On 10/19/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Self-published books aren't neccesarily bad
sources either. I've heard about
2 guys who are writing a jazz encyclopedia and publishing it on Lulu. It
might be a self-published source, but it won't promote their opinion. I'd
see no harm in using their work as a source and I'm sure I'd have the same
feelings with other self-published books.
If it is self-published by recognized authorites in a field, I don't
see anything wrong with using it as a source, absolutely. Broad
categories of anything shouldn't be treated as automatically good or
bad. That's the problem, people aren't making these kinds of
distinctions and instead are acting like, as David Gerard put it,
"insane robots" mechanically repeating a sentence from a policy page.