Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Lustead (talk | contribs) at 16:35, 10 June 2007 (→What kind of a source is Tamilnet?). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Editors, please note:

After four months of discussion at Misplaced Pages:Attribution, editors at Misplaced Pages talk:Attribution have agreed on a means of merging Misplaced Pages:Verifiability with Misplaced Pages:No original research, while also streamlining Misplaced Pages:Reliable sources into a simpler FAQ.

There are no policy innovations suggested: WP:ATT is intended to be a more cohesive version of the core content policies with which the Misplaced Pages community is already familiar.

To discuss reliability of specific sources, please go to Misplaced Pages:Reliable sources/Noticeboard.

Archives

Weasel words

Why is this article in the weasel words category? --Blue Tie 14:29, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

• Because of a comment by Itayb about half way past the page, where he cites another editor and points out a lot of alleged weasel words and POV in the citation. Not a very good reason, I suppose, but there you go. >Radiant< 14:46, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

• • In the guideline itself or on the talk page? If it is on the talk page, I don't see the tag as applying... we can be a weasly as anything on a talk page... different rules apply. Should we delete the tag? Blueboar 17:09, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
    • This talk page. Scroll up a bit or do a text search. I suppose it shouldn't be categorizing this page, to say the least. >Radiant< 08:08, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

In which case, I will remove the tag. I really don't think such tags apply to talk pages. Blueboar 13:09, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Ah, I see the problem... Solved by adding "no-wiki" formatting to his flags.

Nick Baker (prisoner in Japan) exceptional claims

On the Nick Baker (prisoner in Japan) article an editor is using the "exceptional claims" provision to exclude information that was published in Metropolis (English magazine in Japan). The removed claims are here: Talk about the claim is here: . In this case my position is that the removed claims support the major claim that Baker lied to the public, and that the removed claims are not exceptional claims in their own right. Another way to put this is: do supporting claims on a BLP also need multiple sources?

I have had some confirmation that these claims are not exceptional before but the issue keeps coming up and I would be very grateful some more advice and comments. Thank you. Sparkzilla 06:15, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

This item has been moved to an RFC on the article's talk page. Talk:Nick_Baker_(prisoner_in_Japan)#Request_for_comments I appreciate your comments. Sparkzilla 02:24, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

If the...FBI and GAO don't write Government Reports... who does?

The past two days have seen some pretty strange editing on List of groups referred to as cults in government reports with different editors giving different reasons why this is not a government report: Cover Page CRS Report No. 79-24 GOV 1/23/79 Addendum II CRS-45 and why the ...FBI and GAO don't write Government Reports... I'm sorry but that is a very odd statement, on top of odd logic implying it was my idea to remove them. I've been asking this editor and some others to explain why CRS a division of the LOC isn't WP:RS or WP:V. Can someone explain why it isn't a RS? (Granted it should not be used to imply that all groups in the report are still even in existence and those that are may have changed so it needs to be qualified.) I realize WP:V is discussed on that page, so I'm not bringing it up except to say that they are pretty easily verfied. Anynobody 09:35, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Couldn't read much of it without my eyes glazing over. Seems to me like much ado about nothing – an inability to distinguish between a "government report" and a "Government Report". I've read a great many U.S. "government reports" of a wide range of types, but I cannot recall ever coming across one called a "Government Report", per se. Usually if it is produced by a U.S. government organization or agency or employee (writing at the direction of a government official) and printed by the GPO, it's considered a government report. Perhaps those arguing against the contested "government reports" being "Government Reports" can provide a link to a U.S. Govt. site that defines what is and what isn't a formal "Government Report". All that nonsense aside, it's hard to credit the CRS and FBI as not being "reliable sources" as WP:RS defines them. Askari Mark (Talk) 00:08, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

I completely agree with your definition of a government report, and have asked them to provide some examples of their definition of a "Government Report". Their main contentions are that it should represent the opinion of "the government" and hold it's Imprimatur. They have also indicated a belief that CRS is a "private" arm of the LOC. The example provided of what they consider it to be was a Congressional report. When I pointed out that a Congressional report fails their own definition (it only represents Congress) it seemed to make no difference.

I've tried explaining that their are no reports which express the opinion of the entire federal government. Such a report would need to be from all three branches (Executive, Legislative, and Judicial) and that's not really possible because the Constitution, the only official document which affects all three, makes no provisions for it.

The whole situation is almost surreal because if they are right, all the articles citing anything produced by the government has gotta go. Anynobody 01:48, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

I have dealt with the CRS from time to time. They are not a "private" arm of the LOC; more like they're the "dedicated" research arm of the Congress. They are supposed to be non-partisan, and their analytical products are certainly more respected than, say, those of the GAO. You are correct that the three branches of the U.S. government publish separately. I've never heard of an imprimatur for the U.S. government. I've only heard of the Roman Catholic church using it. We're a democracy, so we don't need to have such a thing. If there were, then there would be a formal government organization tasked with the duty to prepare, vet and promulgate a document reviewed and approved by all three branches, as well as to maintain the "official version". If the critics you're dealing with cannot identify this organization and provide a link to its website that confirms its charter, then it doesn't exist. End of story. Askari Mark (Talk) 02:24, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Government Reports are reasonably reliable sources, from any branch. I would not say that CRS is more respected than the GAO, but if either of them were less respected, the lesser respected service would still be a reliable source. There should be no problem using them as sources. --Blue Tie 03:54, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

I really appreciate your input, Askari Mark (Talk) and Blue Tie. Do you know if anyone has ever doubted the reliability of this type of information? I found that there isn't much said about gov't sources, probably because it's assumed most people "understand". Anynobody 04:28, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

There are good reasons to doubt its REAL reliability SOMETIMES, but from WP:RS perspective, there is no reason to doubt it. If someone objects, they probably do not like what it says. In that case NPOV comes into play and they can find another source that presents a different perspective.--Blue Tie 04:30, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

My thoughts exactly. Anynobody 04:45, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

• Hi. As one of those doing what Mr. Anynobody calls "pretty strange editing", I asked the Director of the CRS whether he writes "Government Reports" and I got a very enlightening response from his Coordinator of Communications. Please see Talk:Groups referred to as cults in government reports#Straight from the source, the CRS weighs in. Here is the interesting part:

  CRS, like the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Government Accountability Office (GAO), as parts of the Legislative Branch, serve the Congress but do not “speak for it.” Only documents provided by these agencies pursuant to specific statutory mandates might be said to be “official government reports” – an imprecise term. Even those documents, however, cannot necessarily be said to “carry the weight or tacit approval” of the Congress.
  
  CRS reports represent our response to congressional legislative needs and in no way represent “what the legislative branch of government says” on a given topic. The 435 members of the House, the 100 Senators, and the delegates and committees that together make up the Congress have no single voice, save through legislation, nor has the Congress vested in CRS the authority to speak for it on any matter.

  So, do they write good reports? Probably. Are their reports respected? Probably. Do their reports "speak for the government"? Absolutely not! Their reports are no more "special" than the reports of any expert or academic. Remember please where Anynobody et al would use these reports. In an article entitled Groups referred to as cults in government reports and since we already have the more general article, List of groups referred to as cults, the opposing editors want to reserve the former for actual reports that bear the seal, literally or figuratively, of the issuing government. The CRS reports clearly do not fit in that category. --Justanother 00:40, 13 May 2007 (UTC)
  • I think that you're going through some logical gymnastics to try to exclude something you don't happen to agree with. I've received lots of communications from government functionaries, and that reply is typical of the way these guys qualify everything they say. If we followed your reasoning to its logical conclusion, very few government-produced documents would be allowed as sources. For example, the reports of the Warren Commission or the 9/11 Commission would be excluded, because we couldn't say definitively that those reports "speak for the government", because I am sure there could be found a congresscritter or two that did not agree with the conclusions. - Crockspot 01:17, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Thank you, Crockspot. That's one of the things I've been saying. Anynobody 01:21, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

No one is disputing that these reports are reliable sources that can be used in Misplaced Pages articles. They are, of course. The dispute is about the labeling of these as "Government Reports", as if they represent the view of the government or an official commission. When asked, the Coordinator of Communications of the CRS responded with this unequivocal statement: ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 01:30, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Dear Mr. ----,

The Director has asked me to respond to your email regarding the “status” of CRS reports. While I’m not sure I can “settle an argument” for you, I can provide you some general thoughts regarding the role of the Congressional Research Service (CRS) vis a vis the Congress and the nature of its reports.

CRS works exclusively for the Congress of the United States. It has no public mission. All of its reports are therefore produced for and provided to Members who are then free to distribute them as they deem appropriate.

As you know, the Congress is a body made up of individual Members – Senators, Representatives, and Delegates – and there is no single voice for the Congress, either for the body as whole or for the individual chambers. Only through the passage of legislation can it be said that the Congress “has spoken.”

CRS, like the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Government Accountability Office (GAO), as parts of the Legislative Branch, serve the Congress but do not “speak for it.” Only documents provided by these agencies pursuant to specific statutory mandates might be said to be “official government reports” – an imprecise term. Even those documents, however, cannot necessarily be said to “carry the weight or tacit approval” of the Congress.

CRS reports represent our response to congressional legislative needs and in no way represent “what the legislative branch of government says” on a given topic. The 435 members of the House, the 100 Senators, and the delegates and committees that together make up the Congress have no single voice, save through legislation, nor has the Congress vested in CRS the authority to speak for it on any matter.

_______________

(name removed)
Coordinator of Communications
Congressional Research Service

I would think that there is no agency of any sort that provides a report of the position of the whole government. They provide reports of the position of that agency. These are still government reports. But I do not think there is such a thing as a report from the whole government. The US has 3 branches of government and sometimes reports from one branch are intentionally created to counter a report from another branch. This does not make either of them unreliable for purposes of RS. The FBI will issue a report that is contradicted by the CIA. Which one represents what the "Executive Branch" says? Maybe neither. But they are still government reports. --Blue Tie 01:33, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

I would argue that calling these "government reports" is misleading to our readers. The obvious connotations for a reader would be that a "government report" represents the view of the government, or an official commission appointed by it, particularly when such documents are placed alongside other documents from other governments reports (such as from France, for example) that are indeed official government reports. That is the dispute, Blue Tie. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 01:39, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

It appears that List of groups referred to as cults in government reports is a redirect to List of groups referred to as cults in government documents. So what's the problem? Maybe it should further redirect to List of groups referred to as cults in government-produced documents? This is hair-splitting to the extreme. Come up with a name for the list that suits everyone, and move on. - Crockspot 01:37, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Yes, somebody messed up trying to undo a move... A suitable article name for its contents is surely the way out. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 01:41, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Next! :) - Crockspot 01:44, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Do I disagree that a 28-year-old report by an agency that does not speak for anyone has been cherry-picked to be included as something that appears to be the position of the United States government? Especially when it specifically is NOT the position of the United States govenement as regards Scientology, my area of interest. Well, yes, I guess I do disagree. And there is little point in renaming to "documents" as we already have the more general article. So what is the point? But we will sort it out. Your'alls help is welcome. --Justanother 02:01, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Attacking the source as outdated is a different ball of wax, and one you may have better luck arguing. Views do change over decades. - Crockspot 02:11, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

The issue Anynobody wants it to be is whether CRS writes WP:RS. The real issue is the definition (or implication) of government reports. A government report, (at minimum suggests that it), represents the view or opinion of a government, or an official sub-section of a government which is authorized to release reports and opinions. The Congress would write and release Government reports for that sub-section of the Unites States government. The CRS works for the Congress and per an email from the CRS, it is not authorized, without specific statutory mandates, to write official government reports. The only question is whether or not the wiki-LIST implies the word official. I submit that a goverment report implies official. Lsi john 02:22, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

The problem I see with interpreting the above e-mail in this way is that it suggests that, essentially, there is no such thing as an official government report, other than via direct legislation. This is clearly a meaningless distinction; if a phrase is being used without specificity and it can refer to two different things, one of which is exceedingly rare, I would say interpreting it in the broader sense is usually the correct thing to do. Specifically, the sense of "official government report" used in the e-mail above is a very restrictive one. The e-mail even goes so far as to suggest that the term isn't a particularly useful one. Why we should then interpret another term as meaning it by implication is beyond me. JulesH 10:48, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Justanother has a point about the age of the list report in question, which is why I've been saying it needs to be mentioned because indeed the groups may have changed. As a historical document though, there is no reason it should be excluded (discussing the phrasing of a source is all that's needed. Removing it is overkill and actually is against WP:NPOV. Anynobody 07:08, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

These emails are unverifiable and therefore completely moot to the article and the argument. I would think Jossi you'd be the first one to point that out. The arguments based on the emails would, if used to modify the article in any way, go against our policy. If the agency were willing to *post* their responses to their own verifiable website that would be a different situation.Wjhonson 19:48, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Curious question. Would it be considered WP:V if they wrote an email to wiki staff, objecting to the use of their report being cited as a government report? I have no idea if they would do this or not, I'm just curious, mostly for curiosity sake. Lsi john 20:06, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

The essence of verifiability is that any editor *could* independently confirm that the attribution is accurate. None of us can confirm that wiki staff got an email. Just like none of us can confirm that you did. And none of us can confirm who sent it. Any of us however *could* confirm public records, newspapers, books, etc. Sometimes it might not be easy to do, but we could. However with private emails we cannot. Wjhonson 04:27, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

The verifiability or otherwise of the e-mail is not an issue. It is not suggested that it be included in the article, as far as I can tell, so I fail to see where WP:V (which applies only to articles) comes into it. JulesH 10:48, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

My recent Edit

Lsi john added this to the guideline: It is important to note that, while 'Reliable Sources' is a guideline, and verifiability is a policy, neither should be used to justify including (or keeping) material in an article. Regardless of how well sourced an item is, satisfying the criteria for reliable source and verifiability alone does not provide sufficient reason to include material in an article. Common sense must be applied, and editors should ask themselves if the material being cited is both relevant and noteworthy.

