On 3/28/07, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
If the claims are that important, surely they will be picked up, verified and repeated by newspapers or other media?
That might be true if it's actually about a member of parliament, but there are claims that can have limited audiences, and yet be "important" in the sense that they are still encyclopediac subjects. It may be that nobody picks up the claim because nobody picks up most claims related to the topic, rather than because this claim is particularly unimportant.
Thus we arrive at the problem of systemic bias - certain aspects of the things we cover may not be sufficiently covered in full by secondary sources. The question is, do we loosen our definition of ourselves as an encyclopaedia, i.e. a tertiary source, for the sake of becoming a knowledge base which becomes the first secondary source for particular topics, or do we remain rigid and refuse to accept information which has yet to be published/cited in any secondary source?
There's no clearcut answer, but I lean towards the latter. Maybe I'm a bit biased, but from my experience, loosening our sourcing requirements for areas with lacunae due to systemic bias (e.g. Malaysian topics - being a Malaysian editor, I frequently run into articles with questionable content) only leads to people running wild with republishing claims from primary sources such as blogs, without regard for whether the content is actually from a decently reliable source.
It's just my opinion, but I would lean against opening the floodgates here. If the information in a primary source has been cited in secondary sources, there shouldn't be anything particularly wrong with citing the primary source - but we should never be the first primary or secondary source for anything.
Johnleemk