On 12/28/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
George Herbert wrote:
Is there any agreement for there being a manner in which to demonstrate
to
the community's consensus satisfaction that a claimed source has been
added
fraudulently and either does not really exist or does not really say what the citation claims it does?
No. The burden of proving that a source has been fraudulently added is on the person making the claim of fraud. Whether a source that is not directly quoted says what is claimed is often a matter of interpretation.
What I seem to have been seeing here is that there's an unreasonable tendency to assume that a citation is legitimate.
Why is that unreasonable? Such a presumption (rather than assumption) is consistent with assuming good faith on the part of the writer.
We consistently see situations where obviously, someone involved in a dispute is not acting in good faith.
The ability of subtle vandals to, for example, edit "apparently reasonably" includes putting fake sources in, or making claims regarding sources which are difficult to verify (find a book in Library of Congress or Amazon, but which you can't locate in any convenient normal library catalogs, and then claim that it says so-and-so; simply fabricate a book name/ISBN).
It's easy to defend the first - someone can find a reference to the existence of the book with a little effort, but is unlikely to be able to find any copies to see what's really in it.
It's a little harder to defend the second if we have reasonable standards, such as "A reliable book source has to have some sort of verifyable bibliographic entry SOMEWHERE". If the burden of proof is on the disprover, however, it's nearly impossible to ever meet that burden.
I would prefer if there
were a healthy degree of skepticism associated with citations - any
citation
that does not contain enough information for a reasonable researcher to locate the original source, or at least verify the existence of the
original
source, should be challengable in a reasonable manner.
If you doubt the citation you can always check it out. There should undoubtedly be standards for what a citation includes. In the unusual circumstances where you think you have a bogus citation you should start by asking the contributor about it.
Right, so I see citation X, saying so-and-so, and the contributor says "Oh, well, that's what it says." I can't find any evidence that the reference book actually even exists. "Please tell me where to find a copy of the book", I ask the contributor, who then either says nothing in return, or claims it's in the University of So-and-So library, where the University of So-and-So has plans to put its catalog online sometime in 2011 due to budget shortages.