On 28/03/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
On Wed, 28 Mar 2007 20:54:24 +0100, "David Gerard" dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
the blind idiot worship of print sources in [[WP:RS]] doesn't help make us a better encyclopedia.
That really helps move the debate along...
I find it hard to describe it otherwise. Look at this thread. Tell me how anyone who's ever actually been written about could regard the press as the infallible source of reliability it's being painted as.
Sometimes we also draw on primary sources. The benchmark here is not, in my view, reliability, but authority. If Joe Bloggs is an *authority* on mediaeval history, then it is valid to cite JoeBloggs.com in support of arcana in articles on mediaeval history. Probably. The problem is it might be [[Eric Lerner]], not Joe Bloggs
- as non-experts it is very hard for us to tell the difference. So we
fall back to requiring that most things be filtered through the editorial processes of dependable secondary sources, and that should work well enough.
Yes. You can't legislate clue. But assuming all print sources are good and all blogs are bad is blind idiot worship of WP:RS.
Do remember, though, that when we use primary sources we substitute our own judgment for editorial or peer review. That's fine as long as it's me making the call, because in the main I trust my own judgment, but what if it's that notorious POV-pusher David Gerard, who is well-known for trying to slipstream support for his seditious view that an open Wiki can provide a reliable and accurate distillation of human knowledge? This is nonsense, as any fule kno and surely we cannot allow such crypto-communist propaganda to infect the project. Or the reverse, depending on who's adding the content. "This is good because I said it's good and I know these things" is a dangerous argument on Wikipedia.
Well, yeah. The trouble is there's no way to write a policy that legislates clue without running into edge cases that make you look stupid, e.g. [[Peter Hollingworth]].
- d.