[WikiEN-l] News agencies are not RSs

[Ian Woollard]

On 30/06/2009, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> What are policies for?  We tend not to ask this often enough.
>
> I say that policies are generally there to create reasonable
> expectations, of editors contributing to Wikipedia, under what you could
> call "normal circumstances".  We have IAR because not all circumstances
> are normal, and application of policy can lead to the "wrong" answer.

The problem is that there are always cabals as well as single people
that simply believe strange things.

So if somebody (anybody, but particularly an admin) does something
strange, are they a member of a cabal or is there something happening
they can't tell you? If they're a member of a cabal or simply believe
something strange then they need to be resisted, but if there is
something they can't tell you then that's much more likely to be OK.

The trick is that an OTRS ticket is a policy compliant item tells you
that there's an official thing happening without revealing what it is;
the chance of it being a cabal is then low, and most sensible editors
will back-off.

> WP:BLP has as nutshell "Biographical material must be written with the
> greatest care and attention to verifiability, neutrality and avoiding
> original research", which I agree with; together with stuff about
> ethical and legal responsibility (which I find somewhat surprising).
> Anyway, the "greatest attention" to verifiability means that high
> standards such as more than one source can be applied, even if news
> agencies were always reliable sources (which is very debatable, I
> think). "Be very firm about the use of high quality references", it
> says. That's the letter.

That wasn't the problem here. The source was probably more or less
sufficiently reliable that it shouldn't have been removed on those
grounds. So the admins were essentially lying to the editor. IMO
that's the real problem, and the anonymous editor was actually
behaving quite normally and fairly reasonably.

> Charles

-- 
-Ian Woollard

"All the world's a stage... but you'll grow out of it eventually."