Wikipedia talk:Identifying reliable sources

Transcript of a lecture hosted on a student organization's page

• Note: Moved to Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard

kingdom animalia

can you please give me the sub phylums of vertibrates? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 112.135.74.68 (talk) 02:51, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

Try asking your question at the Wikipedia:Reference desk. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:47, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

Disclaimers on websites

A trip through RSN's archives shows a lot of discussions in which people ask whether the presence of standard liability disclaimers on the website make the source unreliable.

For example, the website for The New York Times says "NYT does not represent or endorse the accuracy or reliability of any advice, opinion, statement, or other information displayed, uploaded, or distributed through the Services". This is pretty typical, and yet few of us would say that a major newspaper is an unreliable source.

So my thinking is that we should expand the ==Questionable sources== section to add a single sentence along the lines of "The presence of a boilerplate liability disclaimer, such as seen on the websites of many major newspapers, is not an indication that a source is questionable."

What do you think? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:10, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

• Except that it is regularly indicative that a source is questionable, when it is used in place of an editorial policy. Fifelfoo (talk) 04:33, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

  Can you give an example of a source that you would have been happy to accept as if they didn't have such a disclaimer, but have rejected because they do? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:46, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

  This entire thread is being discussed with the implication that sources are globally reliable or unreliable. Reliability is contextual depending on what's being claimed. If anything, we should change the policy to emphasize that few sources are totally reliable or totally unreliable, and that it's all contextual. Gigs (talk) 22:03, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

  Certainly reliability is contextual. We have a problem with people declaring that boilerplate disclaimers like the one at the The New York Times website make the contents of those websites fall into the "totally unreliable" category. For the narrow problem that I'd like to fix, I think that addressing the issue of website disclaimers directly will be more effective than another generalized, vaguely worded round of "it's all contextual". WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:06, 21 February 2012 (UTC)

Counterpunch, Antiwar.com

Can they be considered reliable sources for statements of opinion? If, for example, I find that a criticism against a prominent civil society organization, made by an antiwar.com or Counterpunch writer, fits the entry for that organization, should I include it? Can they be used as reliable sources, not for facts, but instead for opinions, criticism, etc.? Guinsberg (talk) 15:42, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

This kind of question is best asked at WP:Reliable sources/Noticeboard. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:05, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

Are interviews reliable sources?

Are interviews published by a source independent of the interviewee considered reliable sources? CüRlyTüRkey^Talk_Contribs 21:26, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

They are intrinsically only reliable sources of what the subject said in the interview; in that case they are also primary sources (which, for quotations, are preferred). As far as content, they are only as reliable as the person being interviewed (e.g. I once found Loudon Wainwright III misstating his own father's name). If someone were an expert in the field, they might be considered reliable for that. All of this depends on the reliability of the publisher of the interview. Mangoe (talk) 21:37, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

So...if the article were a bio, and the only source for the subject's father's name were in an interview, would it be best to leave it out entirely? CüRlyTüRkey^Talk_Contribs 23:21, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

Er ... I think you're misunderstanding. Mangoe is citing that as an extreme example. In general, most people are reliable sources for their own father's name. Now, it may well be that their father's name isn't important for purposes of the article, and the fact that only one interview mentions it seems like evidence that it's not very important, but that's a different issue, one of weight, not one of reliability. --GRuban (talk) 23:43, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

Okay, what I'm getting at is: in what way and to what degree are interviews acceptable as sources for a biography? A few months ago, I was doing a lot of work on Chester Brown's article, and a lot of the sources I included were from interviews with him. It only occurred to me recently that that might be an issue, and I haven't been able to find anything about it in the guidelines. CüRlyTüRkey^Talk_Contribs 23:54, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

• There is a discussion regarding ethnographic and oral history interviews conducted by amateurs and professionals respectively ongoing on RS/N at the moment. Fifelfoo (talk) 00:31, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing that out, but the discussion seems to revolve around whether oral history can be used to show notability. Chester Brown is an award-winning, best-selling cartoonist and politician. He's got notability coming out his ears. What I wanted to know is to what degree details of his life can be included from what he has said in interviews. CüRlyTüRkey^Talk_Contribs 00:56, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

My two pence is that if the interviewer asked questions about or discussed particular aspects then that shows that the answer has some weight, however bits which the interviewee just offered up without prompting would need some other secondary sources mentioning it to show interest. Dmcq (talk) 09:03, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

For supporting content in an article, an interview is at least as reliable as as the subject's official website. Technically, interviews are defined by policy as being primary sources, and you may WP:USEPRIMARY sources (carefully). WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:09, 21 February 2012 (UTC)

SO, those external links...

