Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 6/2/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 5/31/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
And we haven't even mentioned the usefulness of the yellow pages in establishing the existence of a business over a time frame.
It's even easier to put false information into the yellow pages section.
So? That doesn't mean that every entry has false information.
No, it doesn't. However, it does mean that a phone book isn't a *reliable* source.
That conclusion is not logical..If you are going to be imposing such strict criteria on one kinde of publication you should be applying these criteria to them all. Very few publications would pass your test of reliability.
What other reliable publications are there that are easy to put false information into? I don't think we should consider as reliable sources wikis, or random Internet websites, or the newspaper classifieds sections either.
There are millions of academic publications - ones that actually attempt to verify the information they publish. To call that "very few" is ludicrous.
I am perhaps less willing than you to idolize the "peer-reviewed" academic publications. There have certainly been recent instances where medical publications with very high repute like the New England Journal of Medicine have had to print retractions because of bad material that was supplied to them. Doing a full scale peer review, especially in the sciences can be an expensive undertaking. Who pays for that? Even sending someone to review the author's source data is expensive. Once you have somebody there, establishing that the data was cooked amounts to undertaking a forensic audit. Even governments prefer to believe the self-evaluations provided by pharmaceutical companies. If things are so shaky in such a crucial area as medicine, one can only wonder about less important subjects. Maybe the whole peer review process is a myth, and wikis have a greater potential for effective peer review.
At least if the "National Enquirer" reports that as a result of a Hollywood startlet's friendliness with her German shephard she gave birth to a "humadog" I know that they are the ultimate authority on such matters, and I better not waste my time looking for peer reviews.
Ec