Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
I'm chary of experts determining what sources are reliable, as Carcharoth suggests. There are two meanings for "reliability." Reliability in RS, I claim, depends solely on the publisher, and reliability in this sense is about notability, and certainly not about reliability in the ordinary sense, that we could assume that the material is "true." If it's in independently published source, it's reliably sourced. Sure, there are gray areas.
That would appear to be wrong. Unreliability is screened out of published material in various ways, none of them completely effective: for example (a) publisher has a reputation to lose in the academic sphere, (b) reviewing processes initiated by the publisher catch actual errors, (c) the editorial process actually forces the author onto areas where what is said can be backed up. This is quite a bit like what we do internally with content policy, deletion, and detailed editing of articles. I don't see that it's about notability.
Charles