On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 01:27:15PM -0400, WJhonson(a)aol.com wrote:
They are not the standard however. For example in
biography the number of
"peer-review" articles is vanishingly small. In Physics it is overwhelming.
Quite different animals.
If you are saying that too many of our biography articles (and pop-culture
articles) rely heavily on substandard sources, I completely agree.
You are wrong to lump "self-published
material" with "even from experts".
That isn't what the policy states, nor what we hashed out over and over years
ago on this very point. We made a clear distinction between self-published
material from non-experts, and self-published material from experts. You
argument seems to blur that distinction that we carefully tried to draw.
Here is the entire text on the subject of self-published expert
sources from the current version of WP:V:
Self-published material may, in some circumstances, be acceptable when
produced by an established expert on the topic of the article whose
work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable
third-party publications. However, caution should be exercised when
using such sources: if the information in question is really worth
reporting, someone else is likely to have done so.
This is hardly a ringing endorsement of the use of self-published expert
writing. It explicitly encourages cautious use and a search for more
reliable sources (the "someone else").
In the end, we _should not_ be encouraging the use of self-published
expert writing, for the reasons I laid out in an earlier email. A lack
of ediitorial review is a magnet for theories and interpretations whose
due weight in our articles is very low.
- Carl