New subject: Policy Proposals

26 Jan 2005

Following up on the recent discussion about citation and sources,
I'd like to make a few points in no particular order.

1. Some primary sources are too difficult for most editors to access.
    Examples include unpublished material in archives and old
    newspapers in foreign languages.  Other material is readily
    available - for example almost every university with a Law
    School or Political Science department will have the UN official
    records that I located recently.

2. Primary sources are not necessarily better than secondary sources.
    Many types of primary sources require experience and knowledge
    to interpret because they are written for people in the know and
    not for outsiders.  In this case a presentation and analysis of the
    material by a specialist who understands the context and knows
    about other relevant sources is to be preferred.  (Conversely,
    presentation of genuine primary material in a misleading fashion
    is taught in Propaganda 101.)

3. Many secondary sources are written by people whose purpose is
    to deceive their readers.  We Wikipedians did not invent the
    art of POV-pushing.  For every topic which provokes edit-wars
    in Wikipedia, there is an active information-war out there trying
to
    convince us of one or the other POV.

4. The combination of 2 and 3 is a catch-22.  We need the specialists
    but can we trust them?  There is no easy answer to this but some
    partial answers can be given.  One is that people who work for
    advocacy groups or governments are the least trustable.  Next
    least trustable are the "independent experts" the media like to
    consult.  The most trustable are academics; not the teachers you
    may have taken a course from, but those who publish their research
    in peer-reviewed journals and get cited by other such people.
    However, this only goes for academics writing on their own
    specialties.

5. Academic specialists have prejudices and political opinions too
    and there is no such thing as an unbiased secondary source.

6. The first rule of citation is to state the actual place you got the 
    information from.  If you want to report on some document D
    you read about in book B, your first obligation is to name B.
    It is a sin to only name D unless you looked at D yourself.

7. If it is necessary to cite one of the less trustable sources (see
4),
    the source should be identified sufficiently to warn readers
    that the source may have a motivation in slanting the evidence.
    That is, say what organisation the source belongs to or what job
    they have which might influence their opinion.  However, it is
    not necessary to pass judgment on the source (say "member of
    the XYZ political party", not "member of the XYZ political party
    which some people claim to be a lot of racist scum").

8. Random web pages which make unsourced claims are not
    sources at all in my opinion and should be avoided altogether.

Zero.

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primary and secondary sources