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

[Scott MacDonald]

Case in point.

The Daily Telegraph would generally be regarded as one of the UK better
newspapers in terms of accuracy.


[[James William Middleton]] is one of those terrible articles written by as
pastiche of passing media stories. 

To that article was added the seemingly interesting fact that he memorised
the Scripture lesson for his sister Kate Middleton's wedding, because he
couldn't read it due to dyslexia. Despite being somewhat unflattering, it
seems OK, because it is sourced from the Telegraph.

However, if you look at the source:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/theroyalfamily/8505562/uKate-Middleto
ns-brother-triumphs-over-his-dyslexia.html 

What it says is "Belatedly, one learns the reason: James, is dyslexic. "He
knew that if, on the day, he looked down at the words on the page, they
would be of scant help," I am told."

!!!!***"I am told"***!!!!!

"I am told"- that means the paper is repeating hearsay, it isn't technically
saying "this is true" only "someone has said". Who? We don't know? Could be
someone who really knows - or not. 

If you look at my essay [[WP:OTTO]] it demonstrates explicitly that the
Telegraph (at least on that occasion) was quite happy to parrot a story from
the Daily Mail -dependent on an anonymous source - that the Telegraph itself
probably didn't even know.

Now, the story about James is quite possibly true (who knows)- and is
certainly sourced. However, if we were actually serious about verifiability
we would have to say "this is insufficient for verification".

The problem isn't so much that we take verification over truth, but that we
take the fact that something is mentioned in a source as being adequate
verification, without examining carefully what the source is actually
claiming, or the reliability of its information.

And actually, if you were to apply a proper level of verification scepticism
to all the information on articles such as [[James William Middleton]],
you'd have very little of the article left. That may well be a good thing.

Scott