On 28/03/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote:
On Wed, 28 Mar 2007 20:54:24 +0100, "David
Gerard" <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
>the
>blind idiot worship of print sources in [[WP:RS]] doesn't help make us
>a better encyclopedia.
That really helps move the debate along...
I find it hard to describe it otherwise. Look at this thread. Tell me
how anyone who's ever actually been written about could regard the
press as the infallible source of reliability it's being painted as.
Sometimes we also draw on primary sources. The
benchmark here is not,
in my view, reliability, but authority. If Joe Bloggs is an
*authority* on mediaeval history, then it is valid to cite
JoeBloggs.com in support of arcana in articles on mediaeval history.
Probably. The problem is it might be [[Eric Lerner]], not Joe Bloggs
- as non-experts it is very hard for us to tell the difference. So we
fall back to requiring that most things be filtered through the
editorial processes of dependable secondary sources, and that should
work well enough.
Yes. You can't legislate clue. But assuming all print sources are good
and all blogs are bad is blind idiot worship of WP:RS.
Do remember, though, that when we use primary sources
we substitute
our own judgment for editorial or peer review. That's fine as long as
it's me making the call, because in the main I trust my own judgment,
but what if it's that notorious POV-pusher David Gerard, who is
well-known for trying to slipstream support for his seditious view
that an open Wiki can provide a reliable and accurate distillation of
human knowledge? This is nonsense, as any fule kno and surely we
cannot allow such crypto-communist propaganda to infect the project.
Or the reverse, depending on who's adding the content. "This is good
because I said it's good and I know these things" is a dangerous
argument on Wikipedia.
Well, yeah. The trouble is there's no way to write a policy that
legislates clue without running into edge cases that make you look
stupid, e.g. [[Peter Hollingworth]].
- d.