I'm going through the articles which cite TMZ.com (mentioned here as both unreliable in it's own right, and as plagarisng WP without citing, leading to WP:CIRCULAR). What do the panel think about the site used in Extremal links, for example A Public Affair. Rich Farmbrough, 21:23, 13 February 2012 (UTC).

New essay link

I notice User:Fifelfoo has added a new essay link to an essay that has been worked on for some time now: Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (history). Now that it is being linked into mainstream policy, I would suggest some broader discussion should be had about this. Here are some remarks for comment:

• In general, articles about history tend to sometimes use non-academic sources, but this essay basically says that this is actually original research. While I do not question the need for a preference for the best sources, I honestly doubt that this wording reflects consensus on Wikipedia? In any case calling one type of problem something else hurts my logic organ. "Poor sources" are not "original research"?
• I am also somewhat concerned with the general idea of different fields having different rules, especially when those rules are clearly being qualification driven. Of course common sense and consensus have always meant that different fields require different approachs to sources, and in some cases, even some rules (for example concerning medical information or concerning living people). But there does seem to be a non-consensus movement within Wikipedia which wants to create academic "territories" within Wikipedia. It is like a guild-based version of article ownership isn't it? (I have seen articles about ancient languages being patrolled by linguists who fight against any material published by geneticists or archaelogists about those languages, no matter how frequently cited, and I have have seen it argued that scientific articles should never have sections devoted to popular culture subjects, no matter how obviously notable or linked. Such things can lead to forking in a way which can distort how WP presents a subject so that is no longer neutral and similar to how a reading of mainstream sources would present it.) Apart from WP:NEUTRAL I also think it grinds a bit with the whole concept of WP being the encyclopedia anyone can edit, as opposed to Nupedia?

Anyway I think there should be some broader discussion. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 10:26, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Please notice that the page in question starts with:

This is a project to work towards guidelines equivalent to WP:MEDRS for History related articles.

therefore it is not an essay, but rather something similar to new policy proposal. Aren't there a rules how to format and present such policy-work-in-progress pages? AFAIU, any policy/guideline works must be announced for a broader audience, to avoid possible bias hinted at by Andrew.

Second, Andrew, IMO the proper place for the discussion you started is Wikipedia talk:Identifying reliable sources (history). Therefore I suggest to move this section there, while leaving here an invitation to join the discussion.Lovok Sovok (talk) 17:30, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

My impression is that discussion on that page is within a small group, and this should get broader discussion.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 20:01, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

You may wish to notify those editors. HISTRS is mainly used as a representation of hundreds of RS/N responses regarding history articles. As HISTRS mostly represents a situation specific implementation of WEIGHT, RS and V it isn't aiming at policy status—if policy status isn't necessary why require it?

Andrew, I'm going to respond in detail to some of your points:

