In a message dated 7/25/2008 10:23:53 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, cbeckhorn@fastmail.fm writes:
WP:V is very clear that peer-reviewed sources by professioanl publishers are our preferred sources in the areas where they exist. It is also clear that self-published material, even from experts, should be taken with a grain of salt. I'll include some quotes below. >>
------------- Your quotes are misread. Peer-reviewed articles where they exist are more reliable. They are not the standard however. For example in biography the number of "peer-review" articles is vanishingly small. In Physics it is overwhelming. Quite different animals.
You are wrong to lump "self-published material" with "even from experts". That isn't what the policy states, nor what we hashed out over and over years ago on this very point. We made a clear distinction between self-published material from non-experts, and self-published material from experts. You argument seems to blur that distinction that we carefully tried to draw.
Will Johnson
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On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 01:27:15PM -0400, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
They are not the standard however. For example in biography the number of "peer-review" articles is vanishingly small. In Physics it is overwhelming. Quite different animals.
If you are saying that too many of our biography articles (and pop-culture articles) rely heavily on substandard sources, I completely agree.
You are wrong to lump "self-published material" with "even from experts". That isn't what the policy states, nor what we hashed out over and over years ago on this very point. We made a clear distinction between self-published material from non-experts, and self-published material from experts. You argument seems to blur that distinction that we carefully tried to draw.
Here is the entire text on the subject of self-published expert sources from the current version of WP:V:
Self-published material may, in some circumstances, be acceptable when produced by an established expert on the topic of the article whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable third-party publications. However, caution should be exercised when using such sources: if the information in question is really worth reporting, someone else is likely to have done so.
This is hardly a ringing endorsement of the use of self-published expert writing. It explicitly encourages cautious use and a search for more reliable sources (the "someone else").
In the end, we _should not_ be encouraging the use of self-published expert writing, for the reasons I laid out in an earlier email. A lack of ediitorial review is a magnet for theories and interpretations whose due weight in our articles is very low.
- Carl