I've posted a detailed critique of RS to the talk page. I'm reposting it here (still in wikiformatting) to make sure this issue gets the wide attention it deserves, and because the nature of a talk page is that it's going to become unreadable in 20 minutes or so.

===A somewhat interminable list of flaws===

As requested, an inventory of the flaws in this page. I hope you will see that the flaws are deeply rooted, affecting the organization and goal of the page. Not only is this an inadequate guideline for sourcing, it is an inadequate foundation for a guideline. David is correct - this needs to be rewritten from the ground up.

There are three basic flaws of this page, and they'll recur throughout the below.

#The page arbitrarily attempts to rule out subjective judgment in some cases while mandating it in others. The cases where it mandates it are often masked as didactic guidelines that depend on phrases like "reliable X," "common Y," or a mushy definition of fact. These phrases could be defined in the same way that "reliable source" has been, but such definitions would necessarily run into the same problems of subjectivity. It's turtles all the way down. #The page is, at numerous points, clearly written for a narrow range of topics. When applied to other topics, it ranges from the merely unhelpful to the completely wrong. #Sections flatly contradict each other.

More details follow.

====Opening====

The opening section in general and paragraph three in particular frame the page in an astonishingly flimflam way. The prospect of unsourced information being removed is raised, but no serious suggestion is given as to when "it is better to have no information at all than to have information without sources." The result is to give a vague and nonspecific warning when, in fact, a specific warning is in order. We are, after all, talking (at least primarily) about BLP here.

====Definitions====

The definition of fact is too iron-clad, relying ultimately on the idea that nobody "seriously disputes" a claim. By this standard, neither evolution nor global warming are facts. No serious encyclopedia should assert that evolution is not fact, but this definition of fact leads us inexorably to that conclusion.

The problem is exacerbated in the next definition, whereby opinions are yolked to verifiability, or lack thereof. This contrast between fact and opinion leaves a vast no man's land of verifiable information that people still disagree with. Worse, this no man's land is not self-evident. Does the statement "The US war in Iraq was conducted based on false information regarding the presence of WMDs in Iraq" count? It's verifiable, but it's not universally held.

To be clear, THERE IS NO WHITE LINE DEFINITION of fact and opinion that will let us automatically tell if a statement should be phrased as fact or as "X thinks Y." There are white line cases - Mars is a planet, Christians believe that Jesus is the son of God. But there's a vast middle ground that needs to be taken case by case.

Onward, the definitions of sources are based on old language, but have been altered past the point of usefulness. The biggest problem is the idea that primary sources require a reliable publisher. Here the reliable publisher is being used as a sort of surrogate secondary source - we're not using the primary source, but rather the primary source under the imprimatur of Publisher X. All of this is justified under the idea that "most primary-source material requires training to use correctly." (An idea that is untrue. They require care to use correctly. Training is often given to help people become more careful, but it is not the training that is required. There is a difference between using historical archives and running a nuclear reactor.)

The problem is that the same can be said of secondary sources. Even ones published by scholarly presses, which are, oddly, the only secondary sources endorsed, creating a system whereby we are bound entirely to scholarly sources on a topic. (Thankfully, the page is not consistent enough to endorse that position throughout) Secondary sources require just as much care as primary sources, and the privledging of them is nonsense.

The original statement on primary sources from which all of this derived stated that it's original research to organize primary sources in a "novel" fashion. But it never set up such a wide-ranging ban on primary sources, and with good reason.

Finally, the distinction makes no light of the fact that the primacy of sources is contextual. An example of just how bad this can get: There is a poem by Yeats called "Among Schoolchildren." The literary critic Paul de Man has a famous reading of this poem that has been published by scholarly presses. This reading is a secondary source in terms of the Yeats poem. But despite its scholarly status, it's tremendously contested, since de Man is a controversial deconstructionist - widely recognized as brilliant and important, but not always agreed with. ''Furthermore'', de Man's reading is a secondary source ONLY on the topic of Yeats. It's a primary source on the topic of de Man. And due to the nature of the field, secondary sources on de Man's reading are virtually all critical - not because his reading does not have adherents, but because publishing an article reconfirming de Man's opinion is not considered a useful publication, and so only contrary opinions get published.

