[WikiEN-l] Thousands of *awful* articles on websites

[James Hare]

This is my opinion about references: Each one to its own.

What that means is that depending on the topic, we should use sources that
are appropriate. Something like science and history should typically always
use peer reviewed publications, however webcomics do not have peer reviewed
publications about them. That would be an appropriate time to invoke sources
that would be more unorthodox for traditional scholarly subjects like
science: blogs. I, for one, would trust a web comic blog about web comics
because that's the best there is.

Likewise, just because something is appropriate for one subject, doesn't
mean it's appropriate for the next. If a web comic blog says that George
Washington crossed the Delaware and defeated the Hessians, we shouldn't cite
that web comic in our article about George Washington.

This brings up another point of debate: using primary sources. There are
times when primary sources are appropriate, and there are times when it's
not. When quoting what someone famous said, the primary source is *the best*
source for that information. That's what primary sources are for: pure facts
(like what someone said). And then there are the times when secondary
sources are more appropriate. Use those, then.

There really isn't a source, or type of source, that is perfect for every
kind of knowledge imaginable. Each one to its own.

On 1/3/07, Bogdan Giusca <liste at dapyx.com> wrote:
>
> Wednesday, January 3, 2007, 10:38:55 PM, Jeff wrote:
>
> > Bogdan Giusca wrote:
>
> >> Can anyone suggest any solution to this?
> > The sooner we start allowing blogs and other self-published publications
> > be reliable sources for these sorts of things, the better.
>
> Imagine the spam we'd get then as "references". You know that a link
> from Wikipedia is pretty valuable for one's Google PageRank.
>
>
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