On Sun, Oct 26, 2008 at 2:57 PM, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Todd Allen wrote:
On Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 1:20 PM, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
In a message dated 10/25/2008 11:28:10 AM Pacific Daylight Time, delirium@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
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In this particular case, I would certainly see no problem in changing "Foo is a director" to "Foo directed bar" if that were the only issue. But this had mainly gotten off that issue to a more general discussion of what to do if a subject disputes sourced information in an article. (Obviously, if a subject disputes -unsourced- information in an article, we should remove it at once.)