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Reliability on genealogy websites

There has been some dispute over the reliability of either an accurate website of easy verifiability such as http://www.angelfire.com/realm/gotha/ and the biggest genealogy website in Portugal and perhaps in Europe, http://www.geneall.net/. Geneall.net, with more than a million entries, was part of a vaster project that was dropped by other countries, which prompted it to take the space others didn't want to fill. You can read about it on article here http://www.geneall.net/P/article.php?id=137 - a Portuguese translator is required. Such dispute is almost highly insulting to people in this environment who rely on them and are both qualified and this and other areas. This is something that should be cleared. LoveActresses (talk) 16:21, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

The first is a WP:SPS by someone called Paul Theroff, I'll let our genealogy people tell us if he's an established expert in this area. --Cameron Scott (talk) 16:48, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

The second makes use of user generated content (I think from the submissions bit) but I'm not clear on the editorial policies. Since we currently use it on over 600 pages might be nice to sort that one out... I've removed both of these from BLPs (which is why this has ended up here) but will bow to the greater expertise on the matter. --Cameron Scott (talk) 16:52, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

The site has user generated content but nothing is added automatically nor without the consent and verifying of the author. Perhaps you should contact him through the webpage and he'll confirm it. LoveActresses (talk) 17:43, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
So I looked up a random person on geneall.net: George Darwin. The site claims that he married Martha du Puy, but also states that she married his brother Francis: she did not. The site lists one child for George: he had four. This isn't what a reliable source looks like. Kenilworth Terrace (talk) 17:05, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
I know it seems that just because you searched a random name and it had one or another flaw it seems like the whole website is equally flawed, but I can assure you as an everyday reader of that website that it's just a fluke. Errors like those I can find only very rarelly, if you can take a credit for my word. Check other lines if you have the time, please. LoveActresses (talk) 17:48, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
Incomplete doesn't mean wrong, sometimes it only includes one line and not the collaterals, but the line itself is as accurate as possible. The site has some flaws, of course, but that doesn't make it absolutely unreliable because of it. Read the article I mention above: there the author of the site criticizes people who are destructive towards the effort of such a huge project. Wikipedia has flaws too. LoveActresses (talk) 17:43, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
That's one of the reasons why Wikipedia also isn't considered a reliable source. — e. ripley\talk 18:15, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
PS: User:Caponer is an expert. I invited him to this discussion but he doesn't show up since September 1. LoveActresses (talk) 17:45, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
  • A website like this definitely wouldn't be a reliable source for anything but the opinions of its author. --John (talk) 18:26, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
    • So we have A. A self-published website by a person of no established expertise or reliability? And, 2. A website that is added to by just about anyone? Both A and B are unreliable. The geneaology stuff is just a mess.Bali ultimate (talk) 18:30, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
      • Well perhaps this shouldn't surprise us; genealogy is pretty much non-science or pseudoscience, as between 1 and 20% of each generation's biological father isn't who they think it is. (See Non-paternity event). It doesn't take many generations with this sort of error before the whole thing becomes an article of faith, a social construct more than a scientific one. Until this fundamental problem with genealogy is addressed we will continue to have problems in this area. --John (talk) 18:44, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
        • Such low numbers, valid only for the present in which they were obtained but not for any epoch, make your statement irrelevant, they are clearly not enough to change whole ancestries, specially when the people who they cheat with are often people of a close environment and status, often with common ancestries, and sometimes even more or less closely related to their spouses. Specially when people have so many female lines with ancestries that often appear more than once. Plus, there is no matematical formula or average number for how many people cheat their spouses. And there are many cases when the actual father is discovered as being a famous lover. There were also ways of not getting pregnant from a lover since ages ago. And if tests can confirm the male line of old lineages, then female lines are even less susceptible of being false. In fact, if in the 12th century we have like more than a million ancestors are in our country the population back then was less than that, then the difference is not so huge. Also, if we see the physical and other similarities between parents and children we can realize that such claims are highly exagerated. LoveActresses (talk) 16:12, 20 September 2010 (UTC)
        • You are making a very "republican" point. This is however irrelevant. Genealogy is not about genes, but about family. As to the question about science, genealogy is not studied at universities. Reliable sources in genealogy are generally produced by amateurs. This however does not in any way diminish their reliability. -- Petri Krohn (talk) 19:32, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
          • Genealogy is about ancestry, as it is perceived, that is, who are actually genetic ancestors. No one sees it in any other way. LoveActresses (talk) 16:12, 20 September 2010 (UTC)
          • So long as we are clear that we are talking about a faith-based belief rather than a scientific one, I agree with your first point. There's a school of thought that standards of reliability need to be even higher for pseudoscientific topics than for scientific ones. Amateurs, self-published sites and user-generated sites aren't normally considered as reliable sources. Why would be consider them to be in this case? --John (talk) 19:39, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
            • Just because some people have one or two children from another father it doesn't mean everyone is, and thus it doesn't make genealogy a pseudo-science. I don't know what the women you know do, but you seemed excessively biased. LoveActresses (talk) 16:12, 20 September 2010 (UTC)
            • What's faith, that 98% of our ancestors are real or that 2% might not be? LoveActresses (talk) 16:14, 20 September 2010 (UTC)
            • We may be speaking of very different things. I do not think genealogy exist in the US beyond Ellis Island records. On the other hand, in countries with church records, even ordinary people can trace their roots to the 16. century. Likewise, European nobility is well covered in printed sources. As to the amateur sources, I am not referring to web sites, but printed sources reliably published. -- Petri Krohn (talk) 19:53, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
  • Paul Theroff seems to be highly appreciated on the on-line genealogy community. Quoting from the Frequently Asked Questions file of soc.genealogy.german from 2005
This however does not quite make him a reliable source. -- Petri Krohn (talk) 18:40, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
But how seriously do we take the views of online communities? --Cameron Scott (talk) 19:24, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
Was that a rhetorical question? Active Banana ( bananaphone 19:40, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
OK, let's take another random example. Adrian Carton de Wiart is said to have one child by his first marriage and then to have married a second time to Joan Sutherland. At Adrian Carton de Wiart we read that he had two children by his first wife and that his second wife was called Ruth Myrtle Muriel Joan McKechnie. Not quite as bad as George Darwin, but still problematic. Kenilworth Terrace (talk) 20:36, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
The Wikipedia article also says the second wife, Joan McKechnie, was "known as Joan Sutherland" – with rather bad sourcing. The original source for all of this seems to be The Daily Telegraph, 17 January, 2006, reprinted here. -- Petri Krohn (talk) 21:26, 18 September 2010 (UTC)


