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