- the following was originally to Anynobody's userpage, and was relocated here by him.

Lsi john 03:16, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Anynobody, with all due respect, I do not appreciate being followed to WP:RS. Due to our past history, I believe it is inappropriate for you to revert my edits in unrelated articles.

I will be making a slight change to my edit and putting it back. There are numerous editors and admins who watch that page and it would be more appropriate for them to revert my edit, if a revert is necessary.

As there are a sufficient number of other editors who watch that page, I believe your revert is COI and borders on stalking and harassment. Please leave the edit for someone else to handle.

Thank you.

Peace in God.

Lsi john 01:40, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Lsi john, I was actually editing there first so "following" somehow fails to describe the sequence of events.
As I said in the edit summary, your edit should have been discussed on the talk page first. That being said if you do add your comment to the project page, without discussing it on the talk page, I'll revert it again. In a WP:3RR situation it's up to you to prove a consensus when adding new material. Anynobody 01:53, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

• Anynobody, as I said on your talk page (which you moved here), given the large number of people who watch this guideline page, your immediate revert was unnecessary. Regarding discussion first, the page says do not make major changed, it does not say 'do not make any changes. My change was not major.

Given our edit history, it was COI for you to revert my change here. There are a substantial number of other editors and admins who can revert if my edit is not in keeping with wiki policy or guidelines.

Wiki says be bold and I was bold.

Lsi john 02:10, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

This is a guideline that says "It is generally accepted among editors and is considered a standard that all users should follow." Your addition was not bold, it was presumptuous. A single user should never assert what is "generally accepted". Please revert it and start a discussion since it plainly is not a minor edit. 2005 02:16, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

I do not see this as a major change. It does not have any impact on what WP:RS is. It does not change or affect what can be included in an article. It merely clarifies that WP:RS is not justification to include something. The material being cited, must also be relevant and notable. I have opened a discussion about this below. Lsi john 02:36, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Adding a full paragraph to a fairly short document is obviously a major change. If it's not a major chnage, you'll easily get a consensus. The world won't catch fire in the next few days while is is discussed. 2005 02:48, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

To clarify, as I said below: if you disagree with the statement I added, then you are saying WP:RS IS justification solely by itself to include or keep material. That would imply that you would agree to including citable plumbing facts in sewing articles, solely on the basis of WP:RS. Lsi john 02:40, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Please focus on the issue. You should not make a major change to a guideline without starting a discussion. Whether or not it is a good idea is irrelevant. Discuss it, then if it gets agreement it will be in the document because it DOES represent a consensus, rather than an unsupported edit by a single editor. 2005 02:48, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

2005, I apologize for projecting the Anynobody situation onto you. I have no problem with discussing at all. In fact, my post to Anynobody clearly stated that a neutral editor was welcome to revert me. Based on my frustration at being reverted by someone with COI, I responded to your post with frustration and that was improper. As i said above, I have opened discussion below. Lsi john 03:22, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

I'm honestly not trying to hassle you Lsi john, after all I didn't say it couldn't ever be added just that it needed discussion as 2005 is saying. Are you forgetting that even though it's a guideline the entire wiki will be using it? WP:BOLD applies to articles, not policies and guidelines. If it did, I could boldly remove all of them and cite it as an excuse. Anynobody 04:05, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Is RS sufficient justification for including (or keeping) material in an article?

In my short history at wikipedia, I have witnessed a large number of editors revert with edit comments like: "the material is highly sourced", "do not remove sourced material", "highly sourced".

To me, these seem to be falacious and circular arguments. Based on the fact that so many of these arguments are presented in edit-comments for reverts, it seems to me that there is a general misunderstanding and misapplication of the WP:RS guideline.

For example, if WP:RS is justification for including material, then we could include the fact that a second stage scuba mouthpiece works at roughly 100psi, in an article about the mating habits of the North East Woodpecker.

Because so many editors are using WP:RS as a reason to include or keep material, it seems that there is a general misunderstanding of what WP:RS is and what it is not.

By giving a definition for what is acceptable, it is basically a guideline for what not to include.

It is not a guidline for what to include. And does not provide justification for including material solely on the basis of WP:RS.

I believe that it will be both beneficial and helpful to the wiki community to include a brief paragraph on this in the guideline.

Lsi john 02:30, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Answer

Yes, with very few exceptions, one of which I will discuss. The ONLY time a WP:RS should be automatically excluded or removed is if it has nothing at all to do with the article.

Example of appropriate removal

Removing a NASA report on space debris from an article about Napoleon.

Example of inappropriate removal

A CRS report outlining perceived cults operating in America and abroad circa the mid to late 1970's in an article discussing groups identified as a cult in government documents.

There are probably other exceptions I haven't thought of. Anynobody 06:50, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

• Anynobody, this really has nothing to do with that article or that debate. My question is Is it ever appropriate to justify material solely on the basis of Reliable Source? Your answer contained the provision that it must also be relevant to the article, which is exactly what my proposed wording says. Not meeting RS would be a reason to remove something, but simply meeting RS is not sufficient justification to include or retain it. Lsi john 22:40, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

My question is Is it ever appropriate to justify material solely on the basis of Reliable Source?

Actually sounds more like you're asking if WP:RS should ever be allowed to trump WP:V or WP:OR concerns. There are several policies and guidelines which could conceivably affect the worthiness of a source for inclusion. (For example, a source for an article on a living person must also meet WP:BLP concerns.) I must also point out that the clarification you provided probably should be added to the section title in order to replace the question that's already there.

Is RS sufficient justification for including (or keeping) material in an article?

Yes, with very few exceptions. Anynobody 04:11, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Suggestion to modify WP:RS Lead

Specifically I suggest the following wording be added as a 3rd paragraph:

"It is important to note that, while 'Reliable Sources' is a guideline, and verifiability is a policy, neither should be used as sufficient reason to justify including (or keeping) material in an article. Regardless of how well sourced an item is, satisfying the criteria for reliable source and verifiability does not provide sufficient grounds, by itself, to include, or retain, material in an article. Common sense must be applied, and editors should ask themselves if the material being cited is both relevant and noteworthy."

Lsi john 03:31, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

I don't know, this seems a bit pointless to me. WP:RS and V are about what types of sources it is appropriate to use, relevancy is another question altogether and it would seem to me that it's already self evident that material added to a page must be relevant to the article topic. Gatoclass 07:37, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Gatoclass, to be honest, I agree so much that I would have used the word silly rather than pointless. To me, the difference between relevant and reliable is clearly obvious. In the same way that WP:CIVIL and WP:NPA are obvious, yet both of those exist in order to guide editors toward resolution.

I see 'numerous' editors cite WP:RS as the sole reason for restoring material, even when the reliability is not being challenged. Perhaps it is isolated to the the area of contentious articles where I edit, but it is done often enough that I believe a paragraph here might help clarify the issue and thus help to reduce edit warring. Which is, afterall , the purpose of guidelines.

is one quick example where an editor (whom I do not know) uses WP:RS as the reason to keep an article. There are countless others but I did not feel a litany of examples would be productive. (I can produce a quick dozen or two if anyone requests). At the very least, it won't hurt to include this text. And at its best, the wording will help remind editors in highly contested articles to address and discuss the issues rather than using WP:RS as 'justification' for reverts and edit warring. Lsi john 12:08, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Your example is a non-example. Several editors have commented that the article is noteworthy independent of there being RS or not. There being RS is a requirement, but not the sole one, and it's not the sole reason for Keep votes on the AFD either. Wjhonson 20:12, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps I didn't explain very well (that happens with me too often) I wasn't debating the value of that article. I was only referring to this one specific reason given for keep:

"*Keep. This death was discussed in reliable sources, so it should be included"

With the multitude of other reasons s/he could have cited, s/he chose WP:RS. This speaks directly to what I have seen numerous times. It demonstrates that people use WP:RS as a justification, which it isn't. WP:RS is a requirement, not a justification and just because something meets WP:RS does not mean we must include it.

Specifically, rather than look at my example, what is your opinion of the wording I have proposed? Lsi john 21:45, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

I don't like it. And I'll tell you why. Once an article has passed muster to be in Misplaced Pages at all, trying to fall back on noteworthiness for each detail would basically say, we can't include the birthdate unless it's exceptional, we can't mention their occupation unless it's unusual, we can't say where they were born unless it's extraordinary. It's not the material in the article that must pass noteworthiness, it's the *subject* of the article. Once that bar has been passed, the material of the article should only be required to pass undue weight. Wjhonson 04:31, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

You raise a good point. Specifically I'm speaking about articles that have not 'passed muster' but are still under development. I used the AfD as an example, but I see WP:RS cited far too often in regular article editing rather than addressing the objection to the material which was deleted. To me, citing Notable or Relevant would at least address the issue. Citing RS doesn't. And, even for articles which have passed muster, it would be just as easy (and more correct) to cite notability or relevance. Lsi john 19:16, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

For example, in the article on Anna Nicole Smith we can mention that she had a daughter. Not because having a daughter is noteworthy, but because the article is meant to be a biography and children are part of your life story. Wjhonson 04:35, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Lsi john are you assuming that the article in your example is failing some other policy or guideline?. If it isn't, WHY NOT cite the reliability of the source? A bible is WP:V but not a reliable source on science or anything of a concrete nature that can be reliably quoted by it. Anynobody 04:41, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Anynobody, I'm not assuming anything at all about that article. RS is a requirement for material to be included. Relevantce or Notability would be justification. Using a requirement as justification is an invalid and circular argument.

Arguing to keep information on the mating habits of the raccoon, in an article on airplanes, based solely on the fact that the information is reliably sourced, is obviously absurd and everyone sees it. However, in less obvious examples, it seems that some editors believe RS is justification. When material is deleted based on Notability or Relevance, the specific objection is ignored and RS is cited as justificiation for a revert. It is simply a bad and circular argument.

My desire to add wording is for clarification, not to change how anything works. Lsi john 19:16, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

There is a problem with this proposal--the link to WP:N creates a circular reference, because there it says:

...These guidelines do not specifically regulate the content of articles, which is governed by other Misplaced Pages's guidelines, such as those on the reliability of sources...

I would also avoid referring to that guideline anyway, as it has been perpetually disputed. I think the point about relevance is valid, but such a long winded lede is over-the-top. A brief mention in the body, or a footnote should suffice. Dhaluza 10:35, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

I'm not hung up on how it gets worded. I just believe that some clarification should be included in order to preclude using RS as justification (see above). Lsi john 19:16, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

We could just add the word relevant to the opening sentence:(Changes in bold)

Misplaced Pages articles should be based on reliable and relevant published sources. This page is a guideline, not a policy, and is mandatory only insofar as it repeats material from policy pages. The related policies on sources are Misplaced Pages:Verifiability, Misplaced Pages:No original research, and Misplaced Pages:Neutral point-of-view.

Anynobody 01:31, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

We could, except that doesn't really address my concern and would raise additional concerns by tying relevance into RS. I'm suggesting a disclaimer statement which clarifies' that RS is a requirement but is insufficient as justification. Lsi john 01:33, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

You do understand that this guideline refers to the sources used in articles, if you're concerned about WP:RS being used as a justification to keep an article in a WP:AFD you really ought to be voicing these concerns on Misplaced Pages Deletion Policy. Up until now I assumed you were talking about sources which WP:RS covers, justification to keep an article is not what WP:RS is about. Anynobody 01:44, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for your suggestion, but you have misunderstood and misstated my concern. Lsi john 01:51, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Please correct me where I've interpreted your proposal and example incorrectly. Anynobody 01:57, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Per your request I have corrected your interpretation. Lsi john 02:03, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

You are saying that WP:RS is not justification on it's own to add or keep a source in an article. There is no policy or guideline that can be used on it's own to justify inclusion though. A source that is only WP:V does not justify inclusion, no more than a a solely WP:RS source would. Anynobody 02:35, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Yep. Now you've got it. And, since quite a few people do cite RS as justification, I believe we need something here to let them know that its insufficient. Lsi john 02:38, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

That goes back to what I asked about your earlier example, as long as a source also meets WP:V and isn't WP:OR why not cite the nature of a WP:RS? If the source in your example didn't meet WP:V, then one could point that out to an editor arguing for the source's WP:RS. Anynobody 02:41, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Indeed. And to help prevent editors from incorrectly citing WP:RS as justification in the first place, a short comment on the WP:RS page which better explains that WP:RS should not be used as justification. How about giving a hand with the wording? Lsi john 02:47, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

I think such a statement would be too restrictive. There are probably times when WP:RS shouldn't be cited, but there are many more times when it would be acceptable. Suggesting it should not be cited assumes the exceptions define the rule. Anynobody 02:56, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Name one single situation when WP:RS alone, by itself, is sole justification (not permission) for adding or keeping a citation, where no other reason applies. Lsi john 03:10, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Now you are misunderstanding me, if a source meets WP:V, WP:RS, and is not WP:OR citing the WP:RS as a particularly strong point in favor of the source is fine with me. If a source doesn't meet WP:V, but is a WP:RS and isn't WP:OR and an editor argues the WP:RS is strong; All you need to do is point out that it can't be verified per WP:V. Anynobody 03:19, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

I asked you to give an example where WP:RS can be used as the only reason for including material. You added WP:V, which I'll concede. Are you willing to stand by this statement unconditionally, without bringing in any other requirements? A simple yes or no will do.

