[WikiEN-l] Policies, notability et al, was Request to Wikipedians for BBC Documentary
Surreptitiousness
surreptitious.wikipedian at googlemail.com
Wed Aug 19 09:15:58 UTC 2009
wjhonson at aol.com wrote:
> I just want to address this one quote.
>
> <<You also don't have an article if you have a lot of primary
> and tertiary sources, but very few secondary sources.>>
>
> Let's say that you have the "tertiary" (shudder) source EB 1911,
> "Cleopatra". You are aware that an enormous number of our articles
> were created *solely* from the 1911 EB are you not?
>
You seem to be labouring under the misapprehension this is "my"
argument, rather than just one argument that I have heard put forwards.
I'm not going to waste time defending it, since it isn't my argument to
start with. You'd be better off looking at [[WP:NOR]] and working out
how to amend it to reflect what you believe is consensus. I am well
aware of the provenance of many of our articles.
> So in conclusion, I don't think we have any policy language that would
> say that tertiary sources without secondary ones would make an article
> subject to attack, except possibly a "make this better please" tag.
>
I kind of like the idea that people will tag an article for clean up
rather than nominate it for deletion. It makes me kind of warm and
fuzzy and nostalgic. The thrust of the argument against tertiary sources
is this: "Third party sources don't provide any evidence of notability
unless they contain some sort of commentary on their subject matter,
othewise they are classed as tertiary sources." What's at issue is that
there are good faith misunderstandings of policy and guidance out there,
which it seems it is hard to correct. We seem to have created language
which doesn't solve any problems at all. Look at this fragment from
WP:NOR: "Tertiary sources can be helpful in providing broad summaries of
topics that involve many primary and secondary sources. Some tertiary
sources may be more reliable than others...". That's a tremendous weapon
to charge any tertiary source not to taste as "not as reliable as these
other ones that I like". Look at this fragment: "Deciding whether
primary, secondary or tertiary sources are more suitable on any given
occasion is a matter of common sense and good editorial judgment, and
should be discussed on article talk pages." That leaves the whole issue
to argument, with no onus on either side to budge from their position.
We've probably entrenched the idea that it's better to stick to your
guns than seek compromise. After all, why wouldn;t "your" opinion be the
one that is common sense and good judgment. Who is going to admit
having bad judgment. Add to this that arb-com won't touch content
disputes, and you are left with an atmosphere where both sides try to
act as nice as possible whilst trying to goad the other party into a
mistake for which they can get blocked. Is it any wonder disputes can
fester across Wikipedia?
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