[WikiEN-l] Insufficient primary sources

Fri Jan 2 20:37:47 UTC 2004

tarquin wrote:

> The matter of pet scientific theories and personal biographies have 
> something in common: we can't verify them because the only material we 
> can find on them is written by the author.
>
> So I suggest that we focus on this angle. We already have a policy 
> that "Wikipedia is not a primary source".
> This provides sufficient justification for not having these types of 
> articles in WP.
> We should perhaps try to come up with loose guidelines as to how many 
> primary sources we require.

Autobiographies can still be moved to user pages.

What you call "primary sources" can be furnished with an appropriate 
disclaimer.  I just don't like being in the position where we are 
judging whether someone else's ideas are worth publishing.  If there are 
no Google hits on the subject other than the author's web page we can 
say that; if no books have been published on it we can say that; if 
there has been no peer review (an overated criterion) we can say that. 
 If the proposed theory threatens to become unduly long, or spills over 
into more than one article page we can probably take steps to edit it 
down to size.  The long-windedness of some of these people is often more 
reflective of their inability to write clearly, than of their theory. 
 Many may even thank us for editing things down when they see that it 
makes their ideas "clearer".

Discussing "how many primary sources we require" is playing a numbers 
game.  It doesn't matter.  It is also not our responsibility to try to 
disprove these theories.  That is not a requirement of NPOV; they can be 
met by a brief statement as part of the disclaimer.  It often seems that 
the compulsion which "science advocates" in our community show for 
disproving the unprovable is just another variation of throwing tasty 
morsels to the trolls.  Letting our theorsts sit quietly in their 
playpens will generate a lot less crying than spanking them.

I take a decidedly history-of-science perspective on these issues where 
even the scientifically invalid may neverthess be valid history.  There 
are better ways to deal with these issues than simply deleting them.  I 
would be glad to work on a respectful boilerplate disclaimerfor these 
pages that would also allay the concerns of those who fear that we are 
going to be overrun by an endless series of nutball theories.

Ec