For me this goes back to Larry Sanger, who was always deleting my cites on
the basis that they were "bad". He went overboard, but frankly, some are bad
and we do the reader no favor by not saying so, in one way or another.
Fred
From: Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net>
Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 09:52:11 -0800
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] primary and secondary sources
Tony Sidaway wrote:
Matt Brown said:
It is definitely the case that we'd rather a
bad cite than no cite.
I strongly disagree. The only cites should be good cites. Bad ones are
misleading and wasteful. A good cite is easy enough to make: one that
accurately describes the cited material and relates it to the subjectmatter.
This latest fuss was, at bottom, over attempts by some of us to
transform a bad cite (a statement that a UN source said something that we
didn't know it said) into a good one (a statement that a secondary source
gave a figure and attributed it to a UN source). The former would have
misled the reader, the latter would have given the reader more accurate
information. As it turned out the cited UN source did not contain the
information, but another UN source did. The secondary source proved to be
in error so the inference drawn from it was incorrect in a small but
significant detail.
I would be more supportive of Matt's position. When you try to divide
citations into "good cites" and "bad cites" you make a determination
which should also be subject to the "cite your sources" rule. Rather
than proposing that one source or the other would have misled the
reader, we would do better in such circumstances to cite both sources,
and let the reader decide which misleading he prefers to follow.
Ec
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