"If a source meets WP:V, WP:RS, and is not WP:OR citing the WP:RS as the only reason for including or keeping the source is fine with me."

Lsi john 03:28, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Which again goes back to the example you tried to use and my question about whether it failed other relevant policies and guidelines. No single policy or guideline by itself can justify a source. As long as it meets all necessary requirements, citing one requirement as an especially strong reason to keep said source is ok. Your idea about saying people should not cite WP:RS ignores that aspect and is too restrictive. Anynobody 03:40, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Why do you continually change my words? I never once said that people could not cite WP:RS. I said that WP:RS cannot be used as the only reason for adding or keeping something. But people are using it as the only reason. My suggestion doesn't change anything. It clarifies exactly what you and I are both saying.

Hopefully someone else can explain this to you, because I really don't know how to explain it in any other way. I'm sorry. Lsi john 03:54, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Actually, never mind. I think your claim that WP:RS, alone, can be used to justify including material only further illustrates the need for a statement here. WP:RS is not justification. There are lots of reliably sourced things which are not relevant, not significant, and not important.

Justification is a reason, which stands on its own merits and needs nothing else to support it.

WP:RS only means that the person who said it is qualified to make the claim. WP:V means that the information is verifiable. If material isn't WP:RS then we can't include it. But just because it meets WP:RS doesn't mean we must allow it, and thus WP:RS isn't justification.

I really can't explain it any better than that. Perhaps someone else can. Lsi john 03:36, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Lsi john I think a table may make explain my point better: (Relevance of sources is assumed in this table)

Source	WP:RS	WP:V	not WP:OR	cite WP:RS?
1 Most situations
2 Exception (rare)
3 Ineligible
4 Ineligible	-
5 Ineligible

Numbers 3, 4, and 5 are ineligible so editors should not be citing ANY of the policies or guidelines it does meet.

Number 2 is an exception, since WP:RS is a guideline it is conceivable that a source which doesn't meet it could be included.

Number 1 represents most of the sources included. In situations like this, citing the especially reliable nature of the WP:RS is perfectly acceptable.(Note: I don't mean to imply citing compliance with WP:V or WP:OR should not be done, I'm just not mentioning citing either of them as justification because this would be the wrong forum for it.)

The only time what you're suggesting is true and WP:RS should not be cited as a reason to keep/include a source is during exceptional situations like Number 2

Remember the last three are invalid regardless of which valid policies/guidelines are cited. For example, saying Number 4 is WP:V would be irrelevant because it's WP:OR. The same would apply to Number 3 when citing WP:RS, since that source is also WP:OR it's invalid so NO policy or guideline it does satisfy could save it.

Proposing that an exception scenario can invalidate the majority of situations is too restrictive which is what you are saying should happen: Because WP:RS can't be cited in each and every case it should not be cited at all. I am saying that it can more often than it can not, therefore restricting it's usage is over reacting and places restrictions which are unnecessary on editors. Anynobody 22:52, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Anynobody, I see no reason to continue going back and forth. You keep rewording my point and then arguing against your version. Your table doesn't show any case where WP:RS is the only argument. Lsi john 11:52, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Respectfully, Lsi john I never said WP:RS by itself (without passing WP:V and WP:OR concerns) was enough justification to add or keep a source. This is why I've asked several times if your statement is assuming a source that does meet all requirements or not, see above table for specifics. I guess I just figured everyone understood that a source has more than one requirement to satisfy.

The irony is by claiming that I am saying only WP:RS needs to be satisfied, it is in fact you who are trying to change my words. Anynobody 22:56, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Misuse of online voting

CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and other news sites regularly have online votes on a whole range of issues. Although these news sites are generally considered reliable sources, these online votes are completely unreliable. The news sites even state that they are unscientific polls. The problem is that online voting contains very significant self-selection bias. Some political campaigns specifically email supporters and ask them to go the the news sites and "vote for candidate X" after a political debate. I believe Misplaced Pages needs to clearly state its policy regarding the use of unscientific online voting. These unscientific poll results are already being used in the some of the articles about Presidential candidates. --JHP 07:04, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

• See Misplaced Pages:How_to_create_policy#How_to_propose_a_new_policy Jeepday (talk) 12:12, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

We are discussing deprecating "how to create policy", because frankly, we don't. Instead, just discuss with people. In the case of these polls, if there are no better sources, you may have to make do with those polls, but you should attribute them. People can probably decide on the reliability themselves, though you could add a note or so if you want to be really sure. --Kim Bruning 21:02, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

A follow-up: The reason unscientific polls should not be used is because they are not reliable. To quote the Misplaced Pages article on the subject, "A voodoo poll is an opinion poll with no statistical or scientific reliability and which is therefore not a good indicator of opinion on any given issue. A voodoo poll will tend to involve self-selection, will be unrepresenative of the 'polled' population, and is often very easy to rig by those with a partisan interest in the results of the poll." --JHP 03:34, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Recent issue with reliable sources

Recently a number of experts testified that there might be some issues with our reliable sources guideline, at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/James D. Nicoll (2nd nomination).

While many wikipedians interpret this guideline as saying that this article is either "non-notable" or has no "reliable sources", experts in the field have been so kind as to point out that this is a notable person who deserves an encyclopedia article.

--Kim Bruning 18:52, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Kim Bruning, can you point to a diff there that illustrates your claim? I see lots of discussion and opinion about whether or not the sources met WP:RS, but I didn't see that issues with the guidelines were raised. Whether or not the sources that are cited in that article meet WP:RS wouldn't necessarily affect the guidelines. I'm not sure that I'd agree with some of those editors who were saying 'not reliable source' regarding some of the sources.

Are you suggesting a change to the WP:RS guideline? Lsi john 19:16, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Hmmm, Let me provide a link on the AFD, so interested folks can drop by, and maybe explain for themselves :) --Kim Bruning 19:25, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

To be clear, the problem in this case was that an Usenet source on this subject was not seen as reliable, as per the guidelines when in fact this was the primary source and highly relevant to the article in question. The guidelines as they currently stand promote a mistrust of Usenet as source for anything, without considering the context. For example, Usenet can be a good source for things that happened on Usenet --Martin Wisse 19:53, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

I think the main issue most people had there was that many editors were disputing the acceptability of usenet sources to substantiate that the subject of the article is, essentially, a usenet celebrity. Clearly, this kind of source ought to be considered acceptable, as it is the medium such sources are most likely to be published in. Other issues were the recent removal of a number of self-published sources from the article that had provided key biographical details about the subject. Clearly, again, these should be accepted. There is little or no doubt that they were originally written by the subject, and if he isn't authorititive on (e.g.) his own date of birth, I don't know who would be. See, for instance the comment by User:121a0012 . Also see User:Shimgray here and User:Pnh (Patrick Nielsen Hayden) here (although his comments speak more to notability requirements than reliable sourcing requirements). Also see Shimgray here and User:Bth here.

The other comment is that when we're writing an article about a subculture that doesn't get discussed in traditional reliable sources in very much detail, the type of source you need to use is likely to be non-traditional. This doesn't mean it's unreliable; in this case the reliability of the sources wasn't questionable, only whether or not they conformed to the rules. Frankly, that's not how this project is supposed to be run and there's a good reason for that. One of Misplaced Pages's strengths is that it can harness all of these unusual sources to provide coverage that is much broader and much deeper than any other encyclopedia ever has. We can cover the personalities of online science fiction fandom if we want, because there are authorititive sources that talk about them. Unfortunately, the rules we have here (and, to a lesser extent, at WP:V) tend to get in the way of that. JulesH 20:12, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

JulesH hits the nail on the head, particularly about "traditional reliable sources". The "printed matter uber alles" attitude of some editors risks Misplaced Pages missing the opportunity to give useful, notable, verifiable information on subjects that people might well expect to find here, simply because they're not of interest to print media. I've recently changed my user page to explain a thought experiment on just how silly this is; anyone interested can go and have a look.

I was particularly irritated in the particular AfD we're discussing here by the assertion in the nomination that LiveJournal links weren't acceptable as a source. WP:BLP states that a subject's blog can be used a source on the subject given certain conditions, all of which are satisfied by the James Nicoll's blog, which happens to be hosted on LJ. I'm fairly prejudiced against LJ myself, as it happens, but that opinion is irrelevant to the sourcing question.

Having said all which, the fact that these things keep seeming to come up over and over again every time I get within a mile of returning to Misplaced Pages has crystallised my disenchantment with the current state of the project. I don't feel I have the time, patience or emotional energy to fight this fight myself. I wish the best of luck to those clear-sighted people who have kept their eye on the main goal of Improving Misplaced Pages as opposed to sticking to rules for the sake of sticking to rules. --Bth 20:30, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

See also WP:SELFPUB Lsi john 20:33, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

On the contrary, I tend to think that WP:SELFPUB might need some tweaking, if we are going to go by the letter of the policy. There are clearly otherwise going to be blind spots if we decide to categorize stuff that goes on in non-traditional media as part of the sum of all human knowledge. We may wish to tweak the policy about reliable sources if we wish to report on things that happen in contexts that sources traditionally regarded as reliable just don't report on. Are there, for instance, traditional reliable sources that talk about the Green Card Lottery spam incident on USENET in a reliable way? How about any other source but the Village Voice for the Rape in Cyberspace (LambdaMOO)? There's stuff that happens on the fringes that might be important that may or may not have reliable sources, but which we may decide in consensus we want to/should keep around for posterity, right here. --MalcolmGin Talk / Conts 20:43, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

No doubt. But then there is always WP:IAR. heh. I'm not saying that I don't think improvements can be made. (See my above.) But in the end, I think that it comes down to common sense. Lsi john 20:52, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

We've dealt with many USENET-related articles, including some about UENET celebrities. See Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/alt.romath and Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Romath, for example. Likewise we get articles about radio personalities full of assertions that can be verified by users who were listening to the program on a certain day. Again and again we return to the principle that if a topic is hard to source using proper means then the answer is not to bend the rules but rather to question whether the topic is truly notable. Someone who is known only within USENET is probably not notable in a general encyclopedia. I should also mention that using USENET as a source is also problematic becuase it is a primary source and subject to misinterpretation, fraud, omissions, and other sourcing issues. ·:·Will Beback ·:· 21:52, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Usenet may be either a primary or secondary source, depending on the exact post you're talking about. I see no reason it should be treated differently to a blog in this regard. In some cases it may be difficult to verify who posted the information, but for cases where the identity of the poster has not been called into question I see no reason not to use it. JulesH 22:57, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

IAR when used for unique or very rarely occurring special situations is a good way of avoiding rule creep. For things likely to repeat frequently, it has to be considered emergency first aid: it will deal with the article immediately at hand in a reasonable way, but after that it's an indication that we need to adjust the definitions or interpretations of the guidelines. Articles on web phenomena or things or people documented only on the web are not a rare phenomena. We need a consistent way of dealing with them, so the encyclopedia-worthy among them can be kept, and the unnotable one deleted, without arguing it all from the beginning each time. What we need to adjust is RS and WP:WEB. Some of us saw the need before, but it seems to have been necessary for a really unequivocally indisputable example to all to see the absurdity of the present situation.

We're building an encyclopedia, and the ore principles hold. Everything else should be interpreted to lead to the goal--building an encyclopedia, not arguing about what to put in it. Will would have us adjust our common-sense definition of notability until it matches the existing rules. With all respect, he's wrong this time. We should adjust the rules to match what the editors and the readers recognize. Primarily the readers, because we're not building an encyclopedia as an academic exercise, or primarily to improve our own skills at writing and argument, but to be used. Perhaps useful is the real foundation of the principles and the rules. DGG 21:59, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

The reason that notability is tied to sourcing is that anybody who is notable should have already been noted, and without reasonable sources we can't write NPOV articles. The policies all fit together. In this case it appears we have a single expert, who is apparently an acquaintance of the subject, asserting with no evidence that the subject is notable and should have lots written about him. While the expert may be right that the subject should be notable it isn't our job to correct the errors of society by noting him. If we begin to say that inadequate sources are sufficient to establish the notability of people we know in our hearts to be notable then we have no longer have useful standards. ·:·Will Beback ·:· 22:12, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Can you clarify what you mean by "single expert .. asserting with no evidence" in this regard? Looking at the AfD I see multiple professionals in the field (PNH, Scalzi and Stross) speaking on Nicoll's behalf, along with attributions to multiple published works quoting him. The fact that he gained his notability thru Usenet suggests that those wanting to learn more about him will want to reference Usenet sources. LisRiba 22:47, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

The issue here isn't one of a single expert with no evidence to back him up. The issue is that there is a whole swathe of sources about this subject that are being disregarded for no good reason, other than the technology that was used to publish them. Every single statement in the article in question can be sourced to one or more usenet posts. Additional statements not currently in the article (e.g. that he is a leading SF blogger) could be sourced to blogs (which would require a stretch of the circumstances where they are acceptable sources, but I think a reasonable one).