• "different fields having different rules" is actually what happens on wikipedia already. And the suggestion in HISTRS is primarily practice based rather than qualification based; qualifications are used as a proxy indicator of practice; but, regular publication in the scholarly mode is another indicator of practice.
• This isn't a non-consensus movement; I'd suggest you read RS/N's back catalogue. It isn't like a guild based version of ownership and your suggestion is more than a little offensive—HISTRS includes a fairly obvious sequence of both interdisciplinary and non-academically qualified methods for peering the quality of the standard of publication. But the people who do history have an established system of knowledge and publication.
• In particular, their epistemology, at the highest level "historiography" in general, indicates that stitching together a variety of sources is the conduct that is the production of raw history. We don't accept argumentum ab initio in maths, we don't accept demonstration by statistical calculation in mass sociology or economics, nor do we accept demonstration by original synthesis of primary sources in history—because we do not conduct original research on wikipedia.
• And doing so with sources that are "secondary" to wikipedia, but are of an appallingly poor quality, such as opinionated op-eds from newspapers published 75 years ago, is another attempt to demonstrate by the production of original knowledge.
• The failure to present what the mainstream sources say is a core issue here: the suggestion that Albanian history ought primarily be sourced from late 19th century generalist tertiary works—primarily because these mirror a populist narrative of some kind of southern european ethnic nationalism—the sheer level of avoidance of scholarly works in the area of history is a deep problem.
• Supplementing fundamentally good behaviour (scholarly weighting, structure, narrative) with individual factual points that lie clearly within such claims, or with illustration of a point by reference to a primary source is good. But as I recently read on a major war article, suggesting that the article be rewritten to conform to a collection of primary sources compiled by an involved government, some types of suggested editing break OR quite badly in the field of history. Fifelfoo (talk) 00:54, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

Hi Fifelfoo. I probably should mention that I intended to post on that talkpage also a long time ago but had a problem with an ipad. I then forgot about it. The inclusion of the link on a policy page is the trigger for asking for broader discussion.

• I agree that in practice different fields do require different approaches, of course. See my own bullet points. My concern is to make too many rules, or rules which are over-simplistic, might in fact make it impossible to use different approaches in different types of cases.
• Whether there is a non consensus movement or not is something that would need to be tested.
• Of course I agree that we do not accept synthesis of primary sources, and we already have policy pages which say this. If this new page simply repeated that, then there would be no issue. What it does is that it states that usage of non academic, non specialist sources can generally be safely equated with original research. That is an extreme position in my opinion? That is the bit I think needs discussion.

I want to point out that I do see the good faith in this. You and I often contribute to RS/N and although we come from different directions I do believe we tend to come up with the same advice in practice even if we explain it differently. My concern is about making inflexible rules which might over-ride common sense consensus finding. I think we have a different approach to rule making.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:50, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

The central issue around the "movement" is describing it as a "movement;" it is one of those "cabal"ly type descriptors that indicate a level of separate coordinator. Saying "a bunch of people who edit at RS/N have edited a draft" is clearer—at least in part because there's active debate around the construction of that draft anyway.

The issue of rules creep is a serious one, but for many years we had a long winded explanation of how to identify good historical sources based on the summarising of high quality secondary sources, we also have had WP:MILMOS#SOURCES which the History project incorporated. HISTRS both respecifies these, and respecifies the many exceptions given in practice at RS/N.

Regarding non-expert sources, and the synthetic conflation of these to produce predominantly ethnic-nationalist, but occasionally religious-sectarian or political-sectarian POVs on History articles—as sources such as newspapers grow older, the essential context that allows a non-specialist to summarise them disappears. Words change meaning, tone and context. Interpretations that appeared as progressive now appear reactionary. Moreover, the fundamental absence of interpretive quality in most non-specialist works, the commercial and militaria presses in particular, makes these works useless. They are so little esteemed in the literature that they are not even reviewed. (Religious and political presses seem to do a little better in this regard). The commercial press regularly generates "unique" interpretations of little value, they are broadly FRINGE. Editors have the habit of effectively cherry picking facts without interpretation from these works to produce new and unique historical narratives by synthesis. We can't do this.

Guides to writing and sourcing history articles on wikipedia have had the long term habit of specifying a "best practice" and then forgiving editors. Often this is a good decision, as conflicts between editors over appropriate editing escalate towards epistemological and interpretive issues surrounding sourcing in history articles. Specifying a non-best-practice standard, such as an every-day practice standard doesn't work—because when the ethnic identity dispute X hits RS/N, it is always about people incorporating less than scholarly sources to synthesise a POV, and we always end up saying "WEIGHT and structure from scholarly field reviews, take the narrative and fact from scholarly secondary sources, fill in primarily from scholarly secondary sources though you can have recourse from elsewhere if the incidents you cite meet the weight, structure and narratives..." It ends up being a mantra.

