Steve Bennett wrote:
I've been trying to get my head around why we even have a rule about what an acceptable source is.
I think it was developed with articles on scientific subjects in mind, rather than cultural ones. I suppose it depends where you sit on pseudoscience. Should people be able to assert that levitation exists, or that the grand theory of everything is y=2+b, stuff like that. When we move into cultural and historical topics I think there is certainly a case for relaxing the sourcing requirements somewhat. But I do think there should be standards, but they have to be contextualised by the information that is being sourced: it seems reasonable to source opinion and commentary from blogs, history should be sourcable by building a narrative from a chain of events, but scientific theory should be sourced from peer reviewed journals, that sort of thing.
I guess there's also issue with the denouncing of sources. For example, the recent afd over Neglected Mario Characters webcomic hinged on the claim for notability, namely for being potentially the first sprite web comic. Research was performed using the Internet Archive, and that was challenged as original research. To my mind the source should have been challenged, since the archive is not complete and may miss stuff, but that shouldn't preclude using the information sourced; rather we should note that fact in the citation.
Steve block