(Subject changed, since this is drifting from the original topic.)
On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 09:46:53PM -0500, WJhonson(a)aol.com wrote:
I don't see why you claim on the one hard that the
standards are lax, and
then you say "Encarta and Encyclopedia Brittanica".
You've lost me. Are you claiming that Brittanica is not a reliable source?
I would say it is an unsuitable source and we shouldn't be using it.
Imagine if I included a reference to Encarta in the next research paper
I write...
The standards for sources on BLPs are not lax imho,
they are stronger
than anything else. Perhaps if you made your point more clearly.
The standards are stronger in the sense that a higher percentage of
sentences have an inline citation attached, but the average quality of
those inline citations is often very low. The vast majority of citations
are to newspapers, new magazines, and online news and opinion sites,
while very few are to peer-reviewed publications.
We do not write BLP articles, in general, by starting with someone
else's explanatory framework and fleshing it out with some references.
Because that would require a pre-existing explanatory framework, which
will not develop until after the person's death.
Instead, we assemble a mishmash of random news stories into what we hope
is a coherent article. Or we write a coherent article and then go back
and source it from a mishmash of cherry-picked news stories.
This practice directly contradicts arguments that other articles cannot
be written by arranging an original synthesis of material from primary
sources. I don't accept "but some of those newspaper stories are
secondary sources" as a strong objection to my argument here.
My point is specifically primary versus secondary, not
any other point.
Dividing sources arbitrarily into primary/secondary ignores many of the
actual distinctions good researchers make between sources. For example,
we should not be debating whether a particular story in the New York
Times qualifies as a primary source or secondary source. Instead, we
should ask whether the type of analysis done by the New York Times is
appropriate for the sort of claim that we are making in the article.
- Carl