Bryan Derksen wrote:
Todd Allen wrote:
"It's damn near impossible to write
objectively about yourself or
something you have a vested interest in promoting" has a lot higher
certainty than 90%. I'd put it somewhere around 99.999%, and even that's
generous, that's saying 1 in 100,000 people could do it.
Highly implausible. Wikipedia has 4,300,000 registered accounts
(probably fewer individual users since a lot might be sock puppets or
throwaways, but this also doesn't count anons so call it an order of
magnitude estimate). So you're suggesting that, on average, there have
only ever been 43 registered users in the history of Wikipedia who have
been capable of writing "objectively about themselves or something they
have a vested interest in promoting?" That's _generous_? I think you've
got an overly pessimistic view of our contributors and would like to
know how you arrived at that figure.
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For one, we're talking about primary sources, not necessarily Wikipedia
editors. If a (band/company/etc.) sets up a website, chances are that
website will be specifically intended to promote them. I don't blame
people for that-if I had a company and set up a website for it, you bet
it would be promotional! But that information isn't accurate or
complete. If you could get honest, unbiased, neutral information from
companies, Consumer Reports wouldn't have a single subscriber, and the
Better Business Bureau would be, well, out of business.
Aside from that, it's simple human nature, when describing oneself or
something one has an interest in, to accentuate the good and gloss over
the bad. If that weren't the case, we wouldn't have a conflict of
interest guideline. But that guideline, and indeed NPOV, are useless, if
we're just going to use self-published sources without demanding
independent verification.
So, like I said, I think 1 in 100,000 is conservative. I doubt one in a
million people could write fairly in the presence of a conflict of
interest, and much self-published material isn't even -intended- to be
neutral, at that. (At the very least, the previous figure of 90%,
presuming that 1 in 10 people can write neutrally and objectively on
themself or something they have a vested interest in, is pretty
unquestionably overly generous.) Even if we presume I'm pessimistic, and
it's 1 in 10,000 or even 1 in 1,000, that makes it a totally unreliable
source.
For that matter, presume 90% is right! If that's the case, 1 out of
every 10 self-published sources is accurate and neutral. Well...I don't
know about you, but I wouldn't consider a source that gets it wrong 9
out of 10 times to be reliable. Self-published sources are not, then,
reliable verification (even by the 90% metric), and so articles that
rely solely or mainly on them fail verifiability (and likely NPOV as
well.) And I stand by my assertion that the reality is far less than 1
in 10.