On 10 September 2012 17:04, Ken Arromdee <arromdee(a)rahul.net> wrote:
On Sat, 8 Sep 2012, Charles Matthews wrote:
You might be justified in saying this if he was
really told he wasn't
"credible". If he was told that he wasn't a "reliable source" in
WP's
terms, that is a different kettle of fish.
How's he supposed to know the difference?
Oh, I don't know, they keep saying he should get a Nobel Prize as a
novelist, so perhaps his command of the English language is above average.
There is a nuance.
Besides, once he is verified to be himself, he is a reliable source. The
issue was that he was a primary source and the secondary sources had
preference.
The issue appears to be something different. Roth's biographer wanted the
existing secondary sources zapped from the article as simply worthless, and
we couldn't accept that. Roth's unpublished view as funnelled through his
biographer might have had to have waited until the biography was published,
in which case we would have cited it without trouble. Via what appears to
be an OTRS mail Roth was given what appears to be the wrong advice, phrased
in terms of secondary sources. As
WP:ABOUTSELF<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ABOUTSELF> tells
us, Roth simply had to get his view published; which he did. The caveat in
the article by 20 August was actually enough to cast great doubt on the
other story about his inspiration, at least for any attentive reader.
It is traditional to hang all sorts of other considerations on these
incidents, but from the point of view of getting the case study straight,
it isn't that helpful.
Charles