--- On Tue, 10/5/11, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Otto Middleton (a morality tale) To: "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Tuesday, 10 May, 2011, 17:11 On 10 May 2011 17:04, Scott MacDonald doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
I've written a little essay which I think serves to
illustrate the dangers
of Wikipedia's tendency to create articles (and
particularly BLPs) from a
pastiche of newspaper articles. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Otto_Middleton_%28or_why_newspapers_a re_dubious_sources%29 It may amuse (or it may not)
Yep. Anyone who calls a newspaper a "reliable source" in terms other than comparison to even worse sources has clearly never been written about by one.
Suggestion: move the explanatory box to the top.
A while ago there was a discussion at WP:V talk whether we should recast the policy's opening sentence:
"The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth— whether readers can check that material in Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether editors think it is true."
(As usual, the discussion came to nought.) That sentence -- whose provocative formulation has served Wikipedia well in keeping out original research -- is a big part of the problem.
A.