What do we do about well-sourced information which turns out to be incorrect? I don't think policies cover this area particularly well, but the commonsense view is to word it something along the lines of:
"A national newspaper in 2007 reported that celebrity x had been arrested for taking drugs<ref> </ref>; however this was later shown to be untrue <ref> </ref>"
If it's not that important you can always include the details in a footnote:
"Joe Blow (b. 15.1.74) <ref>Note the New York Times stated he was born on January 14 - (ref). However, this source shows the actual date to be 14 Jan </ref>
The added advantage is it means editors don't add the incorrect information in again at a later date.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Ken Arromdee" arromdee@rahul.net To: "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Thursday, 23 April, 2009 01:11:39 GMT +00:00 GMT Britain, Ireland, Portugal Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Foundation-l] Board statement regarding biographies of l...
On Wed, 22 Apr 2009 WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
You're arguing for a policy that says that someone without a source can't correct errors about himself *at all*--whether you looked up the official site for his radio station or not. Verifying his identity is, in fact, completely irrelevant to this policy.>>
No Ken. Because we do not require sources for non-controversial points in the first place.
If he's correcting an error, another person disagrees with him, so it's by definition controversial to some degree.
Also, remember that we're talking about BLPs. BLP subjects may be unfamiliar with Wikipedia and do things like publically complain--and once they do that, it's guaranteed that if they try fixing the article, someone will remember their complaint and automatically treat the change as controversial.
WHEN a statement is fact-tagged, then a source should be provided.
That doesn't work too well when the source is wrong.
Remember that "verifiability, not truth" means that sometimes it will be verifiable, but not true.
The sole place where the subject may have a special position, is in providing a response to a well-sourced negative statement.
What if it's a well-sourced non-negative, but false, statement?
If we have a statement like "Britney Spears stabbed her husband and was arrested" (L.A. Times, 12 Oct 2007), then she is quite welcome to provide an alternate version such as "she stabbed him, but it was with a nail file and the skin wasn't even broken, he's just a big cry baby bitch." (Britneyspears.com, "Why I was arrested last week")
If it's not Britney SWpears, but the guy whose radio station you looked up, why should we require him to create "guywithradiostation.com" before he can correct facts?
However, this does not mean that we remove the L A Times reference. That would be whitewashing the article. We are here to provide the reading public with the most consistent, neutral, inclusive view of pop culture. That isn't simply the glamour magazines, it has to include as well the news articles that have negative material.
Ah. "Joe Blow claims he was born on January 15, but the New York Times says he was born on January 14. Joe Blow insists this is a mistake."
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On 4/23/09, Andrew Turvey andrewrturvey@googlemail.com wrote:
What do we do about well-sourced information which turns out to be incorrect? I don't think policies cover this area particularly well, but the commonsense view is to word it something along the lines of:
"A national newspaper in 2007 reported that celebrity x had been arrested for taking drugs<ref> </ref>; however this was later shown to be untrue <ref> </ref>"
If it's not that important you can always include the details in a footnote:
"Joe Blow (b. 15.1.74) <ref>Note the New York Times stated he was born on January 14 - (ref). However, this source shows the actual date to be 14 Jan
</ref>
The added advantage is it means editors don't add the incorrect information in again at a later date.
This is what I've done on a few occasions when it's obvious that one source has got it wrong - see the footnote relating to the birthdate of Emlyn Garner Evans http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emlyn_Garner_Evans. However there are always some where it is impossible to tell which of the conflicting sources has got it right; see Edward Doran for an example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Doran.
On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 9:47 AM, Sam Blacketer sam.blacketer@googlemail.com wrote:
<snip>
This is what I've done on a few occasions when it's obvious that one source has got it wrong - see the footnote relating to the birthdate of Emlyn Garner Evans http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emlyn_Garner_Evans. However there are always some where it is impossible to tell which of the conflicting sources has got it right; see Edward Doran for an example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Doran.
For Doran, you would have thought the years of education at Manchester Grammar School could be looked up and that would shed light on a difference of *seven* years between the two proposed birth years (1885 and 1892). It's normally only one or two years difference between disputed birth years.
Carcharoth