[WikiEN-l] Blog Entries (Bauer fork)

[John Lee]

On 3/28/07, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:
>
> > If the claims are that
> > important, surely they will be picked up, verified and repeated by
> > newspapers or other media?
>
> That might be true if it's actually about a member of parliament, but
> there
> are claims that can have limited audiences, and yet be "important" in the
> sense that they are still encyclopediac subjects.  It may be that nobody
> picks up the claim because nobody picks up most claims related to the
> topic,
> rather than because this claim is particularly unimportant.


Thus we arrive at the problem of systemic bias - certain aspects of the
things we cover may not be sufficiently covered in full by secondary
sources. The question is, do we loosen our definition of ourselves as an
encyclopaedia, i.e. a tertiary source, for the sake of becoming a knowledge
base which becomes the first secondary source for particular topics, or do
we remain rigid and refuse to accept information which has yet to be
published/cited in any secondary source?

There's no clearcut answer, but I lean towards the latter. Maybe I'm a bit
biased, but from my experience, loosening our sourcing requirements for
areas with lacunae due to systemic bias (e.g. Malaysian topics - being a
Malaysian editor, I frequently run into articles with questionable content)
only leads to people running wild with republishing claims from primary
sources such as blogs, without regard for whether the content is actually
from a decently reliable source.

It's just my opinion, but I would lean against opening the floodgates here.
If the information in a primary source has been cited in secondary sources,
there shouldn't be anything particularly wrong with citing the primary
source - but we should never be the first primary or secondary source for
anything.

Johnleemk