I think the question of quality of sources cannot be avoided. Where I live
we had a young man who made a living off of stories of flying saucers,
cattle mutilations and similar stuff, none of which was fact based (as I
have lived here for many years, surely I would have observed at least one of
the numberless phenomena he reported). He is notorious enough that should
someone wish to write a Wikipedia article it would not be questioned. Simply
a lot of independent sources doesn't raise crap to fact. The modest article
Ray Gardner wrote about himself falls in an entirely different category,
nothing in his article is subject to serious factual dispute, despite lack
of any way of definitively validating whether, for example, he worked for
Electronic Arts.
Fred
From: tarquin <tarquin(a)planetunreal.com>
Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
Date: Fri, 02 Jan 2004 13:22:02 +0000
To: Wikipedia-En <wikiEN-l(a)wikipedia.org>
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Insufficient primary sources
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.
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