Furthermore, if an expert asserts that a topic that he is not directly connected with is notable, why do we need any more evidence than this to keep an article? Yes, delete an article if it cannot be sourced (which clearly isn't the case for this article), but don't say that it is because it isn't notable. JulesH 22:57, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

I wasn't aware that user:Scalzi is an editor, and co-worker with user:PNH. Even so, being friends with prominent SF editors or being quoted in multiple blogs is not a sufficient basis for notability. While Usenet sources may help readers learn more about subjects (so long as we can be sure that the Usenet postings are legitimate) they are not reliable sources for establishing the notability of the subjects in the real world. Having friends in the blogosphere does help recruit supporters, though. ·:·Will Beback ·:· 23:01, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

What happens if notable persons make public statements saying "This dude is notable" ? ;-) --Kim Bruning 23:40, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

I thought this was supposed to be a discussion about sourcing, rather than notability. Nonetheless, if you want to talk about "standards for Misplaced Pages", one question is -- is this person(or thing) somebody/something people will want to look up? In this case, the subject is well known for a quote -- well-known enough to deserve a page in Wikiquote, and people trying to source the quote want to find out more about the author. Furthermore, since the quote has often been misattributed (including to a historic figure of the same name) then within the Wikiverse there's a need for further information. Does that make sense? LisRiba 23:56, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

The definition of notability incorporates the definition of a reliable source by reference. I think this part of the argument is best handled over there; my guess is that the best solution is to use a less-rigorous definition of reliable source for this purpose. But we would still be able to delete articles as unverifiable if there were no reliable sources by the definition there. Which is normally interpreted to mean the same as the definition here. JulesH 08:32, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Who determines what "in the real world" criteria? There are numerous entries in Misplaced Pages on subjects that are not very well known to the world at large. How many people outside Usenet or some portions of the Internet know (or care) about Ed Conrad, Alexander Abian, Joel Furr or Kibo? The fact that Nicoll is well known to a good portion of the online science fiction community, to the point where people will object to the removal of his article, is in itself sufficient proof that there should probably be an article. Given the lengthy articles on fictional people, some of whom are minor characters in novels, films and TV shows, that people complain about a real person seems a tad absurd.Keith Morrison 00:45, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Will, why does "notability of the subjects in the real world" enter into the question? Why shouldn't WP include articles on subjects that are important to a particular subculture (in this case the Usenet community) on the say-so of members of that subculture alone? (Assuming the subculture is, in itself, notable.) I think the heart of this is stating: for information on a subculture, prominent members of that subculture should usually be regarded as reliable sources, however they choose to publish (whether that be in magazines, newspapers, blogs or usenet comments). This applies equally, in my opinion, to sourcing (non-contentious) statements within an article and determining whether or not that article is notable. JulesH 08:32, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

The thing about noticability is that it always has to be considered in context. Misplaced Pages is supposed to be the ultimate encyclopedia, not just a replacement for a general knowledge encyclopedia like the EB; which means that for every suject mentioned in here that everybody has heard of (e.g. history of Rome, or George W. Bush or whatever) there will be zillions of subjects most users and editors will not have heard off. To judge whether one of them is noticable enough to keep, you need to look into the context of such an entry, rather than deciding because it has never been mentioned in the NYT it's not noticable.--Martin Wisse 13:50, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Aside from the notability angle, this also highlights a problem with approaches to verifiability: over-zealous (and selective) insistence on policies intended to improve the accuracy of articles can actually have the reverse effect. I'm afraid this comment turned out longer than I'd intended...

Let's start with a bit of heresy: notwithstanding BLP, it is absurd to insist that every bit of data - even in a living-person bio - can or should be cited, and not a single Misplaced Pages editor actually does so. Looking at George W. Bush, the first paragraph alone contains half a dozen uncited facts. No citation is given for his birthdate, that he's the oldest brother, that he's the 43rd President rather than the 42nd or 44th... I could go on, but you get the idea, and you will find similar uncited material in any BLP worth reading.

This is not for want of scrutiny; it's because applying that standard of citation would make it so tedious to write new material on Misplaced Pages that nobody would do it. Further, even if we could do it without effort, waving a magic wand at the article to get everything cited, it wouldn't actually be an improvement. The only thing we'd achieve is to bury the article content under an unreadable mess of citations.

So let's agree that this is not a desirable or achievable goal (I may change my mind on this if somebody can show me even one featured article where all facts are cited). Let's also agree that as far as controversial information is concerned - anything where there is a reasonable likelihood somebody might be upset by what the article claims, anything where two editors in good faith maintain a disagreement about a fact in the article, anything that puts a significant positive or negative light on somebody - cites are in order.

Those two points acknowledged, it's time to take a more pragmatic attitude to uncontroversial information, and in particular to first-party sources. On controversial points, first-party sources are unsatisfactory for reasons that don't need explanation. On uncontroversial points - minor biographical details, etc - they are probably the most reliable sources we could look for.

As an example, the article on James D. Nicoll (best known from USENET) listed his birthdate, citing a USENET posting by Nicoll as the source. Leaving aside the point that most birthdates given in WP have no citation at all and this doesn't seem to bother anybody, it is absurd that this sort of citation should be rejected without some evidence to the contrary. Is there a reason why somebody else would impersonate Nicoll and lie about his birthday? Is there a reason why Nicoll would lie (or be mistaken) about his birthday? Is there any risk of Nicoll suing WP for defamation in the event that it is mistaken about his birthday?

If not, then perhaps we should be treating this sort of information as more reliable, rather than less, on account of its source. (And I would suspect that most of the 'reliable' sources we customarily accept as authorities on such things just take the subject's word for it anyway, unless they are known to be untrustworthy; I don't know of a lot of journalists who go around checking birth certificates as a matter of course.)

Here's another example: the article on Patrick Nielsen Hayden, a well-known SF editor. On January 27, an editor added a large chunk of material to Hayden's bibliography; along with a lot of correct information, it contained an error: it listed 'Yolen and Greenberg' as editors on a book where it should have listed Yolen alone.

The error sat there undetected for two months until Pnh - i.e. the subject of the article - corrected it. In response, he was asked not to do this sort of thing, but to go through the more roundabout path (and less obvious to a newcomer) of posting on the talk page to ask that somebody else do it.

If he had been posting about awards he'd won, sure. But on a minor point of fact which the guy can be expected to know? At best, this attitude encourages people to correct their own entries anonymously, or nudge a friend to do it. At worst, it hurts accuracy by discouraging those who are best placed to correct this sort of detail from doing so. These are hardly isolated incidents; every time something like the Nicoll AFD kicks up a discussion about this somewhere, I hear half a dozen stories about people who've given up on trying to correct uncontroversial data in their own articles - like, say, the spelling of their name - because of the opposition to first-party edits. It's hardly going to stop the unscrupulous ones, who'll just create a sock.

When Misplaced Pages started out, this sort of thing was less of a problem. Put simply, anybody who was notable enough to be mentioned in WP probably had better things to do than edit it; when somebody did edit their own entry, it was often for bad-faith reasons. With WP's growing profile and importance, there is more and more legitimate reason for notable people to take an interest in their own articles. While acknowledging the potential for bias on certain types of information, we should welcome proofreading of uncontroversial data by the people best qualified to do so. --Calair 02:37, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Footnote: As I should've noted before, WP:BLP does allow some circumstances in which first-person sources may be used, but these would still exclude both the examples I gave above. The first requirement is that the information in question "is relevant to the person's notability" - which rules out things like birthdays and the exact spelling of somebody's name - and the third is that it "does not involve claims about third parties", which the Hayden example does. --Calair 04:16, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Reliable Source

I invite comments from expert members on this forum about defination of reliable source in context of forced divorces there is a discussion about a blog of a person who has stated that he was forcefully divorced by a cult group, this however is not accepted as reliable source by some editor's. Wiki say's clearly that blogs are accepted incase they are from reliable source, can anyone explain who can be a reliable source incase of forced divorces other then the person himself ?

--Shashwat pandey 09:57, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

First, I think you are not correct on blogs... blogs are generally considered unacceptable. There may be rare exceptions, but this does not sound like one of them (an expection for noted journalists and experts in an accademic field has some consensus... but is not yet part of Policy). Second, you definitely should be hesitant to use someone's personal blog... Such a source clearly falls under the "Self-Published" clause of WP:V and WP:RS... it might be useable in an article about the person claiming to have been forcibly devorced, but not in a general article on the topic. What I think you would need is a reliable third party report, such as a newspaper, that repeats (and has fact checked) the person's claim. Blueboar 12:29, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Tnx for the info.

--Shashwat pandey 13:49, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

If blogs are unacceptable, why do we have an article on Groklaw? --Kim Bruning 23:11, 19 May 2007 (UTC) I wonder if I'm violating WP:BEANS , WP:POINT and several as yet unwritten metapolicies by mentioning that ^^;;

If neo-nazi forums are unacceptable, why do we have an article on Stormfront? Because not everything with an article is an RS. Hipocrite - «Talk» 23:14, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Other wikis

Would infromation from another wiki (not from Wikimedia) be considered a reliable source or not? Ashura96 19:23, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Depends on who the author is. Hipocrite - «Talk» 23:15, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

In the vast majority of cases, no.--tjstrf talk 23:17, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Alright, I just wanted to make sure. Ashura96 23:19, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Revision/Addition to WP:RS

I'm proposing a clarification for WP:RS. The problem that seems to arise is that the policy, as it is now, allows for agenda-pushing. A good example of this is what has been happening for months on the Georg Cantor article. The debate is whether or not it is correct to categorize/refer to Georg Cantor as "Jewish." It seems that some sources write off Cantor directly as "Jewish." They're mostly Jewish-culture oriented websites, sometimes newspapers or magazines. However these sources seem to leave out the whole story, and when you read into Cantor's biographies you learn that his father was Lutheran, his mother Roman Catholic, his family somewhat anti-semitic, and only an ethnically Jewish grandfather to qualify him as "Jewish." In other words, he was neither self-identifying nor substantially of ethnic descent. A frequent excuse used to during the debate is that anyone who removes the categories/qualifications is being a vandal because they're removing sourced information (even though there is OTHER sourced information contesting it). This debate extends to many other articles and also is closely related to WP:BLP issues.

My proposal for a solution is to modify WP:RS so that a "hierarchy of sources" exists for biographies of people. Ones that are higher on the hierarchy are seen as more reliable for categorization and listing purposes. The hierarchy would be something like:

1. Quotes and Statements from Person
2. Official Published Biographies
3. Newspaper Articles, Magazine Articles
4. Reliable Websites

Is there any way we can get something like this into WP:RS? --Tellerman

• Per WP:V The threshold for inclusion in Misplaced Pages is verifiability, not truth. Jeepday (talk) 04:01, 21 May 2007 (UTC)
  • With a viewpoint like that, it's no wonder so many people consider wikipedia unreliable. All you need is someone pushing an agenda and looking as deep as possible for a source that could be called borderline reliable, and voila you get potentially misleading information. Newspapers and websites tend to ignore the specifics and just simplify details on people to a poor degree. I, and I think everyone should, apply WP:IAR to that part of WP:V. --Tellerman
• For better or worse, I don't think there's any substitute for careful editorial judgment in these cases. Sometimes direct quotes are more reliable then biographies, sometimes the reverse; sometimes a (reliable) website or newspaper article may in fact trump all other sources because of being based on more recently-discovered data. -- Visviva 04:30, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

• But if it's important recently-discovered data, it will appear in other more reliable places eventually. If it's only trivial, it's probably not even worthy of being mentioned on wikipedia. --Tellerman

Quotes are of course the most reliable for the person's opinions, but not really for anything else. Objective biographic sources are probably better for accomplishments, and I wouldn't rank "official" ones very high in the case of, say, political figures. Even for opinions, you can't use use any quote at all--by selecting the quote you can affect the meaning--it's a well-known art. But V not truth means or should mean that we do not have to prove its actually true, but that doesn't mean we should take something published which is likely to be false. There is no way to avoid the need for good judgment. DGG 06:02, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Remember the person's opinion on themselves is usually one of the most important aspects of their biography. To entertain the subject, let's say scientists somehow biologically prove a person to born a homosexual, if that person then says they're not, we shouldn't put them in an LGBT category. If there's relevance, it can be said "scientists said this and this" but the direct references should still stay off, whether the person is dead or alive (WP:BLP). If there is contradictory information, it should still be said, but not highlighted. Sorry, I might be doing a poor job of explaining. --Tellerman

• Per WP:RS Reliable sources are credible published materials with a reliable publication process; their authors are generally regarded as trustworthy, or are authoritative in relation to the subject at hand. In the example given you appear to have multiple reliable publication, placing a person in a category you do not agree with, there is nothing saying the person can not be in more then one religious category. Jeepday (talk) 13:06, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

