I think the question of quality of sources cannot be avoided. Where I live we had a young man who made a living off of stories of flying saucers, cattle mutilations and similar stuff, none of which was fact based (as I have lived here for many years, surely I would have observed at least one of the numberless phenomena he reported). He is notorious enough that should someone wish to write a Wikipedia article it would not be questioned. Simply a lot of independent sources doesn't raise crap to fact. The modest article Ray Gardner wrote about himself falls in an entirely different category, nothing in his article is subject to serious factual dispute, despite lack of any way of definitively validating whether, for example, he worked for Electronic Arts.
Fred
From: tarquin tarquin@planetunreal.com Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Fri, 02 Jan 2004 13:22:02 +0000 To: Wikipedia-En wikiEN-l@wikipedia.org Subject: [WikiEN-l] Insufficient primary sources
The matter of pet scientific theories and personal biographies have something in common: we can't verify them because the only material we can find on them is written by the author.
So I suggest that we focus on this angle. We already have a policy that "Wikipedia is not a primary source". This provides sufficient justification for not having these types of articles in WP. We should perhaps try to come up with loose guidelines as to how many primary sources we require.
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