On 4/7/08, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Indeed. We are useful. And I am hard pressed to believe that if you asked a random, non-wonk user if our usefulness to them was based on the fact that we are generally accurate, the answer would be "yes" almost all of the time. To dismiss accuracy as some philosophical technicality is to deny the reality of why people look things up in encyclopedias. -Phil

On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 1:43 AM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: I think you have an excellent point here, and this brings us back to the previous point: Which one of us decides what is accurate? Why should any of us be doing that? In the absence of a different source offering a counterargument, what you are left with is "This is wrong because I say so," and allowing that is simply not sustainable, especially for contentious areas. Rather, we simply say "Source X says Statement Y", cite Source X, and leave it to the reader to research and decide what to believe about Statement Y. Citation and attribution are the keys. -Regardless of the truth of Statement Y itself-, so long as Source X really did say Statement Y, that line is both accurate and verifiable. We are not and should not be making judgments as to the validity of the claim, simply reporting that it was made. Or to put it more simply, if the New York Times reports that the moon is a large pink beach ball, it is both accurate and verifiable to say "According to the New York Times, the moon is a large pink beach ball." The Times' hypothetical claim is ludicrous, but our statement that they said so is simple fact. And it is left to the reader to believe or not believe the claim, we are simply and accurately reporting that it was said and who said so. -- Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.

On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 5:37 PM, Carl Beckhorn <cbeckhorn(a)fastmail.fm> wrote: No, we should write our policies to deal with this dysfunctional situation when it arises. Which it tends to do independent of what policy says. RR

There are two classes of such meta-sources. within the world of primary scientific journals, there is citation. worthless articles are not cited. Of course the notable wrong ones are, but thats a very small percentage of the nonsense. the test of acadeic acceptance is not publication, but citation. and there is the other one that applies for all subjects: the judgment of reputable secondary and tertiary sources. that usually makes it unnecessary to go to citations of primary articles as a way of establishing reliability. This is really the basic presupposition for RS, and it remains valid. The determination that a source is "reliable" just -- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 9:29 AM, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote: Then those books will be reviewed saying as much, and indicating how far they are representative of scholarly consensus, which is information that we can incorporate if necessary. RR

On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 4:40 PM, Brian Salter-Duke <b_duke(a)bigpond.net.au> wrote: You are, of course, quite correct, and my extreme hypothetical example rightly should be treated exactly that way if it ever were to happen. (Though it would make a fine source for [[New York Times pink beach ball report]].) It certainly should be removed as an extreme fringe viewpoint in [[Moon]]. But in this case, there are no problems showing that other credible sources overwhelmingly do not agree. In real-life cases, examples are often murkier, where credible sources may legitimately disagree. In this case, we present verifiable opinion by stating who says what, without attempting to "take a side" in any way. If one view is minority or less reliable, we certainly should reflect this (and NPOV requires this). But V does not affect that requirement. We still mirror sources, we don't second-guess them. If the overwhelming majority of sources say something, NPOV indicates we must present that as the majority view. That's nothing new, that's always been there. But if the sources say something, nothing reliable disagrees, and you say "Well, but I -know- that's not correct...", then you are not a reliable source. Write your own source or ask them to correct. -- Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.

On 09/04/2008, Matthew Brown <morven(a)gmail.com> wrote: Note that this has been a problem - BLPs with information from one bad source that got copied around the world, and the subject unable to get it removed from Wikipedia because of bloody-minded editors who think sourcing must be done robotically. - d.

Matthew Brown wrote: I wonder if they'd be willing to "publish" a denial with us if we had some mechanism for doing so? We could have some sort of way for them to register a denial or disagreement or clarification, which we'd cite in the article. I don't see this as much of an increase in original research---We consider notable people's blogs reliable sources on their personal views, and it seems like saying "just register your disagreement here and we'll cite it" isn't any worse than the more roundabout "okay, start a blog, then post your disagreement there, and then we'll cite that". Of course, that still leaves the other problem of editorially judging of noteworthiness---do we report the allegation along with a denial, or not report it at all once we determine it to be false? This depends on the noteworthiness of the allegation of course (something that was a big furor for months /has/ to be reported; something alleged once in a semi-rag paper shouldn't be), but people disagree on the threshhold. -Mark