Genealogies generally do not list all children. This does not make them unreliable. Indeed, infant mortality and the reuse of names in a family occurs often. Also sites such as LDS do not check data offered. Major societies do (Mayflower, DAR etc.) and are reliable. As are Debrett etc. Lastly, women marrying the borther of their first husband are not rare at all, though I do not know if this is the Darwin case. See Henry VIII. Collect (talk) 12:32, 19 September 2010 (UTC)

Oh dear. My point is that I looked at exactly two entries. The Darwin entries contain errors: Maud du Puy married George Darwin and she did not marry Francis Darwin. That error occurs in three places on the site: here, here and here. The de Wiart entry contains a serious inadequacy: Joan Sutherland's correct name was Ruth Myrtle Muriel Joan McKechnie and that should have been recorded. Both entries are incomplete in respect of the list of children. Collect's points are valid in general, but irrelevant in this case -- the facts of which show the site in question to be quite unreliable. Kenilworth Terrace (talk) 16:17, 19 September 2010 (UTC)

There is a Wikipedia article on the Almanach de Gotha. The last edition, printed in Gotha, is from 1944. On-line versions of the book are available at the Internet Archive, the latest version seems to be from 1922. These are definitely WP:RS but are of little help in WP:BLP. There is another publication from London with the same name from 1998–2004, but it has been criticized for unreliability. It may well be that Paul Theroff's on-line Gotha may in fact be the most reliable. I do not think this notice board can pass judgment on Paul Theroff. The issue should be discussed and decided in Wikipedia:WikiProject Royalty and Nobility or maybe Wikipedia:WikiProject Genealogy. -- Petri Krohn (talk) 16:54, 19 September 2010 (UTC)

