Todd Allen wrote:
-Primary source only articles tend to irreparably fail
NPOV.
This statement is remarkably shallow. Giving only the first side of the
story does not imply NPOV. Amazing as it may seem to some, there is no
obligation that every concept presented must have a disputable side. As
Freud is reputed to have said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
A band or
company's own site will and should promote that band or company (why
else would they have a site?)
Just because a company will and should do this does not in any way lead
to the logical conclusion that this is an exclusive obligation of their
web site. There is still much neutral information on a company's site.
A list of products that it produces, the members of the board of
directors, where its offices and branches are located, whether it has
issued recalls on any of its products, historical data about the
corporation, stock prices, ... There is no reason to believe that any
of these is necessarily included for the sole purpose of promotion.
But if that's all that's out there, and
we mirror that source (and we have to mirror sources, using our own
interpretations would just shift the problem to NOR instead), we have
nothing to print but marketing fluff.
Only if the corporate site is exclusively "marketing fluff".
In that case, better to let
their website or Myspace promote them, and say nothing at all until
-someone else-, who's reliable and has no vested interest in promoting
them, decides to say something about them.
IOW if a company has issued a warning that one of its own products is
dangerous, and nobody else has picked up we should not mention it
because our rules are more important than protecting the public from risk.
-Primary source only articles fail V. "If an
article topic has no
reliable, third-party sources, Wikipedia should not have an article on
it."
Sometimes. Julius Caesar may be the only source for some of the
material in his "Gallic Wars". Your position implies that he should not
be used as a reference, and that we should restrict ourselves to the
misinterpretation of others.
-Just accepting whatever gets thrown at us fails NOT.
We're not a
directory or an indiscriminate collection of information. Using a bar,
that -someone else- must have written about it in a decent amount of
detail before we will, ensures that we stay true to those, and don't
become an indiscriminate collection of trivia, factoids, or articles
based on biased, promotional stuff if that's all that's out there on
the subject.
That should depend on the nature of the information, and its entire
context. It requires judgement rather than reckless robotism.
Ec