On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 3:27 PM, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
If "riddled with errors" means "has more (frequent) errors than other sources", then this makes some sense.
If "riddled with errors" means "has errors that we have recently had our attention called to" or "has errors that happen to be about some subject we are personally pissed off about", then it's a very bad idea.
I agree, and that's why I suggested any decision to "delist" a source as presumptively reliable be based on an analysis of a selection of published content. Shmuel wrote that the purpose of identifying reliable sources is to keep editors from making stuff up -- but we exclude all sorts of sources that aren't editors making stuff up, based on a potentially faulty assumption about their editorial review. So rather than aiming to prohibit hoaxes, rules about RS are an attempt to weed out chronically unreliable sources. If we find that a traditionally reliable source of facts has become chronically unreliable, then it should face the same scrutiny as blogs or personal websites prior to being cited.
Nathan