On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 5:26 PM, <WJhonson(a)aol.com> wrote:
What I think we do not want, is tendentious
mass-deletions of sources, which
the editors in those articles have accepted, by a person who has not
actually investigated the source, but is only characterizing it by its *type*
instead of its veracity.
Wikipedia is nothing if not grey. Which is why, on RSN, we generally divert
hypothetical discussion into specific discussions. Hypothetical discussion
of types of sources ends up too many times generating situations that we'd
wish to avoid.
Very much agreed.
To give an example from my own editing (on the subject of railroad
matters): I regularly cite
UtahRails.net as a source. This is a
website owned, operated, and written by a single individual, Joe
Strapac. Someone favoring automatic judgment on a source's
reliability based only on its publication method will probably have a
fit at this point; it's self-published, with no formal fact-checking
or editorial judgment standing between the author and his audience.
However, Joe Strapac is a respected author on these subjects, with a
large list of published works on this exact subject matter. This
makes him a noted authority. The fact is that on such subjects he is
very likely to be correct, and he has a lot of professional and
personal reputation riding on the quality of his research.
Furthermore, the fact-checking his online published work receives from
readers of the site is probably just as good as that which his
publishers are able to give; they'll simply pass his words to a few
other experts in the field for a once-over before publishing, at most.
Sources must be evaluated individually.
-Matt