Sometimes it isn't good to encode interpretive case related rules. In this situation, however, the repetition of core sourcing practices suitable to defuse history articles in conflict is so tiresome for editors that relief is needed. And the structure of the writing is exception laden. While the standard is "Texts published by scholarly press by historian," all three elements are structured around equivalency rather than normativity. We know someone is a historian because their work has been repeatedly reviewed as a historical work by historians; we know a scholarly press is scholarly because it has been repeatedly reviewed in the scholarly press. This is fairly effective because it allows the "peering in" of non-standard researchers; it also allows non-Anglophone traditions considerable freedom, as the standard isn't review in the AHA (though they review a lot, and broadly), but any system of historical scholarly publication reviewing.

Finally, anyone looking at HISTRS might note that the section on supporting specific "facts" in the wikipedia sense is blank. I can't imagine how to write that many exceptions, and actually appropriately sourcing "facts" isn't the problem—it is always weight structure and narrative. Fifelfoo (talk) 22:33, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

Thanks Fifeloo. I still don't see any good reason to equate non-best practice sourcing with OR and SYNTH. I do see that writing such rules is difficult, and that is in a sense my point.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:11, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

I see your point clearly now! Historians generate an essential knowledge of the past they call "narrative"—this is the complex causal analysis and ordering of the interaction of causes. It is an analytical behaviour which non-historians do not conduct very well. Popular works, such as journalist's accounts of past events, or the recollections of involved figures, do not produce this form of knowledge. Attempts to rely upon this kind of source for complex causal structures produces original research. However, relying on works of lesser quality, where otherwise trustworthy, for descriptions, facts within an interpretive frame derived from elsewhere, or other such material is usually valid. Compare from source A being historical writing, and sources B and C being popular writing: A, thus: A1 A2 A3; A, thus: A1 B2 C3; B1 C2 C3, thus this. I would suggest that the first two are legitimate encyclopaedism, but the third is synthesis, and because it is synthesis it is making an argument about causal structure which does not and cannot adequately lie within the sources B or C. The appropriate journals are quite adequate at spotting historical works written by people not professionally accredited as or employed as historians, and reviewing them to indicate their usefulness. The issue isn't drawing a fact from a popular source, it is much more "writing out of" popular sources—as this writing out of duplicates what is original research in history. Fifelfoo (talk) 11:39, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

Sounds about right, although I may need to read that again. :) But that is not what the proposed page says. It makes much more simplified rulings and you can bet that if it comes to be seen as policy it will be abused heartily? So is it possible to get more subtility into this effort? --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:03, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

One of the issues is that since about 2002 we've had a relatively excellent essaylette Wikipedia:Reliable_source_examples#History. This is so subtle that it isn't an effective tool in sourcing disputes. One complaint from editors with a mentality of "specify and reduce" is that HISTRS is unfortunately vague. Obviously I'll have to reread and rework after this discussion. The underlying context here is RS/N though. I feel like I want to test the concepts into the ground with RS/N or some major sourcing disputes as an effective way to clarify the limitations of the document? Fifelfoo (talk) 20:24, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

Lovok, the answer to your question above about how to present a proposed guideline is at WP:PROPOSAL. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:14, 21 February 2012 (UTC)

Southwestern College

I am not quite sure what constitutes "Reliable Sources" or "References" for a College and its founders and officers. We are accredited by the Higher Learning Commission and that can be easily verified, as well as the Americn Art Therapy Association. I can link to the college web site, to the web sites of the primary people involved, but I am not sure how to VERIFY that we are Southwestern College, or where we were founded without referring BACK to our own website again. Any advice on this one? 71.228.116.157 (talk) 01:24, 21 February 2012 (UTC)Jim Nolan docwahoo@yahoo.com

Hasn't the history of your college been written up in the local newspaper or some other WP:Independent source like that? Sources do not need to be online. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:12, 21 February 2012 (UTC)