On Jan 25, 2008 5:34 PM, Brian Salter-Duke b_duke@bigpond.net.au wrote:
On Tue, Jan 22, 2008 at 05:52:52PM -0700, Todd Allen wrote:
As to determining reliability, this is a solved question. Nature and Science are reliable sources. The Weekly World News is not. The New York Times is a reliable source. A tabloid sensationalist rag is not. In some cases there might be an edge case, but in most cases we can use simple metrics. Is the source widely regarded as reliable? Is it written, peer-reviewed, editorially controlled, and/or fact-checked by professionals? Is it cited by other sources known to be reliable? Again, we let others decide, we don't need to do so ourselves, and we -shouldn't- be doing so ourselves.
The above is, in my opinion very over-simplified. It is also subjective. Yes, we can recognise really good reliable sources and really bad reliable sources, but most of the time we are in the middle.
Further, isn't the source supposed to be reliable in the context of the fact that's being cited? I can't find that specifically said anywhere in the guidelines, but I always assumed that was the case. Plenty of sources are reliable on some subjects, but not reliable at all on others.
Even then, I think I'd have to question the reliability of at least one source listed above - the New York Times. I'm not sure a daily newspaper can ever be a particularly reliable source, at least not for every single topic it writes about. I'd put the New York Times in that middle you were talking about, though probably in the "good" part of the middle section (at least if you include all the retractions).
In the end, I don't think you can apply a mechanical method to determining what's true and what's false (at least not practically, let's ignore the philosophical implications of the Church-Turing thesis for a moment). I think this is why it's essential to always sanity-check rules with practicality. In terms of deletion debates, I'd define the practical question as "what result should be provided to someone who types 'whatever' into the search box and hits 'go'".