I have to agree with Visviva: “For better or worse, I don't think there's any substitute for careful editorial judgment in these cases.” As well-intentioned as Tellerman’s proposal is, there are just too many exceptions to the rule to make it uniformly applicable. In the particular case of Georg Cantor, you’ve encountered an issue that can’t even be resolved in Misplaced Pages: Who is a Jew? Is it someone who practices Judaism or is it an ethnicity – or both? And who gets to decide the qualifications? Even for ethnicity there are religiously based differences of opinion on whether someone is ethnically Jewish – is it determined by having either parent a Jew or only through matrilineal descent? Ironically, some Jewish culture-oriented sources you mention will include as Jewish a person who is non-professing, although of solid matrilineal descent (such as an adoptee), and yet won’t touch a Messianic Jew of solid matrilineal descent. And what about someone like Bob Dylan who converted to Christianity but is no longer apparently a professing Christian (and may or may not have become a Lubavitcher)? About the only thing one can reliably and accurately say is “Oy vey!” Askari Mark (Talk) 01:11, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Dark Tea/Carleton Coon

I am currently involved in what is becoming an increasingly tiresome and long running edit-war with user:Dark Tea over material related to the mid 20th century anthropologist Carleton Coon, whose works DT seems to hate with a passion. I would be glad of some input, since DT keeps quoting WP:RS regarding Coon. It is worth nothing that some editors do treat Coon as a current "reliable source" on racial categories (see Nordic race for example). This is problematic to say the least, but the issue concerns inclusion of his work in accounts of the history of racial theories, as for example on the Australoid article. DT seems to want to delete all reference to the history of the theory (except, oddly Thomas Huxley) on the grounds that early theorists are not Reliable Sources. As far as I am concerned this is as barmy as deleting all references to Aristotle in accounts of the history of physics or biology, because Aristotle is no longer a reliable source on these subjects. Paul B 15:01, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

I agree that such a rationale is "barmy". I would think that early theorists would be the most reliable sources on what they believed/wrote. Imagine writing an article on Mein Kampf without being able to refer to anything it says. Editing out unpalatable or unfortunate "history" does not make it "go away" and is itself nothing more than trying to make and enforce a particular point. However, perhaps you could encourage Dark Tea to take the issue to the talk page, instead of both of you continuing with edit-warring and personal attacks. Askari Mark (Talk) 18:26, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

I appreciate that my comments on Australoid may seem intemperate, but I have been over this in detail with Dark Tea on the Talk:Mongoloid race page. When she can't answer, she goes silent then repeats the same claims on another page. I'm not trying to scapegoat here, I just want some consensus to be established. Paul B 21:35, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Just looked into her edit history and she seems to be calling anyone who doesn't have a politically correct view on race a racist and using this as an excuse to remove them from wikipedia. Sounds like an extreme case of POV pushing to me. Carleton Coon is most certainly a reliable source by any definition of the term. Now certainly some of his views may seem obsolete decades later but all scientific view points get revised over time and there are certainly experts today who still believe in a lot of his ideas. And the notion of removing him from a historical discussion of human races is ludicrous. Secularrise 14:21, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Indeed. While I would add the caveat that references to Coon and his views should always be placed in historical context, the fact that he is obsolete is no reason to exclude him. Blueboar 16:01, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

That's right. I'm also not aware that too much research has been done since along the lines of Coon's - instead it seems to me (I'm no expert, so correct me if I'm wrong) that the whole line of investigation was dropped as politically suspect. What is current is population genetics, which using a different methodology, addresses the same underlying questions. That the word "race" is unmentioned or even attacked is superficial response to politically poisonous but intellectually insubstantial line of criticism.Proabivouac 20:05, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

His theories are so thoroughly irrelevant that I do not think he is a RS except in an historical context: I am not sure you could find any current mainstream support. DGG 07:33, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

From what I gather, that is how he is being used... in an historical context. As such he is reliable. Blueboar 12:33, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Blogs and web forums as reliable sources?

For articles about web topics, many of the most reliable sources are published online. Online magazines often call themselves "blogs," even though they have paid editors and reporters. We should not be biased by the publication media; our criteria should be editorial review and fact checking.

We do allow self-published sources for experts commenting in their field of expertise. We also allow self-published sources as primary references. As such web forums and personal blogs can sometimes be reliable sources, in some situations.

My concern is two-fold: (1) Can we improve our policies and guidelines so people understand these fine distinctions? (2) User:SandyGeorgia suggested that I start a thread here to draw more attention to Misplaced Pages:Featured article candidates/Search engine optimization, a situation that needs comments on the reliability of online sources. There is a concern about promoting this article to WP:FA because it relies on web sources, but those are the best available sources for this topic. How do we resolve this? Jehochman / _✔ 16:03, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Jehochman, I'm going to be very busy IRL over the next few weeks, and may lose track of this; please ping me if you get any resolution. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:05, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

I've moved this over to Misplaced Pages:Reliable sources/Noticeboard for further discussion. Jehochman 01:58, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

School newspapers reliable ?

We could use a weigh in at Misplaced Pages:Requests for comment/University High School (Los Angeles, California).

The article in question is protected after an edit war and we're now attempting to get consensus on whether or not school newspaper articles are RS. Until such a time... Miss Mondegreen talk  00:42, May 24 2007 (UTC)

I have restored this discussion after seeing User:Will_Beback incorrectly (imho) chastise Miss Mondegreen for Spam and canvassing, and after he pointed out that this RFC is already at WP:AN/I. I feel that is inappropriate. RS issues are discussed here, not an AN/I. A user should be quite free to post RFC's on RS issues right here and not be attacked for doing so. That is one of the main reasons for this discussion page. Wjhonson 02:30, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Reliable or not?

I'm involved in a dispute over whether any, all, or none of the following sources can be considered reliable. Any comments or opinions are appreciated. - Crockspot 17:10, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

• Counterpunch.org
• MediaMatters.org
• The Raw Story
• Salon.com
• WorldNetDaily.com

MediaMatters usually includes transcripts or other sources as the basis for its articles, although it may be preferable to cite the primary source for a highlighted incident. Also, some of the cited content (such as radio shows) is ephemeral, or the MediaMatters site may most clearly summarize the situation. The other sources you list are prone to generate arguments about the source tangential to the content, so if there are less controversial sources you might want to use them instead. If there aren't any other sources, how about handling it case by case? --Sgorton 04:52, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

• I also think MM is a good resource for their video and transcripts (which appear to be accessible long after the story is no longer 'the news of the day'. They are undoubtedly reliable in this respect. I'm aware of their leanings though, and I don't think we should advance their POV (care must be taken to keep the overall wiki article NPOV). Traditional media should also be referenced (wrt transcript and video) for as long as it is available.
• rawstory (for the most part I think) reprints stories available elsewhere, although they do have some original reporting which may require a direct cite from them. I think they've also made a move to increase their original reporting, which means their organization may come up more often in the future. In any case, I think they're reliable, so if the work is original to them, cite them as often as is relevent and needed, if it's a posting of somebody else's work, cite the original (AP, CBS, . . . etc.)
• Haven't seen a whole lot of Salon. . .case by case basis where relevent I suppose. I think they're reliable, I just don't know. . . how often they would be needed in wiki-articles that don't concern themselves. disclaimer: I contribute to the Glenn Greenwald (Salon columnist) wiki-article. R. Baley 17:58, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

WorldNetDaily is famous for having a heavy bias, and they have a tendency to report stories not picked up anywhere else. I'd try to find a second source to corroborate anything they post in less inflammatory terms. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 15:19, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Reliability noticeboard

Per #A reliable source committee?, and to answer questions just as that above, I would like to create Misplaced Pages:Reliable sources/Noticeboard, where editors could post questions about whether given source(s) are reliable, and editors interested in reliability would answer. In essence it would be a non-binding RfC for reliability and a place to gather all discussions about specific sources, freeing this talk page to more theoretical discussions.-- _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk}  17:23, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Good idea; might help solve an old edit war or two that flare up every now and again. ~ ONUnicornproblem solving 20:15, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

I also like the idea. I've created the page with your nutshell statement of it's purpose. It would be good if you could add a link from the main article directly to that page, and also we should put a link at the top of this Talk page as well. Wjhonson 02:35, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Unclear status of Misplaced Pages:Reliable sources/examples

This useful page - linked from here - seems partially forgotten, and has no clear status, I have labelled it with 'proposed'. See also my comments at relevant discussion page.-- _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk}  17:30, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. Also a good idea. If this is an orphan page, it should be linked from the main page and also linked at the top of this Talk page as well I'd think. Wjhonson 02:36, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Just for the record... much of RS/Examples page was copied and merged into the WP:Attribution FAQ... not all of it, but a large chunk. I see that there is a proposal to (sort of) "undo" that merge and bring the material back to the RS/Examples page. This is fine with me if that is consensus, but personally I think it is useful to have duplication of the examples in both pages. Blueboar 12:26, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Blueboar I'd recommend linkifying the examples off WP:Attribution FAQ to the RS/Examples page. That way we don't have competing example-wars. Wjhonson 13:36, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

As opposed to competing policy/guideline wars? Perhaps what we need is a single joint examples page, that both RS and ATT point to. Blueboar 14:18, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Make it so! I refrained from saying "Pikachu I choose you!"Wjhonson 14:45, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Not to do

Do not include the "tag" characters "<" and ">" in your comments. I just archived a piece of this page and those characters were in it, and totally whacked out Wiki when followed by something I suppose vaguely looked like a command or ambiguous expression. Well by "totally whacked-out" I just mean it cut off the rest of the page and threw-up some weird error in the text body.Wjhonson 14:57, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Anyone know exactly where I can report something like this to the Wiki-coding-monsters so maybe they could find a way to Wikifix the Wikimachine? Wjhonson 14:58, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Conservapedia?

Do we consider Conservapedia a WP:RS? I've noticed it's been used in some articles (e.g., ). My instinct tells me a tertiary source -- especially one that is self-declared as having a non-neutral point of view -- should not be considered a RS for objective information. Raymond Arritt 00:53, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

I'd say no, Conservapedia is not a reliable source. I should note, though, that both of those article links listed Conservapedia under external links, not as a citation. --Alabamaboy 01:07, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

Wikis are not considered reliable sources. The main reason for this is that one can never predict what one will get when they load a page. A reader could get a page that had been vandalized a few seconds earlier. As for the EL issue, WP:EL states in "links to be avoided, #12, Links to open wikis, except those with a substantial history of stability and a substantial number of editors. I can't think of another open wiki besides WP that I would consider qualifying by this criteria. Certainly not conservapedia, dkospedia, or any other wiki that has an openly POV editorial policy. - Crockspot 01:23, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

Indeed... I would not even put WP in this category. But it comes down to this... Conservapedia is not a reliable source. Blueboar 12:33, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

Pot calling the kettle black and blue--RCT 17:20, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

Al Jazeera

Is al Jazeera considered a reliable source? Thanks in advance, --Samiharris 16:50, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

I think the answer is "it depends." Raymond Arritt 17:47, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

I was thinking about its usage at naked short selling, where a program on the subjet was listed under "media coverage." --Samiharris 18:08, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

Opie & Anthony

Another question: What about using the Opie & Anthony radio show, in the context of the "Criticism" section of Tucker Max?--Samiharris 18:13, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

Sri Lanka related sources

Due to the conflict in Sri Lanka, we often experience edit wars centered around the reliability of Sri Lanka related sources. Earlier this year, Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Sri Lanka Reconciliation started a section Classification of sources, which was largely respected across the spectrum of Sri Lanka related editors. Since these were only recommendations, it was inevitable that some day some editors would ignore them. This happened lately, which lead to a long, fruitless discussion on WP:ANI#Removal of RS sources. I pointed that discussion here because I believe this talk page is a more appropriate place for deciding if sources are reliable. — Sebastian 18:07, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

I propose to split the problem in two (or more) parts:

• What kinds of a source do we want to distinguish?
• What kind of a source is Tamilnet? (Or other sources - maybe that should be discussed at Misplaced Pages:Reliable sources/Noticeboard) — Sebastian

What kinds of sources do we want to distinguish?

This guideline distinguishes two kinds of sources: Reliable and unreliable sources. For Sri Lanka conflict related sources, unfortunately, this distinction is often practically impossible. The reliability of many sources is constantly under dispute between the two factions. Compliant with the Misplaced Pages policy for Attributing and substantiating biased statements, the members of Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Sri Lanka Reconciliation therefore decided unanimously to recommend a third option, which was called "Qualified Source" (QS). This option allows citing QS only with explicit attribution and an agreed qualification, such as "The pro-rebel Tamilnet.com reports that ..." (see details). This has been successfully implemented in many articles. However, the problem is that it is not an official WP guideline, so there are some editors who only respect this recommendation when it fits their partisan agenda.

Therefore, I hope that QS can become a guideline for Sri Lanka conflict related articles. — Sebastian 19:34, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

I agree. If all the articles in the scope of SL is to use this as a guideline it would benefit everyone. If this recommendation is not used by all parties who edit SL related articles then we will go back to the problem of distinguishing which is RS and which is not. Watchdogb 16:34, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

I think Sebastian’s ‘QS’ concept is a good first step toward at least clarifying which sources are “reliable” for at least the unexceptional fact, but subject to bias in certain circumstances and subjects; however, I suspect it may be too simplistic to be broadly practical.

Whenever the question “Is this source ‘reliable’?” is asked, it needs to be responded to with another question, “With respect to what?” Otherwise, the answer can only be “It depends.” Fundamentally, sources are reliable or unreliable with respect to their ability to provide an informed and objective treatment of the issue or fact in question. For instance, is Mein Kampf ‘reliable’ for Misplaced Pages’s purposes? It is a RS for Hitler’s political beliefs or a testament to Nazi philosophy, worldview and perspectives; it is not a RS for Jewish history or culture or belief systems or even for an unbiased (or even clear-headed) analysis and rationale on the causes and consequences of the First World War and Germany’s defeat therein.

