[WikiEN-l] Good thing newspapers are reliable sources!

[Delirium]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 1:54 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2008/oct/12/robots-japan
> 
> Lets be real: The only reason we accept newspapers in general as
> reliable sources is because they are often the only readily available
> source of higher quality than "some dude on the internet said so".  In
> many of Wikipedia's popular "popular culture" articles newspapers may
> often be the only third party sources available at all.

To some extent, this is true of all our sources, though. Books aren't 
really particularly good sources if you just take books as a whole, and 
academic-press books are only somewhat better, and only then if you're 
careful to treat specially the ones that are clearly fringe views in a 
field, and follow up with reviews of the books in journals to find 
whether they have important errata that would affect the point being 
cited (quite frequent, even for respected academic presses).

-Mark