[WikiEN-l] Let us not attack sources as unreliable without reason

[Fred Bauder]

A reliable source will include a specific document and a page in that
document. It is true that messing around emailing someone who has cited an
ambiguous reference is generally pointless, in fact, may constitute original
research. In this case we have a secondary source who may or may not have
gotten his information from a reliable resource. It does no harm to contact
him, might even get him involved with Wikipedia, but it would be wrong to
make too much from his replies or lack thereof.

The question comes down much more to folks who made estimates and published
them in some accessible and identifiable format.

Some folks write books that are quite derivative. With respect to Communist
artocities Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a number of books of this nature. He is
a political scientist, but when he comes up with a number, say for how many
died in the Ukrainian famine, you can be sure he did not independently
calculate the number but is quoting it from some other estimate. This makes
citations to his work, not as good as to references where the nature of the
estimate is more transparent.

Fred

> From: Robert <rkscience100 at yahoo.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 06:13:02 -0800 (PST)
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Let us not attack sources as unreliable without reason
> 
> Slim writes:
>> Would you please post your correspondence with him on
>> the Talk page, as you indicated you would, so that other
>> editors can judge whether he was evasive in response to
>> your enquiry? Your claims about Mitchell Bard as a
>> source have implications for a number of Wikipedia
>> articles in which he is quoted.
> 
> 
> This makes no sense.  Are you seriously suggesting that
> Wikipedia should consider sources as unreliable if one of
> our thousands of anonymous editors doesn't get instant
> gratification from a writer and scholar that they have
> never met?  There are hundreds of respected researchers out
> there who do not waste their time answering e-mails from
> the millions of people on the Internet.
> 
> Having mommy buy you a computer and pay for your AOL
> account does not make you a colleague of any academic or
> writer, and does not mean that they have to answer you
> correspondance.
> 
> Every week on the Phyics and Chemistry Usenet newsgroups we
> have people (kooks, really) claim that mainstream chemistry
> and physics is wrong. Their proof?  They sent their own
> letters, questions and theories to leading scientists, and
> the scientists did not respond.
> 
> Is this really proof that we shouldn't trust these sources?
> No, it is only proof that writers and researchers don't
> answer every demand they get from people with an AOL
> account.
> 
> 
> Robert (RK)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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