This is neither an overly convoluted example, nor an unusual one. There is an endless list of topics that require this level of thought to untangle the nature of primary and secondary sources.

The hedging about using other encyclopedias is a pleasant and rare example of actually molding the guideline to reality, but is done in a uselessly clumsy way, amounting to "unsigned articles in encyclopedias aren't good enough, but we use them anyway." The result moves towards a hardline sourcing guideline with a thousand asterisked exceptions. This is not a direction in which a usable guideline can be found.

====Unattributed material====

The instruction not to remove material that you believe to be true and common knowledge is important, but too weak. The reference to [[Wikipedia:Common knowledge]] is distressing, both because it's unclear to me that the example given (Earth's elliptical orbit) satisfies the criteria there, and because that page seems to me to have a section that tries to depricate [[WP:AGF]] in favor of wikiquette. This use of common knowledge is equivalent to the fact/ opinion mess above - a situation where there is no white line is being phrased as though there were a white line. In reality, the judgments over what does and doesn't need a source are largely done on a case-by-case basis - not by referring to a definition of common knowledge.

This points towards a larger flaw in our understanding of sources. We are basically set up to defer almost universally to the person asking for a source. In reality, we need to recognize that source requests can be made in bad faith or in error. There are many cases where the answer to a request for a source is "No." Requesting a source needs to not be fetishized as an innately reasonable act. Like adding dispute tags or cleanup tags, it is often a reasonable and helpful act. It can also be a trolling or stupid act.

====Beware false authority====

This section starts off by demonstrating the problem with valorizing secondary sources - the process of vetting them is, in the end, subjective, and often no easier than vetting primary sources. The sole privledging of academic sources continues here, impovershing fields with less academic research. (Popular culture, current events, things related to homelife [Washing machines, cooking, furniture], non-theoretical aspects of computing, etc).

The discussion of textbooks is valid only for the sciences and to a lesser degree the social sciences (Where it is valid basically on an undergraduate level only). It is utterly useless for the humanities, where few college textbooks exist, and fewer still are assigned.

====Exceptional claims====

"Reputable news media" is yet another case of a deep well of subjective judgment masquerading as a white line policy. "Reports of a statement by someone that seems out of character, embarrassing, controversial, or against an interest they had previously defended" is similarly flawed.

====Evaluating sources====

In many fields, it is nigh-impossible to publish a critical review of anything. This would be one thing if bad books were simply not reviewed, but in practice bad books are badly reviewed, with reviews focusing excessively on positive points while ignoring negative points.

This does not, of course, mean that sources in those fields cannot be evaluated.

====Check multiple sources====

Certainly nice practice, but is this, practically speaking, ever going to happen?

====Issues to look out for====

The Stormfront/Al Qaeda/Socialist Workers Party comment is another example of the thousand-exception style of policy writing.

====Independent secondary sources====

This seems, ultimately, to point towards coming up with an absolute account. NPOV neither mandates nor encourages this.

====Online Sources: Evaluating Reliability====

The tone of this section is good, but it's trying to collapse all the common sense into one section, and still suffers from a bias towards academic sources. The main problem here is that, by being collapsed into so small a section, it ends up going in circles, and ultimately reads more as "Evaluating sources is hard" but doesn't really point toward an endpoint.

====OS: Bulletin boards, wikis and posts to Usenet====

This section is just nonsense. Usenet, BBs, and wikis are perfectly reliable as primary sources in lots of cases. [[Spoo]] is a featured article based almost entirely on BB posts and Usenet, and nobody with any knowledge about the topic would criticize a one of them.

