[WikiEN-l] The vexed issue of sources

[Andrew Gray]

On 08/12/06, Abigail Brady <morwen at evilmagic.org> wrote:
> On 12/8/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> > Since there are only two such occasions it should not be difficult to
> > identify the two episodes.
>
> Ah, but how do you source the fact that it isn't seen in any other episodes?
> This is not a facetious question by the way.

A while ago, I was writing an article on a notorious vanity-published
and remarkably self-publicising author. (We'd just deleted a big
swathe of articles on his books, and references to them in every
article imaginable... and, for reasons which may not be entirely
unrelated to vindictiveness, AFD kept his article but deleted
everything else. So, of course, we needed to write something decent
and sourceable on him)

The problem is, it's astonishingly difficult to provide an actual,
reality-based, response to claims of fame and success. Barring quoting
someone in the publishing industry saying "who is this guy?", what can
we do? We can't quote the fact that his books aren't available in
normal bookshops, that they don't exist on bestseller lists or in any
library - because we can't cite the absence of something.

> Do we have something against academic fraud: such as, say, adding
> something as a "Source", apparently without having read it, or even
> having a good idea of its contents from other sources,

This is often a simple misconception - "sources" become "references",
references gets misinterpreted as "further reading". Most problematic
with adding URLs, of course, but I've seen apparent good-faith
drive-by inclusions of sources with no actual edits made to the
article.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk