Bryan Derksen wrote:
Todd Allen wrote:
"It's damn near impossible to write objectively about yourself or something you have a vested interest in promoting" has a lot higher certainty than 90%. I'd put it somewhere around 99.999%, and even that's generous, that's saying 1 in 100,000 people could do it.
Highly implausible. Wikipedia has 4,300,000 registered accounts (probably fewer individual users since a lot might be sock puppets or throwaways, but this also doesn't count anons so call it an order of magnitude estimate). So you're suggesting that, on average, there have only ever been 43 registered users in the history of Wikipedia who have been capable of writing "objectively about themselves or something they have a vested interest in promoting?" That's _generous_? I think you've got an overly pessimistic view of our contributors and would like to know how you arrived at that figure.
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For one, we're talking about primary sources, not necessarily Wikipedia editors. If a (band/company/etc.) sets up a website, chances are that website will be specifically intended to promote them. I don't blame people for that-if I had a company and set up a website for it, you bet it would be promotional! But that information isn't accurate or complete. If you could get honest, unbiased, neutral information from companies, Consumer Reports wouldn't have a single subscriber, and the Better Business Bureau would be, well, out of business.
Aside from that, it's simple human nature, when describing oneself or something one has an interest in, to accentuate the good and gloss over the bad. If that weren't the case, we wouldn't have a conflict of interest guideline. But that guideline, and indeed NPOV, are useless, if we're just going to use self-published sources without demanding independent verification.
So, like I said, I think 1 in 100,000 is conservative. I doubt one in a million people could write fairly in the presence of a conflict of interest, and much self-published material isn't even -intended- to be neutral, at that. (At the very least, the previous figure of 90%, presuming that 1 in 10 people can write neutrally and objectively on themself or something they have a vested interest in, is pretty unquestionably overly generous.) Even if we presume I'm pessimistic, and it's 1 in 10,000 or even 1 in 1,000, that makes it a totally unreliable source.
For that matter, presume 90% is right! If that's the case, 1 out of every 10 self-published sources is accurate and neutral. Well...I don't know about you, but I wouldn't consider a source that gets it wrong 9 out of 10 times to be reliable. Self-published sources are not, then, reliable verification (even by the 90% metric), and so articles that rely solely or mainly on them fail verifiability (and likely NPOV as well.) And I stand by my assertion that the reality is far less than 1 in 10.