Tony Sidaway wrote:
Matt Brown said:
It is definitely the case that we'd rather a bad cite than no cite.
I strongly disagree. The only cites should be good cites. Bad ones are misleading and wasteful. A good cite is easy enough to make: one that accurately describes the cited material and relates it to the subjectmatter. This latest fuss was, at bottom, over attempts by some of us to transform a bad cite (a statement that a UN source said something that we didn't know it said) into a good one (a statement that a secondary source gave a figure and attributed it to a UN source). The former would have misled the reader, the latter would have given the reader more accurate information. As it turned out the cited UN source did not contain the information, but another UN source did. The secondary source proved to be in error so the inference drawn from it was incorrect in a small but significant detail.
I would be more supportive of Matt's position. When you try to divide citations into "good cites" and "bad cites" you make a determination which should also be subject to the "cite your sources" rule. Rather than proposing that one source or the other would have misled the reader, we would do better in such circumstances to cite both sources, and let the reader decide which misleading he prefers to follow.
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