To follow the ‘QS’ approach, I think we have to say it has at best limited applicability and only in those circumstances in which it is a significant resource in of itself. Mein Kampf would be a ‘QS’ for certain subjects related to WWII, the Nazis, German history, and so on, but it would be neither a ‘QS’ or ‘RS’ for anything having to do with Sri Lanka, for instance.

With respect to news media, at the trivial level, when it comes to incontrovertible facts like “2 + 2 = 4” or general news of no political significance, a source like Tamilnet (or German mass media publications under the sway of the Nazis’ Propagandaministerium) can be just as “reliable” a source as any other of the same type. (Keep in mind, though, that for Misplaced Pages, “reliable” does not necessarily mean all of the source’s products are “unbiased”.) It’s whenever events or issues are of political significance, or value judgments are being expressed, or opinions or interpretations are being presented (e.g., op-eds) that such sources become quite uncertain in their ‘reliability’ – except, of course, as sources for quotes representative of their “side’s” particular biases or as examples of propaganda statements regarding the topic.

Basically, if there’s no value to the publisher (or the government looking over their shoulder) to do so, there’s no reason to go to the effort to slant the story. Contrariwise, if publishing the story is likely to cost the publisher, then the reliability of the information sourced might be quite credible indeed. In short, rating a source as always being on one side of the “reliability” line or the other is a simplistic approach which WP:RS has taken for the sake of, well, simplicity. The better question to ask is, “Is XYZ a reliable source for this information in the given context?” Askari Mark (Talk) 02:32, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

It's only reliable for telling us what the LTTE and other pro-Tamil groups think, and not for what factual event occurred or did not occur, or if some other people said something (or did not). Just like "a video was posted on a pro-Al-Qaeda website... stating some event/policy change, declaration, etc. This conflict is heavily covered globally and there are many, much more reliable sources.Blnguyen (bananabucket) 02:57, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

The point is local media covers extensively about local events. We can not expect BBC international to cover all the events say in Tamilnadu which are important to local people. This is like saying we should only use BBC international as source for Tamilnadu related events and not Dinathanti (a local newspaper) Praveen 15:41, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Thank you, these are good points. In particular, I agree with the point of the Al-Qaeda and Nazi examples that sources can be reliable, but biased. I now realize that the concept of QS as we defined it may not be optimal because it lumped together reliability and bias, and we may need to distinguish between the two. However, this distinction opens a new dimension of complexity. Few cases are so black/white as Al-Qaeda and Mein Kampf. To stay with the example of Nazi Germany, and to illustrate the other extreme: Suppose, it's 1944. The Nazis successfully fooled the world. Suppose, a Jewish organization had published detailed reports of concentration camps, and one of our editors quoted from that. The Nazis, of course, would denounce the Jewish organization as "biased". Would we have to remove that information?

But let's move away from Nazi Germany, which was an extreme case. There is a wide range of uncertainty between these extreme examples, which probably is part of why we saw continuous edit wars (at least until we we defined QS). WP:RS curently does not address this dimension, so we need to spend some thought about how and where to draw the line. I now lean towards only allowing reliable sources, but distinguishing between:

• unbiased sources
• sources that may be seen as biased (or partial). These sources would only be allowed to be used with proper qualification ("pro-X").

The experience of SL conflict related articles shows that that would work as a guideline. I don't think we need to explicitly specify certain contexts of applicability; that was never a point of contention in the conflicts so far. (Presumably because it would be strange to contest a claim such as "party X killed civilians of party Y" with the argument that it's not pertinent to an article about terrorism and massacres.) — Sebastian 05:38, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I employed the Nazi example because it would be well-appreciated across a wide range of cultures (and to break away from the emotionally charged connections to Tamilnet in this particular instance). The “1944” scenario is interesting, but – assuming the Nazis hadn’t won the war, in which case there’d be no Misplaced Pages (or likely an Internet, for that matter) – Misplaced Pages can only draw from published sources perceived to be reliable; infallibility is not our standard, but rather correctability.

I would encourage you to please not abandon your ‘QS’ innovation, because it’s a useful tool in certain cases. I think the ‘QS’ technique can be useful in especially contentious situations and narrow application as with the SL/LTTE. If editors from a broad range of viewpoints can be brought together to form a consensus on the degree of reliability (in Misplaced Pages terms) of various commonly used sources, that’s a real boon in that you don’t have to keep arguing the RS issue over again and again and again and …, but instead have something to point them to. Bias does play into the reliability factor, but the “X says Y; however, Y says X” formulation helps us to deal with that. In fact, if you think about it, identifying and responsibly and appropriately employing ‘QS’ sources helps show that we are accurately capturing the full range of viewpoints; in short, it can be a tool to ensure NPOV, not just reduce time wasted in edit warring.

I don’t think we can usefully sort reliable news sources into “unbiased” and “biased/partially biased” bins. All sources are “biased” in some way, wherever subjective evaluation comes into play. I think what you mean to catch is something more like the following:

• Automatically RS: neutral or disinterested sources – those without a “brand in the fire” which neither benefit nor suffer from one side or another being “right”.
• QS (Sometimes RS): partisan sources – those which have a reputation for generally following mainstream journalistic practices except with topics where their obvious/admitted bias is “aroused” or “at stake”.

That isn’t perfect wording, but I think you can catch what I’m reaching for. ‘QS’ sources can then be handled as a provisional RS – where no better RS has yet been found – for non-contentious material, but as a “pro-X” (or “anti-Y”) quasi-RS regarding material that “resonates” with its bias. (This captures the ‘contextual’ side of the source’s reliability.) Thoughts? Askari Mark (Talk) 03:12, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

That sounds perfect to me Taprobanus 14:15, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

I can agree with the idea of a QS... but not with your definition of RS. A source can have a "brand in the fire" and still be reliable. I see what you call QS as a subset of RS, not as a separate item. A qualified source can be reliable ... if nothing else, it is reliable as a source for what a particular group or individual says. Once again, we are dealing with the difference between a source that is reliable for factual statements vs. one that is reliable for statements of opinion. Both are reliabile ... but the second needs to be attributed in the text of the article. Blueboar 15:45, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

It seems everyone agrees in the intent and the only disagreement seems to be in how to name what we mean. Blueboar is right that RS should be a superset, or put differently, all sources that are allowed in Misplaced Pages need to be RS. Now the distinction we need to make is simply that some RS may need attribution while others don't. The latter are what Askari called "RS", maybe we could better call them "RS/n" (where the "n" can stand for "no attribution necessary" or for "neutral or disinterested"). For symmetry, the former, which Askari called "QS" could be called "RS/a" (for "attribution necessary"). — Sebastian 18:44, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Yes, Blueboar, I agree fully. I wasn’t really trying to define ‘RS’ as much as winnow out the neighborhood of ‘QS’. What I was trying to do was lump non-contentious sources as automatically and unequivocally RS (inasmuch as unbiased sources are a moot point for this discussion), while defining QS sources as potentially and conditionally RS sources, depending upon how they are used (i.e., context). A QS source would be certainly be “reliable” as a source for what a particular group or individual says – but not necessarily so with respect to how they represent their opponents’ positions. If you don’t mind, I’m going to slightly redact (in bold) what I wrote to make it clearer. Askari Mark (Talk) 04:04, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

As I understand, the general position is that QS attribution be used only when any source is used to reference content, that maligns its 'perceived' opponents. One problem that we have to consider is how to find the perceived opponents... Praveen 14:51, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

‘QS’ would not be a broad application, but rather a tool to allow a broad range of editors to come to consensus as to how to treat certain contentious sources – especially newspapers and other news media – as potentially reliable sources, despite perceived bias, in terms of the context in which it is to be used. This is particularly helpful where several related articles are not only drawing upon the same sources, but in such cases only one side’s sources are available (like those in a guerrilla-controlled area). Based on the discussion here, ‘QS’ would be applicable to a source that is either notably biased against or a partisan toward another party under discussion. On non-contentious topics and on topics reflecting their side’s viewpoints, QS sources could be treated as RS, while on topics where their bias may prohibited a neutral and fair-minded treatment, they would need to be handled on a “X says A” basis – following which it would be fair to say “but Y claims B” for a balanced perspective. It’s a tool being experimented with at WikiProject Sri Lanka Reconciliation; what we’re trying to do here is see if we can’t evolve it into a more formally described and practical tool for such disputatious cases for which few useful neutral, unbiased RS can be found. In these cases, a more subtle approach is needed than WP:RS offers – it basically tells us to march straight through the minefield, the torpedoes be damned. Askari Mark (Talk) 03:17, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

I do not think we should see this as fixed categories. I do not think you could propose examples where there would be a sharp distinction. Even newspapers: the WSJ news section is one thing, the editorials another. The various NYT columnists are not of equal standing. BBC does very reliable news, and it also does a moderate degree of sensationalism. Even the worst source from a unreliable organization will tell us who the president is and when they were founded (though I can think of exceptions). "Nature" has published some pseudoscience from time to time, to maintain a show of impartial coverage, and has erroneously published some very obvious frauds as well. There is no way of avoiding individual analysis of the difficult cases. We do not need a straight-jacket. DGG 06:01, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

DDG, we’re looking at QS as a tool (not policy) to “remove straightjackets” through capturing a stable consensus of “individual analysis of the difficult cases” among related articles where a source may actually be useful (or even essential as one of the few sources available) and that source may be reliable for some uses but obviously subject to bias in others. Just like we don’t give carte blanche to WSJ or NYT op-eds, there are sources for which they’re “reliable” in some ways and unreliable in others.

In a recent posting in the section following this one, Nishkid64 succinctly and clearly captures the “traditional and proper” RS approach:

“Personally, I don't think if neutral reputable sources such as Reuters and Associated Press label Tamilnet as "pro-LTTE", then the site should not be used as a reliable source. Given that the website itself is called Tamilnet, and only reports on news regarding Tamil people and LTTE, I think there will sometimes be a COI in the news material the website publishes (which can be seen in some of the material the news website publishes). With a COI and a reputation of being a pro-LTTE news website, I would disapprove of Tamilnet being kept as a reliable source in these articles. Neutral sources that are not biased should be best used in these type of situations. I think the fact that there has been so much discussion about this speaks for itself. Not everyone agrees that the website is a reliable source, and given its controversial nature, we should avoid using it as a source.”

One of the problems with LTTE-controlled areas is that the LTTE doesn’t normally allow “neutral” reliable sources to wander around freely – even for general news that has nothing to do with the LTTE or Tamil-Sinhalese relations; Tamilnet reporters can, and sometimes it’s the only available source for what’s going on in Tamil areas. The “traditional and proper” approach is unquestionably the way to go in most cases; however, it leaves unaddressed how to deal with these exceptional “difficult cases” – other than constant warring over what sources are or are not “reliable” and then each time something is “settled”, have to start all over again with the next new editor joins the fray or turmoil in a related article boils over into “adjacent” articles again. WikiProject Sri Lanka Reconciliation is an experiment in trying to resolve source issues in a central location and contain the RS issues there, while allowing the affected articles to progress in a more constructive and less contentious manner. Askari Mark (Talk) 21:07, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

• "One of the problems with LTTE-controlled areas is that the LTTE doesn’t normally allow “neutral” reliable sources to wander around freely – even for general news that has nothing to do with the LTTE or Tamil-Sinhalese relations; Tamilnet reporters can, and sometimes it’s the only available source for what’s going on in Tamil areas." - I disagree. For starters, I am not too sure of the veracity of that claim and secondly, we do not need info coming out of LTTE held areas 24x7x365. We are not a news service. We are an encyclopedia. As an encyclopedia, we are only keeping track of the notable issues. If something is notable, I am sure BBC and Reuters will pull all stops and publish it. BBC and even the Indian media has covered the conflict extensively and I cant think of any notable issue that they've missed. Tamilnet otoh might publish every gunshot fired and grenade hurled, but we're not interested in that because, regardless of what else we'd use it for, I'd shudder to think of using it as a source to establish notability. To put it simply, if the absolutely reliable and reputed sources like BBC and Reuters and The Hindu, The Indian Express etc., are not reporting something that tnet alone is cooking up, then we also should not be allowing it on Misplaced Pages. The BBC, Reuters, Hindu, IE etc., have no axe to grind in the conflict and can be taken as impartial observers with impeccable credentials. tnet, otoh is a brazenly biased source with questionable credentials.
• Almost every dispute on the Sri Lanka project traces back to these dubious sources. You flush out these sources and several of the disputes will settle themselves. First they use dubious sources like these and then they open wikiprojects just to keep track of the disputes! I've never seen anything quite like this on wikipedia. Sarvagnya 21:45, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

What kind of a source is Tamilnet?

I believe Tamilnet is a reliable source and it does not violate WP:RS because it has

• 1. Editor (See source)
• 2. Editorial board ( See source)
• 3. Thorough review of information from reporters and removal of any suspect material.(See source)
• 4. It is extensively used by news agencies such as Reuters, AFP and news organizations such as BBC, CNN as a primary source for information from Sri Lanka that is usually censored. (See source)

But it is also a biased source hence , it should be used with attribution. Following are the views of 3 neutral editors about this news site.