As always, reliable for what purpose? Information in the Almanach de Gotha is probably reliable when it is dealing with people living at the time and their immediate ancestors and near relatives. The little historical sketches showing exactly how Prince Johannes Georg Ferdinand of Saxe-Saxe-Saxe is descended from Julius Caesar and how his family ruled X, Y and Z in the 12th century are not reliable in any sense since this kind of information is the province of historians. But in general, genealogical information which doesn't make it into plainly reliable sources probably isn't important and therefore one should not be looking for dubious sources with which to support it. An article without an ahnentafel or graphical family tree is usually all the better for that absence. Angus McLellan (Talk) 20:23, 19 September 2010 (UTC)
None of the sites mentioned (http://www.angelfire.com/realm/gotha/ , http://www.geneall.net/ ) are considered reliable sources by genealogists. They are self-published, have no editorial policies, accept any drivel submitted by anyone, and as already stated, are not reliable sources for anything but the opinions of their authors/contributors. There seems to be some misunderstanding about the nature of genealogy and its sources. Genealogical sources are not created by genealogists; they consist largely of public records, (e.g., vital records, court records, censuses, ships' records, etc.) created in the past by public or governmental entities, and then cited as sources for the assertions of genealogists. Although genealogy is a mature field with well-established standards, none of these sites employ those standards in determining what is posted there. Further, a genealogist can be a reliable source for how to conduct genealogical research without being a reliable source on the family tree of any given family.
To the sites already mentioned, I'd like to add another: http://www.wargs.com/ . It is used as a source in over 500 articles, many of which are biographies of living people. Each family tree there contains a disclaimer by the website owner: "The following material on the immediate ancestry of soandso should not be considered either exhaustive or authoritative, but rather as a first draft." Doesn't sound like it meets WP:RS to me. ProGene (talk) 20:43, 19 September 2010 (UTC)
In my country, they are recognized as reliable, despite its flaws. As for the gotha one, if you compare with the actual Almanach of Gotha you'll see it's accurate. LoveActresses (talk) 16:21, 20 September 2010 (UTC)
A first draft essencially means incomplete, not wrong. LoveActresses (talk) 16:16, 20 September 2010 (UTC)
It's still a Self-published source (as far as I can tell) and should not be used. --Cameron Scott (talk) 16:18, 20 September 2010 (UTC)
Whether first draft or not, anthing that has such a blatant "We do not stand behind the factual accuracy of the content you find here at this time" should not be used until they are willing to stand behind their claims. Active Banana ( bananaphone 23:36, 20 September 2010 (UTC)
Such a blatant nothing. You're putting those words on the mouth of the author and trying to fit them in the claim that it is just a first draft. You can't infer that from "first draft". If I say something is still at the beginning you can't jump and accuse me of having inaccuracies as if you were inside my mind and work. LoveActresses (talk) 15:48, 21 September 2010 (UTC)
Does that mean it's OK to delete citations to http://www.wargs.com/ ? ProGene (talk) 23:41, 20 September 2010 (UTC)
I can't see why not. --Cameron Scott (talk) 20:24, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

Deep Sea News

I've had a quick scan of the archives and, although I can references, I can't seem to find a definitive position on the reliability of blogs published on scienceblogs.com (maybe I've missed it?). I'm wondering whether the specific blog entry on Deep Sea News is sufficient to reliably source the claim that Lucernaria janetae is the first species of Stauromedusae ever described living on a deep sea vent. It's something of a synthesis on the part of the blog writer, since the original sources cited by the blog don't make the claim directly themselves (as far as I can see), although it does appear to be justified from the literature (WP:OR on my part). The authors claim to be Marine Biologists, have sourced their statements and credit various other scientists for the images that accompany the entry. I ask, in part, because I'm hoping the article will qualify for WP:DYK. Thanks Ka Faraq Gatri (talk) 13:44, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

