"jossi fresco" wrote
On Nov 22, 2007 3:11 PM, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Exactly. "Reliable" is an everyday concept. We mentally class people as reliable or not, and I defy anyone to say exactly what that means. Doesn't mean it's not a helpful notion.
Charles
No one is arguing for the dismissal of the concept of "reliable sources", which is already explained in detail at [[WP:V#Sources]]. What is being proposed is to redirect WP:RS to WP:VSources.
People are coming up with some really bad ideas these days, it seems. Keeping the in-principle discussion of verifiability, which is a Foundation level policy, separate from the nitty-gritty discussion of what a reliable source is, is a very good idea. Mainstream press is usually reliable enough to use in WP, supermarket tabloids are never. There's a grey area in between; it makes no sense to me to have comments about that near the basic point that WP can't accept unverifiable factoids.
Charles
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charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
People are coming up with some really bad ideas these days, it seems.
Seems like a good one to me. The fewer policy pages the better, IMO.
Keeping the in-principle discussion of verifiability, which is a Foundation level policy, separate from the nitty-gritty discussion of what a reliable source is, is a very good idea. Mainstream press is usually reliable enough to use in WP, supermarket tabloids are never.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_Boy has plenty of supermarket tabloid references, and quite rightly so. Never say "never."
The problem I've always had with RS is that it's written by people who understand that guidelines are meant to be flexibly and non-universally applied, and then interpreted by people who consider it to be universal hard-edged fundamental law. Maybe if the material is relocated to a policy page it'll be written with the flexibility built in more explicitly.