On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 5:26 PM, WJhonson@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