Folks,
There are probably reliable reports that we can use:
(1) reports by state and local election authorities on the elections in their states or districts;
(2) the debate on January 6 over certifying the vote in Ohio;
(3) essays in political science journals;
(4) books such as the Almanac of American Politics 2006 by Michael Barone will have articles on the outcomes;
(5) reports on the court challenge.
While blogs can be useful, a lot depends on the credibility of the blogger - Michael Barone. Like in all articles, we should aim for a neutral point of view. For example, in the number of articles on voter fraud, there is precious little on Wisconsin (won narrowly by John Kerry) where an inquiry found clear evidence of fraud see [ http://www.jsonline.com/news/metro/may05/324933.asp].
Kerry's margin in Wisconsin was much less than Bush's in either Florida or Ohio by the way. We are now in a situation when reliable sources are available and more will become progressively available. We should clean up these articles for NPOV, make sure we use reliable sources in a balanced way and get rid of the claims in the articles that just don't stack up.
Regards
Keith Old
Keith Old User:Capitalistroadster
On 10/19/05, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
The key issue here is not the topic at hand but whether or not it is verifiable. The main question here seems to be, "Do blogs count as sources?" In certain rare cases they ought to be, but in general they are no better than citing user pages on Wikipedia. If a blog can cite a source, then we can find that source and cite it ourselves, I assume.
If you remove everything from the article that is cited with a blog, and everything which is not cited but should be, what do you have? Perhaps it would be a useful rhetorical technique to try on one of them, whether it gets reverted or not.
Of course, all of the above rests on the conclusion that blogs don't count as sources in and of themselves for articles of this sort. The people who wrote the articles are obviously going to disagree on this, hence the entire root of this dispute. I think it'd be nice to have some sort of "ruling on high" every once in awhile about what counts as evidence and what doesn't (what Foucault would call defining our "regimes of truth") but I'm not sure there's any way to do it systematically or rigorously. But perhaps that isn't needed -- perhaps a one-time, "this doesn't work in this situation" wouldn't be so bad (seems to have worked out with the LaRouchies).
Again, this doesn't have to have to do anything with politics if it is honestly just a source issue. If "real" sources on these topics come out later, the articles can be rewritten, simple as that.
FF
On 10/18/05, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Oct 18, 2005, at 1:33 PM, Guettarda wrote:
I see. So saying "obviously you support election fraud" would be appropriate too, and not "needlessly" inflammatory? Interesting.
I don't know how to answer this, except to say this. I have taught freshman composition at a respected university, focusing particularly on research. If one of my students handed me a paper that used those citations in that way, I would fail them. Regardless of whether there was election fraud, the article is a poorly written, POV mess. And it is not the place of Wikipedia to decide if there was election fraud - it's the place of Wikipedia to accurately describe the controversy surrounding it. A controversy that led to no successful challenges to the outcome of the election, and no lasting media coverage. Instead of this, though, we have 60,000 words of original research.
-Snowspinner
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