[WikiEN-l] Otto Middleton (a morality tale)

[Scott MacDonald]

Yup.

But my point is celebrity stories in newspapers, if they use unnamed or
unattributable sources, are not reliable and should never amount to
verification.

We might as well source things from random internet blogs and claim: "but
this is verification (it may be true or not, but we don't care about
truth)".

"Verification not truth" must not be a suicide pact and certainly not an
excuse for sloppy publishing of gossip on BLPS.

Scott

-----Original Message-----
From: wikien-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikien-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Ian Woollard
Sent: 13 May 2011 01:30
To: English Wikipedia
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Otto Middleton (a morality tale)

On 13/05/2011, Scott MacDonald <doc.wikipedia at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> The point is that the story of "Otto the true earring-eating Dog of Kate
> Middleton" was also verifiable from multiple reliable sources, despite
being
> a crock of shit. (Indeed you can find articles published as late as last
> week referring to
> "Kate's dog Otto" - despite the hoax being identified a year ago).

We're never going to avoid untrue things being in the Wikipedia.
Sometimes, the sources make mistakes. (And yes, it's much more likely
to be a mistake with The Daily Mail).

But I don't in any way agree that that impacts on verifiability over
truth. We have no way to know the real truth about anything for
certain, but verifiability of sources is at least possible.

That's one part of the Wikipedia that has to remain as bedrock. We
have to build the Wikipedia on rock.

> Scott

-- 
-Ian Woollard

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