We can use a 100 year old version of EB as a seed for hundreds or thousands of articles, but we cannot cite them as a source.
lol? On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 8:10 PM, Carl Beckhorn <[email protected]> wrote: > (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 > -- You have successfully failed! _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
