[WikiEN-l] Slashdot article

[Delirium]

Todd Allen wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 1:20 PM,  <WJhonson at aol.com> wrote:
>   
>> In a message dated 10/25/2008 11:28:10 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
>> delirium at hackish.org writes:
>>
>>
>>     
>>> than "some guy on Wikipedia has investigated, and determined that all
>>> the sources are in fact wrong".>>
>>>
>>>       
>> ---
>>
>> This part is great.  Made me smile.
>>     
> And that part is exactly -why- we require sources, including to change
> something at a subject's request. If reliable sources indicate
> something, and the subject says "It isn't so" but we've got nothing to
> verify that, we can't simply say "Oh, alright," and change the
> article.
>
> One thing we -can- do in such a case, as stated earlier, is to change
> that particular part of the article to a quoted form, e.g. "The New
> York Times reported in 2006 that foo did bar", rather than "Foo did
> bar <ref name="nyt">". In that case, our statement -cannot- be
> inaccurate, provided that the New York Times really did make such a
> report-we're simply in that case asserting that such a report was
> made.
>   

Just to avoid making *too* strong a "sources are everything" comment 
here, we can of course also exercise some editorial judgment when it 
comes to weighting parts of a biography and writing intro-text 
descriptions and so on. If a source says that someone was born in 1947, 
and no source says otherwise, in some sense we're stuck, even if it's 
wrong---absent original research, the literature says he was born in 
1947, so we'll duly report that. But just because someone somewhere has 
called someone "a director" doesn't necessarily mean our intro paragraph 
has to say that he's "a director". That he directed a film, the body 
text should say, but which of the things in the body text is worth 
highlighting in the intro sentence/paragraph should be done by 
summarizing the rest of the article with some common sense.

-Mark