The idea of "atomic" units of fact turns out to be really slippery. In the end you're just shifting consensus to questions about what things really are verifiab

The idea of "atomic" units of fact turns out to be really slippery. In the end you're just shifting consensus to questions about what things really are verifiable facts. And then, what is a valid statement you can build on those facts. Wittgenstein and Russell tried to build philosophical atomism and it fell apart. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein-atomism/#DisLogAto http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein-atomism/#DisL... You're making a common mistake, which is to think of Wikipedia as a collection of facts. It's a collection of verifiable statements from reliable sources, or reasonable summaries thereof. "Reliable" is a collective judgment call, and even "verifiable" can be tricky sometimes if it's not an online resource or if we're summarizing. So what you really want is a kind of source tracing. You want to know that when one statement is put into question, everything that followed from that statement is also questionable.