&gt; “The point is, basically, that Wikiepdia is not bad,” Evans added, “But it needs to meet its own standard for verifiability.”<p>But published books and journal articles <i>do</i> meet the Wikipedia verifiability criterion, even if they are not accessible online at no cost.<p>To make those books get a low &quot;verifiability score&quot; seems like a bad idea to me. For quite a a few topics, it is still the case that the information you can find by just googling a topic is a lot worse than what is published on paper. (I know this from trying to track down online sources for various things I read about on Wikipedia...)