i was writing about a book. This book contains lots of symbolic elements in it. I was trying to list and define what the elements represented. Now, my contributions were removed because i couldn't reference them. But the book is very new, and no one has written anything about it yet. So what am i suppose to do? wait for someone else to write a printed book on it, and then copy his ideas??
I remember writing essays at university, and when referencing i would always think: just because this prof has written hundreds of books on the subject, it seems anything he says is sacred truth, but what if he's wrong?
