While I think you might be on the right track with respect to Wikipedia, this wouldn’t really work in casual (or even scholarly) discourse. There are a lot of things of which I’m confident and don’t have an immediately available justification, and tracking them down would be so time-consuming that I just wouldn’t bother to comment on anything.
Also, there is a disanalogy between Wikipedia and other kinds of scholarship; Wikipedia does not allow original research, in which the appropriate citation for a claim might be the preceding argument, and so should not be explicitly stated.
There are two cases where argument from authority is still clearly fallacious:
respecting the authority of someone who is not an expert in the appropriate field—for instance, taking the Pope’s word on evolutionary biology
regarding the authority as itself what gives truth to the claim—This happens, for instance, when one makes appeals to one’s own authority. If someone asks me for a citation and I say “I’m an expert, and I say so” then that’s insufficient.
P.S. You should change that URL to a link so MarkDown doesn’t eat it.
While I think you might be on the right track with respect to Wikipedia, this wouldn’t really work in casual (or even scholarly) discourse. There are a lot of things of which I’m confident and don’t have an immediately available justification, and tracking them down would be so time-consuming that I just wouldn’t bother to comment on anything.
Also, there is a disanalogy between Wikipedia and other kinds of scholarship; Wikipedia does not allow original research, in which the appropriate citation for a claim might be the preceding argument, and so should not be explicitly stated.
There are two cases where argument from authority is still clearly fallacious:
respecting the authority of someone who is not an expert in the appropriate field—for instance, taking the Pope’s word on evolutionary biology
regarding the authority as itself what gives truth to the claim—This happens, for instance, when one makes appeals to one’s own authority. If someone asks me for a citation and I say “I’m an expert, and I say so” then that’s insufficient.
P.S. You should change that URL to a link so MarkDown doesn’t eat it.