Steve Block wrote:
Stan Shebs wrote:
How do we know reliable sources aren't lying. Every newspaper and source in town reports Colin Montgomerie holed the winning putt in the 2004 Ryder Cup, but it isn't true, Ian Poulter struck the putt that mathematically won the cup. Monty's story simply made better press. If we do, as you say, withhold judgement on whether a source is correct, why do you then say we can't use some sources because they may be lying. Obviously some judgement is at play.
Well, if the source is lying, then by definition it's not reliable. Your example is an object lesson in how newspapers are intermediate in reliability; they are usually better than Joe Random's blog, but not as good as a scholarly monograph that has had multiple layers of review spread over multiple years.
No, you haven't as yet stated how we define which source is telling the "truth". My understanding is that we don't do that. If we don't do that, it stands to reason we don't determine which source "lies", since doing so indicates we have determined one source is telling the truth. My understanding is that we weigh each source in relation to the topic, and present it in a NPV. This means we must judge whether the information is relevant, not if it is true. It is relevant to note that Montgomerie is credited as hitting the winning putt.
Dangerously close to epistemology, but I'm not afraid. :-) I think we work with a fundamental underlying assumption that the facts are knowable, even if we don't know them at the moment. Otherwise, if somebody finds a hundred blogs stating that the sky is really green (perhaps as part of a prank), and runs to WP to add stuff about how the color of the sky is in dispute, we wouldn't have any basis for saying "dude, it was an April Fool's joke, we're not going add it". We've actually had a couple people in the past adding totally fictional events, sourced from websites that reported the fictional events as if they were real, and they got irate when we deleted their material, because they were convinced it was all real - or that was part of their prank, or possibly performance art, to this day I can't say for sure. So I exaggerated when I said we're just stenographers; we do have to do "research", if not "original research".
Seeing the references to that article, I can see where you're coming from. I personally would be very reluctant to, for instance, use rootsweb to source a death date, because not only do we have the problem of identifying *which* person of a given name is meant, but genealogy sites include all the standard howlers, like descents traced to Julius Caesar, which is only plausible if you don't realize how utterly corrupt the primary sources are for the Dark Ages. The "California Death Records" link comes up blank, the oldpoetry.com link has a single unsourced line affecting to be written in the first person, post-mortem ("I lived from 1887-1972.") - kind of spooky actually. So some of your references illustrate well the reasons to be wary of primary sources.
No, they reflect your bias regarding those sources. What you cite as spooky is simply the presentation style of a website. What you write about the rootsweb site doesn't apply to the California Death Records, which are state records and not genealogical research which links me to Julius Caesar. The rootsweb link is to show where I accessed the record from, not the source. The source is the death record itself. I'm open to hearing someone argue that I haven't used the source properly, but I'm not open to people declaring it is out of order because it was found on the web.
That's why I said "personally reluctant", not "against policy". After thirty years of doing scholarship, I thought I was pretty savvy, but even so have been caught out a bunch of times while working on WP. Just recently I used a web article that looked good, and it cited four print references, but then we got a note from the webmaster of the site that he was pulling the article because it was inaccurate, and making claims not separated by those references. Ironically, the corresponding de: article is sourced from newspapers of the time, so now I'm planning a little quality time in the microfilm department of the library to try to sort it all out.
Despite all our warnings, people do take WP at face value; I found it very sobering to see some of my early mistakes propagated onto websites all over the net. Maybe I'm the only one bothered by that.
I bring these up not to try to disparage you, but because to me it's what is interesting about scholarship and Wikipedia. Which sources of information are good, which not so good, and why? If they're inconsistent, which is true, or are they both true if you interpret in a different way? I imagine that some day, if it hasn't already happened, a heated talk-page argument over some factual detail will inspire an expert to do some original research and then publish the findings - which we can then incorporate into the article originally in dispute.
I find this somewhat at odds with your thrust up until this point. It seems to me this debate started when I asserted that web sources have value since the OED uses them. If it is not your intention to declare web sources as inappropriate, then I fail to see how we have ended up where we are. And if you didn't intend to disparage me, then I fail to see what your edit history has to do with anything. I'm quite capable of judging an argument on its merits, thanks, and would hope my argument would be judged similarly too. Let's not forget, these are only opinions, not facts, and we shouldn't be basing strict rules on subjective opinions. I'm of the opinion sourcing is a "horses for courses" issue.
My argument is that web sources *may* have value, but people need to keep their hands on their wallets - we have a lot of editors getting their pockets picked and they don't even know it. Have you ever looked at the fine print in an unabridged OED? It's great stuff - those guys know about not only the English language proper, but every other human language, and all the historical context too. To them, a web usage is a raw data point, just like somebody's diary, or graffiti seen on a subway wall. You will never find an OED entry that cites a web page as an authority, it will always be in quoted form, as an example of observed usage. That is the crucial difference.
Stan