James and Stewart James: "The whole point of a Wiki is that it is essentially self-managing, although one of the interesting things about familysearch is that it's a wiki with an invisible big brother overseeing it, which does set rules on some things, even if they're hidden in the algorithms employed e.g. for identifying possible duplicates." Being self-managing is not part of what what makes something a wiki. There are many wikis which are moderated and have oversight from individuals or committees. I have no idea how many wikis exist but many are within private companies etc. (Maybe of interest: On wikipedia itself, in its sourcing policy, a distinction is made between moderated and non-moderated wikis and online collaborations. Non moderated wikis such as wikipedia itself are not considered reliable sources according to wikipedia editing policy. The aim of wikipedia is to collect and present information that was checked and published. As part of that aim, also, the policy is clear that the sources should be named: "say where you got it".) You are also still insisting on using the word wiki to mean any online collaboration, and honestly this is going to confuse the issues, because I think most people do not use the term this way. Ironically the way you are using the term makes it very difficult to see how the Henry project is not a wiki though, making Stewart's absolutism about "all" wikis being bad all the more difficult to justify. Presumably you and Stewart are seeing the distinction has having to do with scale. But again, scale is obviously not part of what makes something a wiki. In my opinion Stewart's position on larger scale online collaboration boils down to this: "In my opinion, it is unlikely that the second route will ever lead to anything better than "not quite as bad as it used to be." Even if it were possible (which would require a method that corrects errors faster than they are being introduced), the labor involved in cleaning up these messes would be much more than just starting from scratch." In other words Stewart accepts that large scale collaborations possibly get slowly better sometimes but insists that he is sure that worsening edits will always inevitably come faster overall. I have pointed out that this is a statement which can be tested against reality, but the only empirical evidence being given to "prove" the statement is a static observation of bad articles on wikis. On wikitree, just to take that example again, I have not seen any article that anyone worked on properly ever revert or worsen in any significant way, at least since editing in the medieval sections was changed. If that observation holds, then Stewart's model of how large scale wikis inevitably have to be fails, because his model is basically stating that this can absolutely never be true. In other words I am saying that if you fix 10 articles on wikitree they will almost certainly remain fixed as far as I have seen, at least for pre-1500 articles. None of this is intended to accept the opposite argument that we might as well all work on large scale collaboration because these are inevitably the future. Small focused collaborations can achieve things more quickly, and with far more attention to quality from the first moment. As people get more used to the idea that a quality publication does not need to be paper, some online collaborations are increasingly seen as equivalent to quality publications on paper. (Whereas largescale wikis typically see themselves as places to collect and collate information from more focused but un-linked sources.) And just to make it clear, fixing an article also means making sure it has proper sourcing. I have never heard an argument against that. I find the comments on why sourcing is important in this discussion pretty weak to be honest. Sourcing is important not because people "own" facts, and that they can be "stolen". This seems a misapplication of a legal term. Owning and stealing are defined in written laws, that can be changed by politicians, and vary between countries. I do get the point that some bad people on the internet have no respect for what is important, and we want to use words that show we feel strongly, but I am not sure this helps us make the world better. I have no problem with "pride in work", but it is more a description of why we find quality generally important in the first place, a comment on human nature, not why sourcing is itself part of quality. I believe that if we are talking about why sourcing is important for quality in good writing of articles about most things, perhaps especially genealogy, it is because a good article should distinguish what is known from primary sources, and what has been suggested by secondary sources including ourselves. If we do not set-out where we got our information, mistakes will multiply. That is why I believe the standardized formatting for any lasting online collaboration for good medieval genealogy will (like the Henry project) include a policy on how to set-out and explain the sources, and indeed the debates possible about them. I think it is a point not often enough made that in some way genealogy is a sort of predecessor to the internet. Before internet genealogy existed, and even going back to the 19th century, the dangers (and perhaps some benefits) of massive uncontrolled "copy paste" information dispersal were shown in genealogy. No wonder that the internet quickly attracted genealogists, and genealogy quickly became one of the main things done on the internet. Best Regards Andrew