[WikiEN-l] CITE nazis

[stevertigo]

--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> In many cases, the issue is further complicated by the question of 
> exactly _how_ a source is used.
> ...
> And the NYT and Weekly World News are both more or less easy cases.  The 
> difficult cases are partisan publications writing "factually" about 
> political events, and things of that nature.

Right. There are plenty of out unreliable "reliable sources" out there 
(The Pentagon, etc.). Even after tracing back --from blog to local TV page to 
major news media to an anonymous source somewhere high up in the Eskimo 
government --even deriving an "original source" is often just linking to some 
political page with somebody's claims and interpretations on it. 

As I said before sources are often just claims and interpretations, and 
virtually none of it is "facts." So why should Wikipedia expect to be a higher 
standard? And of we want to introduce some value judgements about who's 
interpretations are more correct, we need to understand that such is often too 
close to POV to deal with without some broader editorial policy (and heirarchy).

The case in point which brought me to post the thread had nothing to do with 
particular claims though, and had everything to do with OWN (incivil abuse of 
reverts) with regard to how certain material is presented: as somebody's 
clinical interpretation, or or as an actual human-readable explanation of a 
human event or concept. Calls to CITE are too often just smokescreen for a weak 
or incivil or POV argument, and if you do give a source (some famous intellectual, 
for example), they say "get a real source" (a 'The Pentagon' spokeswoman for example.) 
I pay no attention to such calls for "CITE."

The way I interpret that policy is simply as a "give us something, anything" 
(to click on) policy --it does'nt establish *veracity* (just as reading the lede 
to [[Truth]] doesnt inspire one to read any more of the article) but it does give 
people something to click on and feel good about the truthiness of the spun
interpretation of facts they are reading. A claims X, B claims Y, C claims Z, 
[some links at the bottom] is about as good as it gets for any news source at any
particular snapshot of time. The "higher standard" is NPOV, not veracity.

-SV


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