On 08/12/06, Abigail Brady morwen@evilmagic.org wrote:
On 12/8/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Since there are only two such occasions it should not be difficult to identify the two episodes.
Ah, but how do you source the fact that it isn't seen in any other episodes? This is not a facetious question by the way.
A while ago, I was writing an article on a notorious vanity-published and remarkably self-publicising author. (We'd just deleted a big swathe of articles on his books, and references to them in every article imaginable... and, for reasons which may not be entirely unrelated to vindictiveness, AFD kept his article but deleted everything else. So, of course, we needed to write something decent and sourceable on him)
The problem is, it's astonishingly difficult to provide an actual, reality-based, response to claims of fame and success. Barring quoting someone in the publishing industry saying "who is this guy?", what can we do? We can't quote the fact that his books aren't available in normal bookshops, that they don't exist on bestseller lists or in any library - because we can't cite the absence of something.
Do we have something against academic fraud: such as, say, adding something as a "Source", apparently without having read it, or even having a good idea of its contents from other sources,
This is often a simple misconception - "sources" become "references", references gets misinterpreted as "further reading". Most problematic with adding URLs, of course, but I've seen apparent good-faith drive-by inclusions of sources with no actual edits made to the article.