Scienceblogs is generally reliable, in spite of the brief foray into Pepsi-land earlier this year. However, as a sole source for something like this? I'd much prefer a serious publication, not a blog. But are you sure the sources the blog authors used did not make that claim? Try emailing the blog authors. KillerChihuahua?!?Advice 18:58, 22 September 2010 (UTC)
Any of these help? This,this, and this. SilverserenC 19:20, 22 September 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for the advice.  :) I had a sneaking feeling the response might be we really need a better source for this claim. I have access to all of the cited sources except Halanych 1999 and Voigt 2006, of which only Voigt 2006 could support the claim since the population discussed in Halanych 1999 is mentioned in the Collins and Daly paper as only "tentatively" being L. janetae. Unfortunately the paper linked by Silver seren doesn't explicitly claim this as the first Stauromedusan identified on a deep sea vent (only that its location is "unusual") and neither do the others cited in the blog. It's more of a synthesis, as I said. Lutz 1998 does claim the population observed in their paper is the first Stauromedusan population seen on a deep sea vent but Collins and Daly only "tentatively" identify this population as L. janetae as they didn't go back for samples. I should also say that not one of those papers (or any of the others I've read) contradicts the blog claim. If there were other vent dwelling Stauromedusae known I'd have expected some indication of this in the Collins and Daly paper. There is none. This could be one of those frustrating 99% certain it's true but since no one explicitly wrote it in a paper we can't "prove" it things. Ka Faraq Gatri (talk) 21:07, 22 September 2010 (UTC)
Unfortunately, there are sometimes frustrations in working on a tertiary source. But take heart - eventually, someone who meets RS will surely publish. We can wait. :-) KillerChihuahua?!?Advice 22:28, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

Red Brown and Blue

Hey! Red, Brown and Blue is a publication from Victory Media Corporation. A sample article is at http://redbrownandblue.com/index.php/%E2%80%9Cfree-spm%E2%80%9D-movement-is-more-about-a-community-needing-to-face-the-music-than-it-is-about-freeing-an-icon

http://redbrownandblue.com/index.php/about is its about page.

Is this an RS? WhisperToMe (talk) 17:12, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

Unless there is something substantial I am missing, no, this is not a reliable source. The one exception: if any of the authors are notable, an opinion piece by them might be acceptable for a quote to illustrate their views on a particular subject. KillerChihuahua?!?Advice 17:52, 22 September 2010 (UTC)
"It features original research, news, analysis and opinion commentary." Most definitely not a RS. SilverserenC 19:11, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

If I Die Young

I inserted a pararaph at If I Die Young that Sam Tsui has released a cover video to iTunes, but the edit was removed on the grounds that the source I provided (a link to the actual video, on Sam Tsui's official YouTube channel, and therefore not a copyright violation), is somehow not a valid source. Really? Everard Proudfoot (talk) 20:12, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

Never mind, this has been resolved. Everard Proudfoot (talk) 20:39, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

question about interpretations made by sources

(also posted here, i'm not sure where is the best place for it) there are two cases i'm dealing with that are quite similar & interesting. the first one is concerning the Arab Peace Process. israel has never "officially" responded to it (official, written response), however - the prime minister has made few comments about it during a speech. the vast majority of sources do not title it as an "official response", however, one (acceptable) source does. so according to wikipedia policies - it should be written in the article that israel HAS officially responded to it, even though some sources would claim that israel has never responded. israel's official response or lack thereof is an important fact, and i think it might be represented in wikipedia the wrong way, just because a single source chose to title the prime minister comments as an "official response".

the same goes for Mahmud Ahmadenijad calling the holocaust a "myth". the dictionary definition of myth is 

a traditional or legendary story, usually concerning some being or hero or event,
with or without a determinable basis of fact.

so calling the holocaust a myth should probably not be considered as holocaust denial. myth is different from fiction - and most sources do not draw that conclusion - but some (acceptable sources) do! and in accordance with wikipedia policies, that is what would end up in the article - that it IS a denial, and he IS a holocaust denier according to that statement. Here, again - it just feels wrong. there is nothing to reflect that the vast majority of sources do NOT title that statement as holocaust denial. Is that really the right interpetation of wikipedia policies? Maybe there is a policy which addresses this absurd situation. If not, maybe there should be. Eyalmc (talk) 10:00, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

