On 2/24/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 2/25/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
No. It's not. It never has been, it never will be, it never can be. Reliable sourcing is fundamentally a more complex issue than a black and white guideline could ever portray.
This is going to come as a serious shock to all those lecturers teaching the subject
Something that everyone, Wikipedian or not, needs to understand - and that good teachers inform their students of - is this:
There is no such thing as a reliable source.
No single source of information can ever be trusted, and no set of sources, no matter how complete, can ever be trusted completely. All sourcing should reflect that "source 1 says A, source 2 says B" - leaving the veracity of their claims up to the reader's trust of said sources. Now, I'm not fond of having a footnote after every word in an article, so much of our content becomes "a rough consensus of persons who have recently edited this article says A" (which I would hope readers have a suitably low trust of, but is sufficient for uncontroversial data).
-- Jake Nelson [[en:User:Jake Nelson]]