Fred Bauder wrote:
Tarquin wrote:
The matter of pet scientific theories and personal biographies have something in common: we can't verify them because the only material we can find on them is written by the author.
Right! And by "verify them", you ''don't'' mean «verify that they are correct» but instead «verify that this is indeed what people believe about them». (This may have confused Fred below???)
So I suggest that we focus on this angle. We already have a policy that "Wikipedia is not a primary source". This provides sufficient justification for not having these types of articles in WP. We should perhaps try to come up with loose guidelines as to how many primary sources we require.
I doubt that it would work well to specify a ''specific'' number of sources; the question is whether other Wikipedians can independently verify things.
A possible way to manage it: * Person A is enamoured with subject B (a theory of physics, a person, etc). * So A writes the article [[B]] to get the word out to the world. * Other Wikipedians think B is insignificant and want to delete [[B]]. * A gives (or is asked for) an independent reference C about B. * Either: ** Other Wikipedians use C to verify the facts in [[B]]; and ** [[B]] is allowed to remain (perhaps improved in various ways). * Or: ** Other Wikipedians follow C and find no verification of [[B]]; and ** [[B]] is deleted.
This outline assumes that verifiability is (in the end) the only reason to delete [[B]] (which isn't really true, as with vandalism for example), and it assumes that reference C settles the matter; A may need to come back with reference D or whatever. And if A is new, then A may not understand things, so that (the first) reference C is written ''by'' A (hence not independent) or some other problem; people will have to try to work things out in good faith. But the bottom line is that, if A is fighting for the life of [[B]], then A needs to provide a way for other Wikipedians to independently verify it.
It would help to cultivate a culture of mentioning sources on talk pages. Most of the time, we don't do this for uncontroversial matters (and I'm as guilty of this omission as anybody else is). But mentioning sources in the absence of controversy will help smooth things over when controversy appears. Sources are the obvious (not the only) ways to get independent verification; since each Wikipedian can check the source independently.
I think the question of quality of sources cannot be avoided. Where I live we had a young man who made a living off of stories of flying saucers, cattle mutilations and similar stuff, none of which was fact based (as I have lived here for many years, surely I would have observed at least one of the numberless phenomena he reported). He is notorious enough that should someone wish to write a Wikipedia article it would not be questioned. Simply a lot of independent sources doesn't raise crap to fact.
This situation seems entirely correct to me. Wikipedia is not interested in establishing fact. (There is the technical meaning of the term "fact" in LMS' exposition of NPOV, and that ''is'' what Wikipedia covers; but that's not as broad as the common meaning of the term.) That is, Wikipedia doesn't care if your neighbour's ideas are true. But if he is notorious, then there should be independent evidence of ''what his ideas are'', and Wikipedia can write about '''that'''. And if he is notorious, then Wikipedia ''should'' write about him too!
-- Toby