[WikiEN-l] Arbitration Committee Seeking Comment

[Matt Brown]

On 6/7/05, Geoff Burling <llywrch at agora.rdrop.com> wrote:

> And I'm sure that there are other issues one could discuss. However,
> if we could agree that published sources -- either primary or secondary --
> can be cited, but unpublished works can not be, this would solve
> most of the problem.

That is a position that I could stand behind.  

I would be opposed to a suggestion that we should limit ourselves to
published sources that can be acquired through Amazon, Google and the
average inter-library loan service, however.

Obviously, the easier the sources can be accessed the better, but I
would not rule out using rare or old books, magazines and newspapers
even if not commonly archived, small publications, and foreign
language works.

That said, I think that outside a certain vanishingly small subset of
very controversial articles, Wikipedia's problem is not the citing of
hard-to-verify sources, but the absense of sources at all.  Outside
the context of Israel vs. Palestine, certain crackpot science
theories, and a few other controversial places, I don't see much of a
problem at present.

And I'd rather someone cite an unpublished source than none.  It's
always possible that a better reference than that unpublished source
may be findable by someone else, or a published source that references
that unpublished one.

-Matt