QUOTE(Lar @ Thu 22nd May 2008, 8:33pm)
Ya that behaviour is a problem. But that behaviour is the exception, not the norm. That is not to say that the behaviours you describe are acceptable, they are not. But they are outside the rules. The rules are not that hard to figure out, really.
They aren't? Oh, good, we have somebody here who asserts the rules are easy to figure out, and doesn't just snigger that okay they are nutso, so IAR and write well and pretend you believe in them.
Here are a few starts:
Wikipedia is supposed to strive for "verifiable accuracy". Verifiable turns out to refer to certain types of sources. Accuracy-- well, it's not defined. And with good reason, for in most languages "accuracy" means some sort of correspondance to reality, which is to say, to objective truth. Or at least, to truth as agreed to, by most experts. Especially as regards the sciences, but all domains of intellectual inquiry have their own standards.
From WP:V "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth—meaning, in this context, whether readers are able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether we think it is true."
No help there. We're not interested in just checking that the cite says what WP says it does. That's just the V part. We're interested if the source itself is correct. That's the R or reliable part.
Okay, so you track that down. When you go to find out what WP thinks a "reliable source" is, then you get WP:RS, which insists that sources be those that are "trustworthy" and with "a reputation for fact checking and accuracy." These are direct policy quotes. In other words, they are those we think are likely to be TRUE. Hmmm.
Accuracy is mentioned in WP:VS. What is "accuracy" in this context? Let us take the physical sciences again, where things are easy. Does accuracy not usually mean "correspondance to physical reality," as when we're given a synthetic fact like the mass of a proton, in grams? Does accuracy not mean truth? What does "trustworthy" mean as regards to the source itself, other than likelihood not to report error, lies, or other untruth? And "fact checking," please? What would "fact checking" possibly consist of, if not that somebody has investigated the objective truth of statements? IOW, why would we care if our sources engage in
fact checking, if we're not interested in
facts???
What is a "fact" if not a statement which is regarded by the majority of experts to be true? "Consistant" is NOT the same as "reliable" and "trustworthy." A source may be consistantly wrong. But how to tell? Here's a gem from WP:RS: "The appropriateness of any source always depends on the context, which is a matter of common sense and editorial judgment." But alas, other names for your own common sense and your own editorial judgment, are POV-pushing and WP:SYNTH. Yes I understand that NPOV doesn't ask for no POV, but it does demand judgments regarding "due weight" which are (as a matter of common sense) impossible to agree on, even for experts, and still less possible for non experts, who, even if they're supposed to be relying on expert opinion, can't be trusted to know who the experts are, much less understand what they're writing.
The world "authoritative" is used. But seems to me meaningless without the idea of truth. If I'm an authority on something, what is it that makes me special? That I know about my subject? Know WHAT about it? Know lies about it? Know erroneous things about it? What is it I know about a subject which makes me an authority? Am I only an authority due to being acknowledged by other authorities? That's sort of recursive, is it not? It might actually operate when it comes to religion, but what about when we go to the real world? When do we get to the part where the airplane flies, the bridge stays up, and the computer network doesn't crash? These are not matters of opinion only. So where do they fit into WP's search for authority, reliablity, and trustworthiness? So far as I can see, nowhere. WP's official policy (frequently ignored, fortunately) is to be written as though an encyclopedia about the world written by people who've been born in the basement of a library, and never been outside its walls. All they have to go on is what they read, and can cite. But that's no way to write about reality. It tends to give you sex manuals written by virgins, and even worse, articles on physics written by people who aren't good with math. Wikipedia has an "expert review needed for this article" tag, but I don't know why, since officially they should never need it.
What is best to cite, even if you're stuck-for-life in a library? Here, we hit WP's official views on "knowledge". Ready for bias? There's a whole paragraph on RS which argues that News Organizations are reliable if they are "high end," and material from them is welcomed. Yes, the world "welcomed" is actually used, as though for respected guests: "Material from mainstream news organizations is welcomed, particularly the high-quality end of the market, such as the The Washington Post, The Times of London, and The Associated Press." Never mind that the opinion of historians and scientists (not to mention most journalists, who don't trust each other an inch) is that newspapers, not excluding "high-quality end of the market" ones are highly unreliable in what they say factually. For one thing, they have no time to get things more than approximately right, and they have heavy bias against fully reporting their own past errors, which they only do enough of, to give readers the (false) impression that they're trying to be somehow exhaustive about this. According to Wikipedia, the idea that newspapers are unreliable, is formally, and as a matter of policy, wrong. Er, which is to say, as a statement, it's not TRUE. Oh, bother.
Anyway, you were explaining how the official rules are easy to figure out. Obviously I've failed to do it, easy or no. So just explain a bit where I missed the idea, since I need help. Assume I'm an educated layman.
Milt
This post has been edited by Milton Roe: