Christopher Erickson wrote:
My beef is this ... What counts as a reliable source? Does a mention of a POV-pushing political phrase in heresy-hunting leftist rag count as a reliable source, such that said phrase could be used to label people and parties that may go 10 or 20% in the general direction claimed, but not the 100% claimed by the label applied to them? Lately I've had such run-ins. POV-pushing publications (even if respected by otherwise respectable people) do not count as verifiability.
Rewrite the above substituting only "rightist" for "leftist" and the results come to the same thing. If you get away from political philosophies we'll have the same problem with other word pairs.
If in striving for NPOV we need to depend on a POV that determines a "reliable source" we haven't got NPOV at all. The best we can do is link to an article about the publication in question where hopefully there will be enough objective criteria to allow the reader to decide for himself. If we quote some article titles from the publication itself it will be evident that the articles, "Economic Gains of the Socialist Revolution," and "Human Rights Violation of the Socialist Revolution," will represent magazines with conflicting perspectives. How can we possibly come to the conclusion that any publication is POV-pushing without engaging in Original Research about that publication?
Ec