[WikiEN-l] Widespread disagreement with Wikipedia:Verifiability

[Matthew Brown]

On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 5:26 PM,  <WJhonson at aol.com> wrote:
>  What I think we do not want, is tendentious mass-deletions of sources,  which
>  the editors in those articles have accepted, by a person who has not
>  actually investigated the source, but is only characterizing it by its *type*
>  instead of its veracity.
>
>  Wikipedia is nothing if not grey.  Which is why, on RSN, we generally  divert
>  hypothetical discussion into specific discussions.  Hypothetical  discussion
>  of types of sources ends up too many times generating situations that  we'd
>  wish to avoid.

Very much agreed.

To give an example from my own editing (on the subject of railroad
matters): I regularly cite UtahRails.net as a source.  This is a
website owned, operated, and written by a single individual, Joe
Strapac.  Someone favoring automatic judgment on a source's
reliability based only on its publication method will probably have a
fit at this point; it's self-published, with no formal fact-checking
or editorial judgment standing between the author and his audience.

However, Joe Strapac is a respected author on these subjects, with a
large list of published works on this exact subject matter.  This
makes him a noted authority.  The fact is that on such subjects he is
very likely to be correct, and he has a lot of professional and
personal reputation riding on the quality of his research.
Furthermore, the fact-checking his online published work receives from
readers of the site is probably just as good as that which his
publishers are able to give; they'll simply pass his words to a few
other experts in the field for a once-over before publishing, at most.

Sources must be evaluated individually.

-Matt