As to your first question, you will have to provide provide a diff to the challenged material. As to your second, you're fixating upon only one definition of the word "myth". There are many sources indicating that Ahmadinejad's various comments about the Holocaust constitute holocaust denial.[1][2][3]--Cúchullain t/c 12:38, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
what does it mean to provide a "diff" ? also - your sources confirm my point exactly. the word "denial" or "deny" appear only on the first one, and it is based on the usage of the word myth. but that's exactly my point. some will interpret it as a denial, while possible many more wouldn't title it that way (probably because they do not see it as a denial. after all, holocaust denial does make a good headline, but they chose not to draw that conclusion). how should it be represented in wikipedia? Eyalmc (talk) 13:21, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
Here is a link to a previous thread about this [4] for reference.--Torchwood Who? (talk) 13:37, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
Thank you Torchwood. But still, Eyalmc is going to have to tell us what article he's talking about and what source he's concerned with. Eyalmc, please see WP:DIFF on what a diff is and how to link to them.
2)Again, on the holocaust issue, Eyalmc, you're being too pedantic about wording. The sources very clearly depict Ahmadinejad as asserting that the Holocaust did not occur in the way that is historically accepted. That is what holocaust denial means.--Cúchullain t/c 13:42, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
Ahmadinejad certainly did not use the word "myth", as he was speaking in Farsi, not in English. There is a disagreement over the correct English translation of the term he used; having no knowledge of Farsi, I am not competent to judge who is correct. It seems to me that we should reflect this uncertainty, and neither assert nor deny that in this speech he denied the reality of the holocaust. RolandR (talk) 14:21, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
No, we should reflect what the reliable sources say, and these are all clear that he has, on several occasions, claimed that the holocaust did not occur in the way accepted by historians. We do not need to use the phrase "holocaust denial" to get that across. --Cúchullain t/c 14:46, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
Instead of just making assertions, please provide the sources you are discussing. Do they really say what you claim? Is the viewpoint you have articulated really the only significant viewpoint published by reliable sources? There is no way to judge those questions without actually looking at the sources. Dlabtot (talk) 17:52, 17 September 2010 (UTC)
what's this game you're playing? In his previous post, Cúchullain provided 3 such sources, the very first one, from the BBC no less, has as its headline "Iranian leader denies Holocaust": [5] HupHollandHup (talk) 18:04, 17 September 2010 (UTC)
YourThe assertion was "he has, on several occasions, claimed that the holocaust did not occur in the way accepted by historians". The source you provided does not support that assertion. Anyway, I'm pretty sure that no one is denying that multiple reliable sources have reported that he called the Holocaust a myth. Is it a unanimous judgement of all reliable sources or do sources differ in their interpretation of his comments? Dlabtot (talk) 18:31, 17 September 2010 (UTC)
no, that was not my assertion, it was a claim by Cúchullain. The topic of this thread is whether or not Ahmadinejad can be called a holocaust denier. 3 ultra-reliable sources who make that claim were provided. Kindly stop playing games. HupHollandHup (talk) 18:37, 17 September 2010 (UTC)
Please refrain from accusing me of 'playing games' or other personal attacks. "The topic of this thread is whether or not Ahmadinejad can be called a holocaust denier." In that case, you are in the wrong place. This noticeboard is for discussing the reliability of particular sources for particular citations, in context. Determining The Truth™ is beyond its scope. Dlabtot (talk) 18:45, 17 September 2010 (UTC)
when someone provides 3 top-quality sources to support a claim, as Cúchullain has done, and your response is "Instead of just making assertions, please provide the sources " - you are playing games , and pointing that out is not a personal attack. You may be correct that this is not the right notice board - but that comment should be directed at Eyalmc, who started this thread , not me. I'm ok with closing the discussion and marking it 'resolved'. HupHollandHup (talk) 18:52, 17 September 2010 (UTC)
Any comment on this noticeboard that has as its subject matter another editor is disrupitive and off-topic. The question posed was proper for this venue, although lacking in the necessary details for a resolution. Still missing from this discussion are the answers to the four questions I pose below. Dlabtot (talk) 19:10, 17 September 2010 (UTC)
This discussion has gotten muddled. Eyalmc's initial claim was that Ahmadinejad shouldn't be called a holocaust denier, because he called it a "myth", and the definition of myth he chose to use was "a traditional or legendary story, usually concerning some being or hero or event, with or without a determinable basis of fact." Of course that's totally silly and pedantic, and he wouldn't have used an English word in the first place. What is certain is that any number of reliable sources, including the ones I've cited above (these: [6][7][8]), indicate that Ahmadinejad has, on several occasions, voiced the opinion that the Holocaust did not occur in the manner that is accepted by historians. Usually he claims that it was fabrication trumped up to justify the creation of Israel. In his poorly calculated 2006 letter to the German chancellor, he further suggested that it may have been trumped up by Britain to embarrass Germany. It is safe to say this is not what historians of the holocaust believe, and some sources go so far as to call Ahmadinejad a "holocaust denier" outright.[9] Eyalmc hasn't responded usefully to this, so the discussion should be closed.--Cúchullain t/c 12:40, 20 September 2010 (UTC)
