On Mar 13, 2008, at 9:46 AM, David Gerard wrote:
On 13/03/2008, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 6:40 AM, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
Reliable sources? For an episode? Let me think how can we get that... Hmm... Hmm... Oh RIGHT! How about the episode itself? Its quite reliable and verifiable. Each time you watch it it is the same story, same plot.
That is not a reliable, independent, secondary source.
And sourcing is not a bureaucratic checklist. The source text being discussed is obviously relevant to an article and, if objectively checkable, certainly citable.
Indeed. Comments like Todd's are deeply baffling to me. As an active scholar working on areas of popular culture, I cannot imagine any justification for going to a secondary source, independent or otherwise, for something as straightforward as a plot summary. Were I peer reviewing any paper that did that, I would reject it out of hand for egregiously sloppy research.
While I recognize that Wikipedia's goals in research are different from active professional scholarship, I would suggest that a policy that amounts to "use laughably bad sources instead of good ones" is not one that we actually mean.
-Phil