On Wed, 28 Mar 2007 23:10:16 +0100, "David Gerard" dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I find it hard to describe it otherwise. Look at this thread. Tell me how anyone who's ever actually been written about could regard the press as the infallible source of reliability it's being painted as.
The press? A bunch of dunces. They print all kinds of crap. But - if they print *bad* crap they have to pay Actual Money so they tend to be at least marginally careful. That is not the same as "print sources". Print sources also comprises books and scholarly journals. I hold some brief for scholarly journals, although these too are more than capable of showing chronic bias. The really bad ones, though, go bust.
Sometimes we also draw on primary sources. The benchmark here is not, in my view, reliability, but authority. If Joe Bloggs is an *authority* on mediaeval history, then it is valid to cite JoeBloggs.com in support of arcana in articles on mediaeval history. Probably. The problem is it might be [[Eric Lerner]], not Joe Bloggs
- as non-experts it is very hard for us to tell the difference. So we
fall back to requiring that most things be filtered through the editorial processes of dependable secondary sources, and that should work well enough.
Yes. You can't legislate clue. But assuming all print sources are good and all blogs are bad is blind idiot worship of WP:RS.
This is true. But let's not confuse the general and the specific. In general, print sources, tabloid newspapers aside, are more dependable than blogs. Once one gets to specifics, some blogs amount to authoritative primary sources, but are still primary sources. In some cases a blog can reflect the views of a single expert on a number of competing claims, and that can be attributed to that expert with some confidence, but we still have the question of how expert the expert is, and whether his personal biases are skewing his assessment.
Do remember, though, that when we use primary sources we substitute our own judgment for editorial or peer review. That's fine as long as it's me making the call, because in the main I trust my own judgment, but what if it's that notorious POV-pusher David Gerard, who is well-known for trying to slipstream support for his seditious view that an open Wiki can provide a reliable and accurate distillation of human knowledge? This is nonsense, as any fule kno and surely we cannot allow such crypto-communist propaganda to infect the project. Or the reverse, depending on who's adding the content. "This is good because I said it's good and I know these things" is a dangerous argument on Wikipedia.
Well, yeah. The trouble is there's no way to write a policy that legislates clue without running into edge cases that make you look stupid, e.g. [[Peter Hollingworth]].
Yup. So in the absence of the ability to legislate Clue, we keep the policy base to a minimum and exercise intelligence and judgment. In the absence of intelligence and judgment, we carefully and selectively engage those who are known to have Clue. This is called "running to Jimbo" :o)
Guy (JzG)