What is the exact url of the source in question? In which article is the source being used? What is the exact statement in the article that the source is supporting? Where is the relevant talk page discussion, if any? Dlabtot (talk) 18:15, 20 September 2010 (UTC)
That's what's not clear. Eyalmc hasn't provided that information, and it doesn't look like they're going to. As such the discussion is effectively over.--Cúchullain t/c 18:38, 20 September 2010 (UTC)
Thank you for contributing that bit of wisdom. Dlabtot (talk) 23:11, 20 September 2010 (UTC)
You posted under my comments (twice) as if you were responding to it and seeking a response. I can't give you that answer, and it appears that the original querier isn't going to either.--Cúchullain t/c 21:00, 21 September 2010 (UTC)
Yes, so you've stated, repeatedly. Thank you again for repeating yourself again. Dlabtot (talk) 00:09, 22 September 2010 (UTC)
If you want me to give you some other answer, stop asking me the same questions.--Cúchullain t/c 01:18, 22 September 2010 (UTC)
Although you certainly may comment when you don't have anything new to add, you are not actually under any obligation to do so. Dlabtot (talk) 20:22, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
If reliable sources differ in their interpretations, we report all significant viewpoints. You can see an explanation of diffs at WP:DIFF. The operative questions here are: What is the exact url of the source in question? In which article is the source being used? What is the exact statement in the article that the source is supporting? Where is the relevant talk page discussion, if any? Dlabtot (talk) 18:02, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
I just did a quick search. Hopefully this adds helpful information. There seem to be several sources associating Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with Holocaust denial. This link shows books with his name and the phrase. Note that this one says "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is its most virulent and vocal champion". So there seems to be a lot of WP:RS that put him in that category. AliveFreeHappy (talk) 18:26, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
Why did you post this as if it was a response to my comment? You seem to have completely ignored what I said, and don't appear to actually be engaging in a discussion. Dlabtot (talk) 17:48, 17 September 2010 (UTC)
Somehow I doubt that a book called "Icon of Evil" and co-written by Alan Dershowitz would be acceptable as a reliable source for such information. RolandR (talk) 18:56, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
really? Why is that? is there some wiki policy regrading titles of works that would disqualify them from being reliable sources? Or a specific policy that relates to Dershowitz and excludes him from being a reliable source? HupHollandHup (talk) 14:28, 17 September 2010 (UTC)
google "Ahmadinejad holocaust myth" - 157,000 results. and "Ahmadinejad holocaust myth -denial -deny -denies" - 63,000 results. so about 40% of the sources do not even contain those words (from the sources that does, many are using the words in other context). So it's not a battle between two different interpretations - it's a battle between an interpretation, and lack thereof. I don't think there is a proper way to represent that duality in wikipedia. Eyalmc (talk) 06:24, 17 September 2010 (UTC)
Yet again, you're being pedantic over the wording and trying to read your own interpretation into it. Every source I checked in a Google News search for ahmadinejad+holocaust discuss Ahmadinejad rejecting that the Holocaust occurred in the historically accepted way. And he's done it on several occasions. Additionally, you've never told us what article on the mideast peace process it is you're talking about, and what the source you're concerned about it. I move we close this discussion.--Cúchullain t/c 12:20, 17 September 2010 (UTC)
Agree. Rejecting that the Holocaust occurred in the historically accepted way i sthe definition of Holocaust denial. HupHollandHup (talk) 14:28, 17 September 2010 (UTC)
Eyalmc, you shouldn't look for reliable sources for such things in regular Google, but first try Google News and Google Books. While both have a significant number of unreliable sources as well, the percentage of reliable ones is much higher than in Google search. But even if you use Google, and you use your second search string, the first result is News.com.au, a reliable source, which clearly states "President Ahmadinejad raised the stakes against Israel and called the Holocaust a lie[...]" Sourcse like this one, without containing the word "denial" or a variation thereof, make it very, very clear which interpretation of "myth" is used by Ahmadinejad, and that the rest of his statements also indicate that he is a Holocaust denier ("a show", "a lie", "an unreliable claim", "this claim is corrupt", ...). If you want to argue that there is a duality in the interpretation of his statements, then you have to present reliable sources which claim that he isn't a holocaust denier. It isn't sufficient to show (or to proclaim) that there are sources which don't explicitly label him one, you need sources specifically stating that he isn't one if you want to present that point of view in Wikipedia as well. Fram (talk) 12:12, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