• Black Falcon’s view here
• FayssalF’s view here
• Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington’s view

Thanks Taprobanus 17:44, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

I believe that Tamilnet is a RS. This is simply because it has all the qualifications for it to be a RS.

After the discussion on the ANI other neutral editors have said that Tamilnet is a RS. The discussion is here. Watchdogb 16:29, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

No there isn't. Blnguyen (bananabucket) 01:03, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Do you have any information regarding it's Editor and it's Editorial board, Taprobanus? --♪♫ ĽąĦĩŘǔ ♫♪ 21:04, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks and did it 20:51, 8 June 2007 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.201.162.1 (talk • contribs)

:D Sarvagnya 23:12, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

In response to Taprobanus' points, the People's Daily also satisfies 1 and 2. In respect to 4, many things that are not RS are used as primary sources by all sorts of reputable information. Otherwise where do all the journalists get all their leaked CIA reports, cabinet reports etc from...from backroom bureaucrats leaking bits and pieces. These guys do not then become reliable of their own accord.Blnguyen (bananabucket) 01:03, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

As far as ANI goes, there is consensus by "neutral editors" that it is not RS. By neutral you obviously mean to exclude people from the ethnicities involved in the SL conflict(Sinhalese and Tamil). If that's what you want, then the only person who wants these websites is FayssalF. For those who think that these are lobby groups, we have Y, Dineshkannambadi, Sarvagnya, Nishkid64, Blnguyen, Sir Nick who are not of the conflicting parties. Blnguyen (bananabucket) 01:03, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Come on, dont put words into my words, I meant by neutral non Indians and non Sri Lankans, that mean excluding you and me who had the difference opinion to begin with, one neutral editor said it was RS with reasons another said it was not without any reasons. Because it was a negative from a neutral negative, I have invite him. Views from India centric editors such as you included is not neutral either way. It is biased one way or the other, further this is not a contest of numbers but ideas. Let us argue with citations not just our opinions.Thanks 17:44, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Wow! so it is you, an invested party to the dispute, get to decide who is neutral? That's logical and fair. Praveen 15:32, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Even the People's Daily seems to be better. They have editors and journalists who have the moral courage to attach their names to their stories. Not backroom zombies operating in anonymity and writing whatever trash they want with no accountability. For that matter, I might have a blog and I am its editor and editorial board. huh. Sarvagnya 02:40, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

I wouldn't count Sarvagnya as a "neutral editor", having shown his bias against anything Tamil. But, back to the point, the one suggestion I can think of is if we intend to disallow tamilnet.com because of its partisan content, we should disallow the pro-sinhala sites too, irrespective of whether they have an editorial board and what not. Lotlil 04:51, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

And nobody cares what an obvious sock of somebody thinks of an established editor like me. In all humility, my contributions to wikipedia are way more honourable than yours. All that you and your buddies Aadal and PP have ever done on wikipedia is stalk and troll me. Do you have anything else to show for yourself? Sarvagnya 06:24, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

The biggest anti-Tamil, Kannada troll thinks itself as an established editor... What an irony! way to go ... Praveen 15:22, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Go for it. When did I ever say that Lankaweb or Sinhalanation etc were any good. Blnguyen (bananabucket) 04:56, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

I'm not saying you said anything about Lankaweb etc. All I'm saying is, if there's consensus among neutral parties that tamilnet should be disallowed, only because of its partisan content, we should use the same yardstick for all pro-Sinhala sources on the Sri Lanka related articles. This is just my opinion. Lotlil 05:01, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Good point. It relates to the example I just wrote at the end of the previous section. — Sebastian 05:44, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Tamilnet is not only partisan but it is invalid as a source for wikipedia purposes because it is not even a bonafide news service or website(flimsy pdfs that prove nothing notwithstanding). It is claimed that it has an editor and editorial board, but we arent told who they are. Nor has anybody demonstrated that they are affiliated to any 'official' press bodies and the like. In other words, I am not sure if we should be putting all 'partisan' sources in one basket.

For example, Times of India may be biased in some cases... they even have plagiarised from Misplaced Pages(Blnguyen's own content).. they are loved and they are hated.. but at the end of the day, we cannot wish them away as a bonafide source. They have editors and journalists accredited by relevant press bodies working for them and all the right affiliations. So we can be sure that there are checks and balances. We can be sure that they are held accountable by someone somewhere. Same with FOX. And CNN. And BBC and The Hindu, Deccan Herald(all of which have covered the Sri Lankan conflict and are as neutral as neutral can be in the affair). The same cannot be said of Tamilnet. Tell me, what is the difference between Tamilnet/tamilnation etc., and the random blog? Yes.. tnet and tnation may get a gazillion hits. But that can only make them "notable" not "RS"

Another reason why tnet and tnation are useless as sources for wikipedia is because, they blog about nothing but Tamil. Tamil-this, tamil-that, tamil, tamil, tamil. Nothing else. And afa Tamil is concerned, we dont believe them. Period. Not even with truckloads of salt. Is there anything other than Tamil related stuff on those blogs that we could salvage? I looked. But I didnt find any! Sarvagnya 06:20, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Your pathetic arguments continue... Is there any rule that if certain website speaks about only certain things, its not reliable? All local news channels cover local events only... Does that mean they are not reliable? There are independent thesis/reports made on reliability of Tamilnet. Do you have anything concrete or only your opinions? Praveen 15:29, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Just for the convenience of editors who did not follow the discussion on ANI, let me restate the evidence/independent research papers on reliability of Tamilnet.com.

A PHD thesis of Kasun Ubayasiri, Central Queensland University covers extensively Tamilnet. This is the conclusion that it derives.

"It can also be argued the Tamilnet success as internet based news service has been largely attributed to a unique position it has created as the only ‘independent’ provider of a reliable alternative view in the Sri Lankan theatre, one designed to counter the states rudimentary propaganda machine. Tamilnet has also adopted a reportage style closely resembling a wire service feed identified by western media practitioners as viable and reliable media. The prompt coverage of news both in the government controlled regions and those under the LTTE control has placed the a Tamilnet in the unique position of the being a news service with the widest coverage – a defining attribute in a media theatre dominated by Colombo and south centric media.Therefore it can be argued that Tamilnet’s strategy of providing pro-Eelamist news without any overt LTTE connections has yielded results and coupled with its reporting style and content, paved the way significantly wider coverage in both the internet and through international mainstream media, when compared with any other web based media Sri Lankan media product." here is the link

Same goes for Tamilnation.org. A simple search in google shows that tamilnation website is used as references in conference papers and other research papers. Associate press & BBC uses these websites as reference too. Praveen 16:29, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Just because the website covers news about tamils it does not make it a non realiable source. How about news that cover only Canadian/American/Indian news ? Are they not allowed to be used ? Pathetic. It is also noted that Tamilnet has fired some of its editors as soon as they became activists for the LTTE. Why would a propaganda site do such ? Because its not a propaganda site. It just covers what has happend. Tamilnet gets source from both the LTTE and the SLA. For instance if an attack happend then Tamilnet states "According to LTTE..." and then it also states "However, according to...". Another thing is just because another website that has editorial board and blah blah balh is not used as RS does not mean that Tamilnet cannot be used. Taprobanus said that because to show that it Passes WP:RS. Furthermore the fact that Tamilnet has an editorial board proves that it indeed goes thru fact-checking. Since it has all the requirments as a RS I can say that it is RS Watchdogb 18:49, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Also please take a look at Undueweight. Watchdogb 19:52, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

hmmm could you give some examples for kicking out their editors with evidence? --♪♫ ĽąĦĩŘǔ ♫♪ 20:21, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

I can indeed. Here is a achiever of the paper released my Whitker a well known person who studied tamilnet and the murder of one of its editers. It has also information of the displeasure by LTTE towards Tamilnet because Tamilnet has put LTTE in "bad light". Watchdogb 23:52, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

The PDF that taprobanus is showing doesn't really prove anything. What it's really showing is that TamilNet is just "notable". It doesn't prove that it is reliable or that it is neutral. And please, Praveen should stop harping that the TamilNet has been "referenced". It might have been referenced a few dozen times in the last 10 years(as the PDF says). That is hardly anything. Also, BBC is a news service and works very much differently than an encyclopedia. And yeah, Misplaced Pages is an encyclopedia. No encyclopedia which talks about truth uses sources like these whose only purpose is to spread Tamil nationalistic ideologies. Gnanapiti 06:32, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Gnanapiti, I think you are confusing WP:RS with WP:NPOV, where does RS says that the source has tobe neutral ? they have to be reliable but sometimes we have to use biased sources to neutralize articles hence Tamilnet becomes very valuable in making articles neutral. Anyway, every body who is arguing here has a known position so this is not going to go anywhere unless we follow the wiki process where truely neutral people can weigh in such as through rfc, rfm and rfa. Thanks Taprobanus 12:28, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

(reply to Gnanapiti:) Do not create rules on-the-fly to suit your regionalistic ideas... Since when did number of times a source got referenced has to be taken into account? If that is the case, then regionalistic propaganda sources such as Kamath's pseudo-history books would have never seen the light in Misplaced Pages... BTW: Read the underlined portion in my previous reply. Praveen 13:21, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

(reply to Gnanapiti:) The way Watchdogb just dropped a link to a whole document is indeed not very helpful to prove his point. However, I found the following on page 27: "none of the backers and editors of Tamilnet.com are members of the LTTE, and when one became an activist for the LTTE he was asked to leave his job as a sub-editor, and did." That seems to answer Lahiru's question precisely. — Sebastian 17:58, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

(reply to gnanapiti:) Yes, as Sebastian has pointed out it is to give answer to Lahiru's comment Watchdogb 18:37, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

• Are we now going to synthesise sources to establish reliability? Sorry. I dont buy it. Like Gnanapiti says, the pdf doesnt establish reliability in the least. It is at best only an 'academic' study of a very popular website(and hence the study). And whether its editors are members of the LTTE and whether they fired such people or not is really besides the point. The question here is really of RS. Not that of COI on the part of tnet.

• It is one thing for Reuters, BBC etc to use this source a couple of times a year and a totally different thing for us to use it as a source for an encyclopedia. And even Reuters doesnt use it as a routine/regular "reference"/"source". They only use it(very infrequently) to indicate what the extreme-Tamil view of the situation is. This whole specious argument that "hey.. it is good enough for BBC.. its good enough Reuters.. so it should be good enough for us" is bogus. First of all, we are not BBC. We are an encyclopedia. Second of all, "its good enough for BBC" is a lie. Sarvagnya 18:29, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Sarvagnya, the pdf was there for many reasons

• First off its there to show that Tamilnet is not a Arm on LTTE and neither is it there as a propaganda for LTTE. Remember that they indeed have put LTTE in bad light. They have also been criticized by the LTTE.

• For tamilnet to fire its editor because they became an LTTE activist shows that it does not tolerate anyone who might bring the hardcore LTTE stand to the news. If they wanted to spread propaganda then they would have kept the editor.

• PDF shows that the because Tamilnet had "subeditors" it must then go through the editorial process as any other news sites out there. Watchdogb 18:52, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

(reply to sarvagnya) We are not synthesizing the source. What I have written is verbatim reproduction of independent research. Not my research. OTOH, all your points are baseless claims without any attribution. Praveen 15:12, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Folks, we are getting way off topic here. The original question was: is Tamilnet a reliable source? And the answer seems to be that it is... allbeit (perhaps) a biased one. What you all seem to be arguing about now is a further question: is Tamilnet reliable for a specific statement? That is a debate that should take place on the article talk page, not here. One option to consider: change the text of the article so that it includes a text attribution, as in "According to Tamilnet...." (ie change the wording so that you are giving a statement of opinion rather than a statement of fact). In any case, I think we have reached a stage where you need to move the discussion back to the article talk page. Blueboar 15:36, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Great, will follow that reccomendation. Thanks Taprobanus 15:55, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Blueboar, please see the AN/I discussion. There were a number of editors (not just one) who did not think Tamilnet was a reliable source (some neutral editors, as well, such as myself). Nishkid64 (talk) 23:22, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

ANI is not the place for the discussion of WP:RS, and people have been invited to bring their arguments forward here. The discussion on ANI has become very long and drifted off in personal attacks and an unrelated discussion; we can't expect everybody to read that discussion. If you see any points in that discussion that have not been mentioned here, how about listing them here? — Sebastian 01:40, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

Okay, here are the views I posted at AN/I:

I have been a reader of Tamilnet for quite a while. I've always had an interest in the actions of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka. Anyway, now that you know my background, I wish to give my whole take on Tamilnet being a reliable source. Personally, I don't think if neutral reputable sources such as Reuters and Associated Press label Tamilnet as "pro-LTTE", then the site should not be used as a reliable source. Given that the website itself is called Tamilnet, and only reports on news regarding Tamil people and LTTE, I think there will sometimes be a COI in the news material the website publishes (which can be seen in some of the material the news website publishes). With a COI and a reputation of being a pro-LTTE news website, I would disapprove of Tamilnet being kept as a reliable source in these articles. Neutral sources that are not biased should be best used in these type of situations. I think the fact that there has been so much discussion about this speaks for itself. Not everyone agrees that the website is a reliable source, and given its controversial nature, we should avoid using it as a source.

Then in response to being labeled as an Indian sub-contient Wikipedian who shouldn't be in the debate I am not an Indian sub-continent Wikipedian. I live in the United States. I also rarely edit India-related articles (actually, the only one I really edited was Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale). Given that I have no history of participation with Tamil-related articles or India-related articles for the most part, then I don't see why my opinion is not valued.

