(Subject changed, since this is drifting from the original topic.) On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 09:46:53PM -0500, [email protected] wrote: > I don't see why you claim on the one hard that the standards are lax, and > then you say "Encarta and Encyclopedia Brittanica". > You've lost me. Are you claiming that Brittanica is not a reliable source?
I would say it is an unsuitable source and we shouldn't be using it. Imagine if I included a reference to Encarta in the next research paper I write... > The standards for sources on BLPs are not lax imho, they are stronger > than anything else. Perhaps if you made your point more clearly. The standards are stronger in the sense that a higher percentage of sentences have an inline citation attached, but the average quality of those inline citations is often very low. The vast majority of citations are to newspapers, new magazines, and online news and opinion sites, while very few are to peer-reviewed publications. We do not write BLP articles, in general, by starting with someone else's explanatory framework and fleshing it out with some references. Because that would require a pre-existing explanatory framework, which will not develop until after the person's death. Instead, we assemble a mishmash of random news stories into what we hope is a coherent article. Or we write a coherent article and then go back and source it from a mishmash of cherry-picked news stories. This practice directly contradicts arguments that other articles cannot be written by arranging an original synthesis of material from primary sources. I don't accept "but some of those newspaper stories are secondary sources" as a strong objection to my argument here. > My point is specifically primary versus secondary, not any other point. Dividing sources arbitrarily into primary/secondary ignores many of the actual distinctions good researchers make between sources. For example, we should not be debating whether a particular story in the New York Times qualifies as a primary source or secondary source. Instead, we should ask whether the type of analysis done by the New York Times is appropriate for the sort of claim that we are making in the article. - Carl _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
