Ken Arromdee: wrote:
On Mon, 5 Dec 2011, Steve Summit wrote:
Even if Demi Moore is
perfectly reliable on the truth surrounding her birth name,
common sense tells you that a 140-character tweet (or two) is not
the sort of place where you can make nuanced distinctions...
The trouble with this reasoning is that BLP subjects who are not specifically
experienced with Wikipedia won't make statements with lawyer-like precision.
That's true, and remains so if you generalize it to "people who
are not specifically experienced with formal reporting won't make
statements with lawyer-like precision".
If you reject the BLP subject's own statement on
the grounds that there could
be some nuance which makes it say other than what it seems to say, you end up
with an excuse that pretty much lets you ignore all BLP subjects whenever you
want.
I think you've just proved that interpreting primary sources can
be hard (and sometimes borders on OR), which is why when there's
any doubt, it's correct for us to defer to secondary sources --
the more reliable and verifiable the better. So, yes, in this
case, Encyclopaedia Britannica is more reliable than People
magazine is more reliable than Demi Moore herself.
(I agree with you that this is a surprising result, and that it
seems to defy common sense at first. Truth has a way of doing
that, sometimes. :-) )
But it's not "whenever you want", it's "when there's
reasonable
doubt", which there certainly is here.