[WikiEN-l] The vexed issue of sources

[Thomas Dalton]

> > The source being used in the article is not the writing on the wall.
> > The source is the few Wikipedians that have seen the writing. While
> > the writing is probably reliable, the few Wikipedians are not.
>
> By this reasoning, a source isn't a book, it's the few Wikipedians who have
> read the book.

Technically, yes, by my reasoning the source is always the author of
the Wikipedia article, however in the case of that Wikipedian reading
a published source that a significant number of readers can verify,
the fact that the information reached the article via a Wikipedian
becomes trivial, so we ignore it. If we can verify the source, then
the Wikipedian is just as reliable as the source itself - the
important thing in all of this is reliability.

> How exactly is the writing on the wall different from a book?  (Sure, not
> every Wikipedian can go read the writing, but not every Wikipedian has access
> to a particular book either.)

The difference is simply the number of people that have access to the
source. I'm not going to try and give an exact definition of how many
people is enough, because there are bound to be exceptions to any
definition I could come up with. A book with copies in any large
library is clearly accessible enough, some writing on a wall in one
place is not. The line is drawn somewhere inbetween, but I'm not going
to try and say where.