wikipedia Only Reports What The Sources Say

This is an essay on the Wikipedia verifiability policy. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wiki's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

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Wikipedia only reports what those sources say. Wikipedia has many different kinds of editors, with many different backgrounds. Even if an editor is sure they know the truth, another editor might note that sources point to a different truth.

Thus it makes sense for all editors to admit their own fallibility when they assert that they "know" something to be true. Don't report what you know (or think you know), but what the sources tell us.

Josh Billings was an American humorist of the nineteenth century. An aphorism he's known by is the following:

It ain't ignorance causes so much trouble; it's folks knowing so much that ain't so.

— Tom W. Cowan, Acounting Review, "Are Truth and Fairness Generally Acceptable?"

It is also sometimes cited as "The trouble ain't what people don't know, it's what they know that ain't so."

Benjamin Franklin in a speech in Philadelphia before the Constitutional Convention of 1787 also stated:

It is therefore that, the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment of others. Most men, indeed, as well as most sects in religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them, it is so far error.

...

On the whole, sir, I can not help expressing a wish that every member of the convention who may still have objections to it, would, with me, on this occasion, doubt a little of his own infallibility, and, to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.

Franklin's words on his fallibility to the Constitution Convention should hold the same standard as a Wikipedia editor as this project moves beyond its twentieth year.