On Tue, 9 Aug 2011, Carcharoth wrote:
My rule of thumb for self-published sources is to see if they cite their sources. If they do, then you can check what they say. If they don't, then you can't, and that can be a problem even with so-called 'reliable' sources.
This fails to be a useful method when the self-published source is the personal experience of a professional in the industry.
This happens a lot with Internet publications, such as J. Michael Straczynski's postings in the Babylon 5 newsgroup, or Jim Shooter's blog (jimshooter.com).
The standard Wikipedian's response to this quandry is "well, if they can't get a reliable source to quote them, it must not be that important in the first place", which ignores the realities of the modern Internet.