[WikiEN-l] Verifiability equating to notability

Wed Apr 26 20:09:27 UTC 2006

Christopher Erickson wrote:

>My beef is this ... What counts as a reliable source?  Does a mention of a
>POV-pushing political phrase in heresy-hunting leftist rag count as a
>reliable source, such that said phrase could be used to label people and
>parties that may go 10 or 20% in the general direction claimed, but not the
>100% claimed by the label applied to them?  Lately I've had such run-ins.
>POV-pushing publications (even if respected by otherwise respectable people)
>do not count as verifiability.   
>
Rewrite the above substituting only "rightist" for "leftist" and the 
results come to the same thing.  If you get away from political 
philosophies we'll have the same problem with other word pairs.

If in striving for NPOV we need to depend on a POV that determines a 
"reliable source" we haven't got NPOV at all.  The best we can do is 
link to an article about the publication in question where hopefully 
there will be enough objective criteria to allow the reader to decide 
for himself.  If we quote some article titles from  the publication 
itself it will be evident that the articles, "Economic Gains of the 
Socialist Revolution," and "Human Rights Violation of the Socialist 
Revolution," will represent magazines with conflicting perspectives.  
How can we possibly come to the conclusion that any publication is 
POV-pushing  without engaging in Original Research about that publication?

Ec