I was later branded as a biased editor because I am Indian, which makes absolutely no sense. In response to a question about why TamilNet fails RS, I said: At WP:RS, it says "The relevant policies on sources are Misplaced Pages:Verifiability, Misplaced Pages:No original research, and Misplaced Pages:Neutral point-of-view." I do not think Tamilnet provides a neutral view, which in this case, would fail RS. Also, the policy says, "their authors are generally regarded as trustworthy, or are authoritative in relation to the subject at hand." Nishkid64 (talk) 18:15, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

Basically, the two pro-TamilNet users here have been telling Indian editors that their opinions are biased because they come from India. That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, and it makes them look like hypocrites. They're Tamil (I presume), and yet they are tellings Indians that they are biased. What bias do we have? We're expressing the opinions here, as are you (Lustead and Taprobanus). If you consider us biased, then you must consider yourself biased and abstain from the discussion. If you really want to hear the opinion of the community, ask neutral editors who have no affiliation to any Sri Lanka or Tamil-related articles, such as myself (like I said, I only have edited a few Indian-related articles on Misplaced Pages; most of my work is American sports and history) and other people, then that's fine. Nishkid64 (talk) 18:15, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

Ah, thank you. I remember reading this, and wondering what you meant by the double negation in "I don't think if neutral reputable sources such as Reuters and Associated Press label Tamilnet as "pro-LTTE", then the site should not be used as a reliable source." I assume you mean you do think so?

Two words about COI: Unfortunately, WP:COI is one of those guidelines that are most often cited by people who either don't understand it or use it to further their own agenda, instead of Misplaced Pages's best interest. This guideline clearly only applies to Misplaced Pages editors and not to sources. Of course, for any topic, whether conflict or not, we need to use information from interested parties. The same guideline is a bit fuzzy about what kind of "contributions" it covers. The way I see it is that it only applies to edits in article spaces. I therefore think that it's wrong to cite WP:COI to exclude an editor from reasonably participating in a discussion. Please let's not expand on this here, though. I only wanted to mention it briefly. (The right place for discussing the policy is WT:COI, and for discussing if certain users abuse this policy you may want to use their talk page, or you could create a section on WT:SLR.) — Sebastian 22:07, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

My usage of "COI" was not about Misplaced Pages editors, but about the people who write newsstories for TamilNet. Nishkid64 (talk) 22:34, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

As people here suggested, we can use Tamilnet without qualifications when there are no other sources. If there is alternative view available (say from Lankanation etc), we will qualify both sources with 'pro-LTTE' and 'pro-SLGOV' respectively as per existing guidelines in Srilanka Reconciliation project. BTW: See my reply above for the claim that if certain sources covers extensively about local things, they can not be used as RS. Praveen 02:03, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

That would be a step backwards. For four months, we have successfully followed the recommendation of citing Tamilnet with the attribution. Plain and simple, without conditions. This has never been questioned. In the contrary, the reason why we have this discussion is because some editors questioned whether Tamilnet should be allowed at all. I understand that you're trying to turn the table on those who questioned Tamilnet, but the point here is not who can push the other side better from the table, but to stay at the table together and work out our differences. There is no reason to change a recommendation that is working well. — Sebastian 02:47, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

I do not understand how COI applies outside of wikipedia. Clearly the COI of wikipedia is for the editors of wikipedia. It does not mention anything about RS and COI. Besides how can you say that there is COI with the writers of tamilnet? It is allready established that Tamilnet is not an arm of LTTE. No proof has been shown to say that Tamilnet is a propaganda sight either. Watchdogb 15:48, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Then please explain why TamilNet has been labeled as a pro-LTTE news website by many, many other neutral sources like Reuters or the Associated Press. COI is not a Misplaced Pages-only term. The term also carries meaning in the real world, and that's how I am applying it. Nishkid64 (talk) 16:06, 10 June 2007(UTC)

I agree with the statement of Blueboar – "A source can have a "brand in the fire" and still be reliable. .......... Once again, we are dealing with the difference between a source that is reliable for factual statements vs. one that is reliable for statements of opinion. Both are reliable ... but the second needs to be attributed in the text of the article".

My answer to Nishkid64 is, you yourself proclaimed – "I have been a reader of Tamilnet for quite a while. I've always had an interest in the actions of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka. Anyway, now that you know my background..........".

The way you expressed your background only made me to say – you are biased, because you are an Indian, though you haven’t edited much the issues of India related.

You are saying Tamilnet is not providing a neutral view, then how did they manage to publish the Sri Lankan President's interview at Al Jazeera television here, where he heavily slammed LTTE.

Tamilnet, because of its name-sake and the way it is carrying the news might be biased, but that doesn't mean that that is not a reliable source. Then for the name-sake, we can assume The Hindu is anti-Muslim or anti-Christian and also we can assume The Hindustan Times is ant-Pakistan. But that is not the case there.

I like to high light some of the views from User:FayssalF , a Moroccan nationality - "I see that TamilNet respects our policy on RS. These are my reasons:

• TamilNet has been cited and used as a reference in both notable media outlets such as BBC, CNN and news agencies such as the notable Reuters. It has also been used in academic papers and still being used in government websites such as the Canadian immigration and refugee board website. (Based on the links provided by participants above).

• Saying a pro-X is biased and unreliable is just like saying that opponent pro-X is biased and unreliable. Defence.lk reporting on TamilNet having lied is not a totally unbiased reporting. They are both partisan websites. In our case here, we only have one partisan side having a say in wikipedia. It is against our core policy NPOV. The article should be balanced. You are talking about "state terrorism in Srilanka" but the main accuser is silenced…

.................

• The argument that says that TamilNet lied once is just not a perfect one. In the list of journalism scandals you'd find almost every universally notable media. Who doesn't remember the Sorry, We were hoaxed story about the fake abuse photos of prisoners in Iraq? Daily Mirror is still considered notable. Newspapers and media in general sometimes lie intentionally and sometimes unintentionally. You can't be sure about that.

.................

• NPOV = Work for balance, that is: divide space describing the opposing viewpoints according to reputability of the sources. And, when available, give precedence to those sources that have been the most successful in presenting facts in an equally balanced manner".

I also agree with the conclusion of Blueboar that Tamilnet seems to meet the WP:RS – "..........is Tamilnet a reliable source? And the answer seems to be that it is... allbeit (perhaps) a biased one.............".
Lustead 16:14, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

I also like to mention here, the Reuters or the Associated Press are not the accreditation institutions for world media.Lustead 16:29, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Need for reliable sources\

I'm pretty sure that reliable, published sources are necessitated for compliance with WP:V ("Articles should contain only material that has been published by reliable sources.") and WP:NOR ("Articles should only contain verifiable content from reliable sources without further analysis."), but the question of what constitutes a reliable source is left up to guidelines to decide. I think the lede of this piece should be changed to point out that reliable sources are mandatory, though this is only a guideline on what constitutes one. Am I missing something? Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 15:38, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

The long-term resolution of this issue is presently under discussion. — Sebastian 06:38, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

A list of unreliable sites?

Is there any possibilty of there being made a list of sites that are "unreliable", thus making it a rule not to use them? What I'm aiming at is that many history-related articles are propaganda-infested by sites with a clear inclination towards Historical revisionism, far right attitutes and so on. As it stands, anyone can simply write some massacre didn't happen and then link to a far right source that confirms that claim. Shouldn't there be a mechanism to prevent this? -The Spanish Inquisitor 09:14, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

No... because the same site might be perfectly valid in the context of some other article we can not make a list of "unreliable sites" based on their content. Unfortunately, you need to battle these citations out article by article. The first thing I would suggest is that you insist on text attribution... ie that the article states something along the lines of "According to the revisionist history site www.pseudohistorynutjobs.com the massare did not happen". This at least lets the reader know who is making the claim. Beyond that, there are several other guidelines and policy statements that can be used to cut the really fringe stuff ... If you have not already done so, I would suggest that you familiarize yourself with WP:V, WP:NPOV (especially the section on Undue Weight), WP:FRINGE and WP:NOR. Blueboar 19:34, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Government databases as reliable sources

I had occasion to cite a public records database of Los Angeles County as a source. Another editor reverted this with the comment "Database searches are not reliable sources; as I said, we need something that is not ephemeral." The database is an official public record; that's how the county publishes business license information. Are public records databases reliable sources? --John Nagle 18:40, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

It is far, far better to use reliable secondary sources. We want to avoid articles that are based entirely on database sources like the one you describe, because the article would then fail to demonstrate that its subject is notable enough to warrant a WP article. And even assuming the article cites secondary sources, are you really also citing the type of facts that are found in a database (like co. owners, founding date, address, etc.?) This information is not typically cited, in my experience. UnitedStatesian 19:51, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

It's one of those things that resulted when another editor added {{fact}} tags which had to be answered. Notability wasn't the issue; there were other sources for that. It was the relationship between related organizations which was controversial. This sort of thing tends to come up with lobbying organizations, where the organization would prefer not to have too much information disseminated about who's behind them. --John Nagle 20:08, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Yes, public records are reliable sources. SchmuckyTheCat

Agreed. Some editors seem to confuse "reliable source" with other factors. Not every source must "indicate notability"; even self-published sources don't have to say why the fact is notable, they just are not to be used to include non-notable information (e.g. the SPS for "Bob likes cats" doesn't have to say why Bob's preference for felines is notable, but if that preference is not notable for Bob's article then the whole statement should be removed from the article no matter that we have a source). Not every source must be permanently online, although WebCite can be used to preserve "ephemeral" sources. And while secondary sources are required for critical commentary and proof of notability, primary sources are ideal for establishing simple facts and should be used without hesitation for that purpose. Anomie 20:54, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Database searches are not verifiable, as the contents of databases are ephemeral. Jayjg 23:19, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Whether or not the database itself is ephemeral (which isn't always true; for instance, http://www.nationalbridges.com/ is just a front-end to a database published once a year by the Federal Highway Administration), the actual records can be checked by anyone going to the county offices. --NE2 00:24, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Please quote the part of WP:V that supports your statement. Thanks. Anomie 01:18, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Government databases, like any database, sometimes record things transiently and sometimes archivally. The individual nature of the source must be considered. We continually use directory type databases that record things as of a certain date, and our edits reflect it. that's the very purpose of giving the date when it was accessed. The same is true of essentially everything we use. If WP was intended for the scholarly preservation of information, we would record and freeze he state of every source we use--but we '- this is a level of certainty and proof that is not the function of a general encyclopedia. We are a merely a convenient tertiary source, of no greater reliability than our sources and how we use them. DGG 07:31, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

The database he is talking about is archival. It brings up text versions of business records, I prefer the one from Florida, which gives you direct document images . SchmuckyTheCat

For that matter, WebCite can be used to preserve links that may "go dead". Anomie 12:39, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

John Nagle has misstated the issue; the issue was original research, as was plainly stated many times - the edits summaries were consistently "remove original research", e.g. , and I said the same in the Talk: page comments: True, in my final comment I accidentally used the phrase "reliable source" rather than "original research", but the issue has been clear from the start. It's baffling why John would try to present the issue this way now. Jayjg 23:15, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

nycsubway.org

The relevant discussion is at Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject New York City Public Transportation#Fact Checking on Station Opening Dates. http://nycsubway.org/ has opening dates for all stations, but many of them are incorrect. Can it be cited for other stations where we don't have another source? --NE2 22:48, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Would you have numbers? How many out of how many checked dates were incorrect, and how far off were they? — Sebastian 23:04, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

I'd guess about 1/2 to 2/3 of the dates before about 1915 are off; it's a lot more accurate after that. --NE2 00:20, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Is it possible to ask the website owners which sources were used to cite the dates? Tinlinkin 03:43, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

I would say that the site can be used for those situations where no other sources for a station opening date are available ... however you might consider adding a text foot note to the reference citation, cautioning the reader that the source is known to contain occasional errors. Obviously, if a more reliable source is eventually located you should then replace it. Blueboar 13:28, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Best sources, not just Reliable sources

I recently tried to trace down the sources of some dubious statements in an area that I know something about -- the history of medieval astronomy. After spending some time on line, searching the bibliographies, and getting books at the library, I identified what seems to be a common factor underlying such dubious claims.

These dubious claims tend to cite tertiary sources written by people with little historical expertise -- sometimes web-based articles, sometimes popular printed books, sometimes books and articles published by little known publishing houses and journals. The replies to the claims tend to be by qualified historians and usually appear in well respected, extensively documented books and articles published by well known publishing houses and scholarly journals with well-established reputations.

The key here is that we can find an indicator of the dominant scholarly opinion by comparing the quality of the rival sources. What I'm getting at is that when there's nothing better, we have to rely on whatever sources are available. However, when there is disagreement among the sources, the "best sources" carry more weight. At some times we can even use the "best sources" to justify dismissing the fringe point of view presented in sources of lesser quality that might formally qualify as "reliable sources".

Shouldn't this article -- or a related one -- address the concept that meeting some technical standard of reliability isn't always an adequate criterion for inclusion? There are a lot of sources out there; we're writing an encyclopedia; so we should use the best available sources. --SteveMcCluskey 01:43, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

1. Kasun Ubayasiri. "PHD thesis" (PDF). Retrieved 2007-05-31.