On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 3:27 PM, Ken Arromdee <arromdee(a)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