Natalia Zawidowski

Editors have created a "Quality of life" section in the Palestinian Territories article which is based upon statistics contained in an article titled "Blame It On The Occupation" credited to Natalia Zawidowski.

Zawidowski does not cite any sources for the statistics and has no credentials as a demographer. Scoop News credits her as the author of six columns or editorials:

A quick plagarism check with Dupli Checker indicates that the information was copied verbatim from the now-defunct meimad.org Community blog Hasbara Central. For example Middle East Facts sources it to http://www.meimad.org/default.asp?id=8&ACT=5&content=128&mnu=8

In 2003 the Jewish Chronicle reported that Zawidowski was a student at London Metropolitan University and that she co-founded an anti-terrorism website with the "aim to educate people about different types of terrorism, particularly the raising of children to be suicide bombers." [10]

The World Bank report contradicts many of Zawidowski's assumptions regarding the quality of life. See [11] and [12] harlan (talk) 06:05, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

Sigh. By editors he means Wikifan12345. Done hounding me Harlan? Like I said in the original discussion, much of the edit is supported by other sources. The statistics aren't very controversial and if anything the section could be expanded. According to Haaretz, the Israel Civil Authority refurbished and built hospitals in Gaza and the West Bank. The cooperation between Israel/Palestinian since 1967 needs to be stated. I think this issue could have been resolved at the talk, but instead Harlan resorts the standard noticeboards. I'm so shocked. Wikifan12345 (talk) 06:50, 22 September 2010 (UTC)
This thread isn't about Haaretz. They have plenty of articles about the quality of life under the occupation in the Palestinian territories. That isn't the topic of the article that you cited in any event. harlan (talk) 21:54, 22 September 2010 (UTC)
Hang on -- the only source for this is Scoop, "New Zealand's Independent News Medisa", which says of itself "Scoop.co.nz is an online publication made up largely of what we call "disintermediated" news - that is news without a spin put on it by a journalist, published as its delivered to us. That makes Scoop unique. All content is delivered to you as the writer intended — leaving only you to make a judgement about what you read, not us"[13]. So it explicitly denies any editorialresponsibility whatever. There is no way this could possibly be acceptable as a reliable source for any article in Wikipedia. RolandR (talk) 07:54, 22 September 2010 (UTC)
If the information also occurs in good sources, as Wikifan12345 claims, then use the good sources! We don't need dubious sources like scoop.co.nz around here. Zerotalk 09:42, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

Fast Company

I did a search of the archives but could find no reference, so, would you say fastcompany.com is a RS? I can;t find anything much on their editorial policy, and they identify as a blog. But they are paid writers and have editorial staff. Thoughts? --Errant [tmorton166] (chat!) 09:16, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

Fast Company (magazine). Yes, they are reliable. 98.180.30.146 (talk) 20:13, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

Max's of Manila - a number of source issues including IMDB as a source for BLP

I tagged Max's of Manila some time ago because I felt it did not establish notability. At the time the entry was already tagged for having no sources, and for reading like an advertisement. Another editor came through and removed the tags without making any improvements, save for adding a couple of references, one of which, I don't think meets WP:BLP standards. I tried putting the tags back and removing the reference that was not satisfactory for BLP, while explaining on the talk page, to no avail. I don't want to edit war over this so instead I would like to know if the references are reliable in the manner they are used.

