-----Original Message----- From: wikien-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Andreas Kolbe Sent: 13 May 2011 06:58 To: English Wikipedia Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Otto Middleton (a morality tale)
Scott's argument is that many press reports publish shite, and that as a result we have lots of shite in our BLPs. My argument is that much of that shite is defended by editors saying, "A reliable source wrote about it, and you wanting to delete it violates WP:V, because you see, policy says it
does
not matter whether editors believe it is true or not."
If we can't use sources to judge truth, and we can't use expert knowledge without sources, what third option remains?
Editorial judgment -- we have to be allowed to judge the reliability of sources, and the quality of their research. Otherwise we're just indiscriminate parrots, regurgitating a random mix of knowledge and crap. A.
Bingo.
The problem is that Wikipedians like to make the complex world simple, in order to create nice rules and pretend that what we do is objective and editorial judgement and POV can be excluded. This is a myth and a dangerous one.
We end up with people saying "well, is the NYT a reliable source or not?" "Is the News of the World?". And then the argument goes "if you exclude them, you can't report Michael Jackson's death until a book gets written" (see earlier post)
Bollocks. You just need to use a little common sense.
If the NOTW or the Sun runs a headline saying "Michael Jackson is dead" - it is highly unlikely to be wrong. And even if it is wrong, the error will soon be news itself, and the Wikipedia article gets corrected. This is verification enough.
However, if the NYT celebrity watch page on p37 mentions in passing that "David Hasselhoff is known to have dated a host of celebrities including a, b, c, d, and e." And on that basis someone adds to the biography of (fairly minor) actress "d" that she once dated Hasselhoff, there is fair chance the story is wrong, or that "known to" amounts to some internet rumour - or tabloid crap story - or they were seen together once, there is also a fair chance that even if bogus it will never be corrected, or no one will notice the correction. All fine, as page 37 of the NYT is soon lining a drawer - except now it is immortalised in Wikipedia, always verifiable, never disputable. And that she dated Hasselhoff is certainly a notable part of d's otherwise uneventful career.
Newspapers print celebrity hearsay - they do it regularly and on a sustained basis, and where the hearsay is trivial it will rarely be corrected and seldom be fact checked - and the same bit of crap will often be repeated in various papers. We need editors to be wise to this.
Another (current example) some adult film company has recently offered Kate Middleton's sister $5milion to do porn. It is, naturally, a publicity stunt. Someone wanted to include it as a verifiable fact on her BLP. Easily excluded as trivia. However, now the Chicago Sun-Times and other sources is reporting that according to a friend she is livid and seeking advice on her future career from Buckingham Palace. Now, this is clearly hearsay - and quite probably crap - but I've got people actually arguing that we now meet [[WP:V]], because Chicago's second biggest paper is generally regarded as a "Reliable Source". Maybe, but since when did it become an authoritative source on British socialites?
The "is this a reliable source? yes/no" binary is simply an abrogation of common sense.
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