[WikiEN-l] The real consensus on synthesis

[C.J. Croy]

My first thought upon reading WP:SYNTH was "What a stupid policy".
Read literally, it forbids using more than one source per article.
Experience hasn't changed my opinion.  Every single time I've seen it
invoked, it has been by a POV warrior trying to keep the other side
out of an article or an autistic killbot that was blindly applying
policy and just screwing up a perfectly good article.

Take the article on [[Baby Gender Monitor]], a Featured Article we
recently frontpaged.  Check out the second paragraph of 'Accuracy of
test disputed' - It's a textbook example of synthesis.

Source A says the test is inaccurate due to vanishing twins.
Source B says the test can predict mixed twins.
Conclusion from article writer: Therefore, it should not be inaccurate.

That version of the statement has been there since at least January
24th.  So it's been there for almost four months including a day on
the front page.  In that time, not one person has brought this up,
although someone did bitch about synthesis for some unrelated point.
Now what's more likely?

A. Everyone who read the article skipped that paragraph.
B. Everyone who read the article read that paragraph and didn't think
it was a problem.

The real consensus is that we should ditch WP:Synthesis.

-Chris Croy