[WikiEN-l] What's wrong with a dodgy source, properly identified?

Sun May 8 10:37:55 UTC 2005

I don't get it. Journalism follows one practice, academic research 
another. I think Wikipedia follows a modified version of latter.

In journalism, stories are published with no indication of the source 
other than the reporter's name (or the name of the wire service). 
_Sources are not cited_. We rely on the newspaper's editorial staff, 
the newspaper's reputation, and the reporter's responsibility to the 
profession of journalism to follow appropriate standards to insure that 
most of what we read is true. We usually have no way of directly 
evaluating what's behind any story.

In academic research, every source is cited in a way that allows the 
reader to verify it personally. Every fact that appears in a paper is 
either the personal testimony of the author of the paper, we did thus 
and such, we saw thus and such, we concluded thus and such. _Or, it is 
a source citation._ These source citations are usually journal 
references, but may occasionally be "personal communications." The 
journals and sources are simply _named._ Sez who? Sez Frotz and Glotz 
1989, Zeitschrift für Krankschaft und Geerschift, 22(6):116-122. In 
most cases the reader can easily verify that the Zeitschrift exists and 
that pages 116-122 of that number have that article and that it says 
what the paper's author says it says.

_It is left completely up to the reader to know whether or not the 
Zeitschrift is a peer reviewed journal or not, what its reputation is, 
and whether Frotz and Glotz are competent_.

I completely fail to see _any problem in general_ in citing USENET as a 
source, provided an actual citation is given so the reader can verify 
that the posting says what the article says it says.

That does not mean that a statement citing USENET should necessarily go 
in an article, or that citing USENET, or The New York Times, or 
_Nature_, waves a magic wand over a passage that protects it from 
criticism, discussion, replacement, or deletion.

A good example of what I think to be an entirely appropriate use of 
USENET is in tracking the approximate time when phrases or neologisms 
or memes became current in the Internet community.

Conversely, The Boston Globe might carry a story quoting sources 
criticizing a judge. That would be a very reliable source. That does 
NOT mean that it would automatically be appropriate for a Wikipedia 
article to say ANY of these things:

*Judge so-and-so lacks proper judicial demeanor.

*Judge so-and-so was criticized for lacking proper judicial demeanor.

*On day so-and-so, page so-and-so, the Boston Globe quoted so-and-so as 
saying Judge so-and-so is "a very passionate woman, and is not afraid 
to go and dance and have a couple of glasses of wine and have a good 
time. She's not your typical judge."

The third form is a valid citation, but may or may not be appropriate 
to the context of an article.

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/