[Foundation-l] Ensuring veracity of articles based on print sources

[Andrew Gray]

On 06/10/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Andrew Gray wrote:
>
> >On 03/10/06, James Hare <messedrocker at gmail.com> wrote:

> >It would be simpler just to toss the name into copac.ac.uk or
> >catalog.loc.gov and see if it appears! But this still doesn't tell us
> >anything beyond "I am claiming this book supports me".
> >
> Absolutely!   And that claim is only sometimes a hoax.  It can as easily
> be a good-faith misinterpretation of the information.

But of course.

The problem is, the original proposal here was to deal with people
making up sources - an explicitly bad-faith action. But the suggested
system is a system that is equally suceptible to being gamed in
bad-faith. You want to game this? You make a false claim with regards
to a reputable (but hard to identify) work. Done.

So instituting this system wouldn't deal with the bad-faith people in
any way, and just create vast amounts of (admittedly automatible, but
still) make-work for "verifiers". Which doesn't really help the
project, it just plasters around the original problem...

> >It still doesn't get past the fact that I belive David when he says
> >"This band does indeed appear on page seventeen of Australian Indie
> >Rock Monthly, August 1979", but am slightly less inclined to believe
> >the unknown chap claiming he's found something earthshattering in a
> >1937 issue of a Russian underground newspaper...
> >
> It takes a long time to build trust, and there are still many long
> standing Wikipedians whose judgement I would question on some issues but
> I would trust on others.  I'm sure we all keep personal lists of that
> source.  The newbie who quotes the 1937 Russian newspaper in support of
> his point could very well be right.  It would a gross assumption of bad
> faith to reject his citation solely on the basis that he is a newbie.

Oh, indeed. It's just... there's a difference between "assuming good
faith" and "assuming trust"

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk