On Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 1:20 PM,
<WJhonson(a)aol.com> wrote:
In a message dated 10/25/2008 11:28:10 AM Pacific
Daylight Time,
delirium(a)hackish.org writes:
than "some guy on Wikipedia has
investigated, and determined that all
the sources are in fact wrong".>>
---
This part is great. Made me smile.
And that part is exactly -why- we require sources, including to change
something at a subject's request. If reliable sources indicate
something, and the subject says "It isn't so" but we've got nothing to
verify that, we can't simply say "Oh, alright," and change the
article.
One thing we -can- do in such a case, as stated earlier, is to change
that particular part of the article to a quoted form, e.g. "The New
York Times reported in 2006 that foo did bar", rather than "Foo did
bar <ref name="nyt">". In that case, our statement -cannot- be
inaccurate, provided that the New York Times really did make such a
report-we're simply in that case asserting that such a report was
made.
Just to avoid making *too* strong a "sources are everything" comment
here, we can of course also exercise some editorial judgment when it
comes to weighting parts of a biography and writing intro-text
descriptions and so on. If a source says that someone was born in 1947,
and no source says otherwise, in some sense we're stuck, even if it's
wrong---absent original research, the literature says he was born in
1947, so we'll duly report that. But just because someone somewhere has
called someone "a director" doesn't necessarily mean our intro paragraph
has to say that he's "a director". That he directed a film, the body
text should say, but which of the things in the body text is worth
highlighting in the intro sentence/paragraph should be done by
summarizing the rest of the article with some common sense.
-Mark