Fred Bauder wrote:

I think we need to adopt standards of what is an acceptable source which is in accord with the nature of the subject. In this case, it is not going to be a book published by the Oxford University Press, blogs may have to serve, as well as comixs websites. The alternative is to drastically trim our popular culture coverage, which is one of the bright spots of Wikipedia, if sometimes considered eccentric and unscholarly.

Yes. Hard policy for this sort of thing would produce ridiculous results; we can't formulate more than guidelines, to be applied according to editorial judgement. If an editor has that judgement, they can reasonably judge if a given source is rubbish or not; if they don't, no amount of guidelines can give it to them. You can't Taylorise clue.

Are John Lee's featured articles on Beatles songs entirely written using peer-reviewed academic journals as sources? Of course not.

(And in my experience as what sociologists use as a primary source [music journalism], peer-reviewed academia on pop music is an incredibly low-quality source of information or indeed clue.)

- d.