====OS: Self-publication====

This policy does not fit sensibly with the previous section. Anyone can start a blog, making the identity verification equally problematic. This renders the two functionally equivalent. In some cases, of course, we can verify a blogger's identity. We can also, in some cases, verify a message board poster's identity. Also, the professional researcher criteria is insufficient. Consider a situation like Ronald Moore, creator of the new Battlestar Galactica. He maintains a blog on the Sci-Fi Channel's website. This is clearly a reliable source of information about the show, despite the fact that he is not a "researcher" in any useful definition.

====OS: Self-publication on self====

The above BSG example (As well as the Spoo example) fail this test too. No independent corroboration is going to be forthcoming on such examples of information being released about a media product. (How would this even be possible? No secondary source is going to base itself on anything other than the statements of the creators.) This is a BLP guideline masquerading as a larger guideline. A more sane guideline would note that when a person's own account is contradicted by other accounts, this should be noted - not to cast de facto suspicion on a person's own account.

====OS:Self-published sources as secondary sources====

The blanket ban on using self-published sources as secondary sources is in flat contradiction with the "professional researcher" clause several sections up.

Why is extreme caution necessary to use, say, the Stormfront website as a primary source about Stormfront's beliefs? This is silly. What we're trying to prevent is allowing Stormfront to write their own biography.

The note about company websites is not a matter of reliable sources - it's a matter of NPOV. A general note that, when conclusions of primary sources are contradicted by other sources, whether primary or secondary, we do not defer wholly to the primary source would be both sufficient and appropriate.

====Finding good sources====

A bit of a pep talk, and an odd one at that. We should be cautious about suggesting that the ideal Wikipedia editor is going to devote an inordinate amount of time to the task and go do book-based research. It's nice, yes, but it does cut rather severely against the notion that "anyone" can edit the encyclopedia, and is an affront to the volunteer nature of the project. We should make sure this guideline can be followed by the volunteers we have - not by the ones we wish we had.

====BLP====

This is not a guideline related to sourcing.

====History====

This section is working more towards a notion of "authoritative" sources instead of reliable ones. Authoritative sources are of interest only if we are trying to present an absolute point of view. We're not.

====Sciences====

The claim about "reporting material in different fields" is problematic, due particularly to the rise of interdisceplenary journals.

Multiple studies have pointed to systemic flaws in the scientific peer review system. This becomes a serious issue when dealing with cutting-edge science, which is often difficult at best to summarize in generalizable terms. The combination of these facts poses serious problems for verifiability. (This is a case where we need to be worried about primary sources - where a non-expert could not possibly interpret them.)

The popular press does not cover science less well than any other academic field. This warning should not be specific to science.

Unless we want to create a general list of reputable publications, the "which science journals" section doesn't actually provide useful guidance.

arXiv needs to be used with extreme caution, but an article on, say, the Poincare conjecture can't really be written without it at present.

The statistics section encourages exactly the sort of judgment that the page forbids on other topics such as blogs and Usenet.

====Popular culture and fiction====

As said before, nonsense - popular culture articles on contemporary culture cannot be written without reference to blogs, Usenet, bulletin boards, etc. This is a fundamental shift in what a source is, and we need to respond to it.

====References====

No reputable style manuals or research guidelines are cited - only Jimbo's statements.

====External links====

Again, a subject-specific guideline is being passed off as a general guideline. These pages on primary/secondary sources are good for history - not for the general case.

That's all I've got. [[User:Phil Sandifer|Phil Sandifer]] 17:29, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

Best, Phil Sandifer sandifer@english.ufl.edu

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.

On Oct 10, 2006, at 6:48 AM, David Gerard wrote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Reliable_sources#Top-to- bottom_rewrite_proposed

WP:RS is an essay, not a guideline. I can say that because the incumbents are now blindly edit-warring to their preferred version, even against corrections of grammatical errors. That's the sign of a process that has become way too introverted and really, really needs to be brought back in touch with the real world.

• d.

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