On 5/13/11 11:40 AM, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
That reminds me of the celebrated occasion when editors insisted that Gloria Gaynor was a "former Scientologist", based solely on the fact that the Guardian had once published a piece called "Listed Scientologists". The piece was on page G2, "Diversions", next to the crossword puzzle and the TV programme.
The piece was just a list of names, and it had an uncanny resemblance to Wikipedia's List of Scientologists at the time of publication (which also included Gaynor as a former member, based on a poor and misrepresented web source).
[...] That's exactly the kind of discrimination and judgment that needs to be applied. But editors were unwilling to give up on their "scoop", and barricaded themselves behind "The Guardian is a reliable source", "verifiability, not truth", and "not whether editors think it is true".
Isn't this just a failure to actually think through what verifying information with a reliable source means, rather than a problem with the principle? It's quite possible for the Guardian to be a good newspaper in general, but for a random list in the "Diversions" section, with no apparent investigative reporting involved, to *not* constitute reliable verification of that point.
I guess I see that kind of critical source analysis as completely in line with the idea of "verifiable information cited to reliable sources", though. At least as I read it, the WP:V/WP:RS combination asks: is this given citation sufficient to verify the fact it claims to verify? So I wholeheartedly agree that bright-line rules like "everything in The Guardian is reliable" are wrong, but I don't think that ought to require abandoning the WP:V/WP:RS view, at least as I've understood it. Isn't there even some text on WP:RS (there used to be, anyway) about how reliable sources may be context-specific, e.g. a newspaper may be a reliable source for some claims but not for others?
-Mark