  • The BLP information come from these two (another similar source was added since) -- IMDB, and IGMA.
  • This text - Aside from its advertising, the story of how Max's Restaurant started has entered into popular culture. It was portrayed in the episode "Sino si Max?" of the long time running Filipino drama series Maalaala Mo Kaya.[5] - goes to a Spanish language "tabloid" (the other editors description) that I just earnestly can't judge for myself.
  • The history of the restaurant, which to me appears to be non-notable marketing materials, is sourced entirely to the company's own website.

Any input here would be helpful. Thanks in advance.Griswaldo (talk) 13:56, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

The IMDb is not considered a reliable source. Their fact-checking is spotty at best, especially for any trivia and the like. (I have an IMDb listing myself [14], and most of what's in there was provided by me.) --Orange Mike | Talk 14:08, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
I link to IMDB as an External link that can be used to confirm filmography info only. This works when the information is uncontentious - if there is a challenge to the filmography info, then a citation meeting WP:RS needs to be included. Personal info should never be sourced back to IMDB. --Jezebel'sPonyobons mots 14:18, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
What about the other site - IGMA? Is this as unreliable as IMDB?Griswaldo (talk) 14:34, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
Griswaldo you don't have the correct link. Here: http://www.igma.tv/profile/isabel-oli. That site is affiliated with the GMA Network. Maybe that will help. Lambanog (talk) 14:58, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
I don't see using the GMA website as an issue, it is a news network and the information that is being sourced using the GMA site is not negative or particularly contentious. That being said I removed the IMDB link and replaced it with a ref from the Manila Bulletin. --Jezebel'sPonyobons mots 15:31, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
  • Max's is quite a notable chain in the Philippines, at least. Backing up the entire article with online WP:RS sources might take some effort; here a few Pinoy and U.S. articles and reviews that might help,[15][16][17][18] and a Google News Archives search[19] reflects quite a few more news stories, although many of them are on pay sites or appear no longer to be available (and obviously not every article in a search of "Max's Restaurant" will be about this chain). As far as Maalaala Mo Kaya and Isabel Oli, I accept the concern about using IMDb for personal bio information (as opposed to credits), but is there anything actually contentious about this content as currently included in this article (or in hers)? There are certainly news stories and sources that mention the commercials and her[20][21][22] and while the WP:RS nature of the Philippine tabloids may be debatable, is there anything here that's really suspect? --Arxiloxos (talk) 15:39, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
  • Thanks a ton. I do not think there is anything contentious about the material, it's just the principle of sticking with quality sources for BLPs that concerned me. I also brought this here hoping to get some help like this for the article, or else to figure out if such help was even possible. People often just drive by and remove tags from articles that need help simply because they know personally that the chain is notable instead of fixing the articles to comply with WP:RS and WP:N. It looks like Max's should now easily get the fixes it needs. Thanks for the help.Griswaldo (talk) 15:43, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

Can Blogs be used as valid sources for articles here on Wikipedia?

There are several theological articles here on Wikipedia that use this blog [23] to source an opinion of the Roman Catholic church. It appears to be a personal blog and is self published and has no apparent peer review of it. Here are three articles that use this blog for sourcing. Hesychasm, theosis and Essence–Energies distinction use this blog to source a not so mainstream Roman Catholic opinion on Eastern Orthodox theology. LoveMonkey (talk) 17:43, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

This would involve WP:SPS. For the most part, yes, blogs are not reliable. While the creator of this blog appears to be someone who would have some credibility, there is no way to verify he is who he says he and, regardless, as you said, the information has not been peer-reviewed or even been considered by an outside, reliable person in the field. SilverserenC 17:58, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
Would it be OK to remove this source from articles that use it? Or would that be considered inappropriate? LoveMonkey (talk) 18:10, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
Yes, please do. Be sure to clarify in your edit summary that the "sources" removed were blog posts, which fail WP:RS. --Orange Mike | Talk 18:16, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
Will do. Thanks LoveMonkey (talk) 18:18, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

Single source for Operation Pike

The article Operation Pike has been tagged as "single source" [24]

As I explained on talk[25], it would be great to find more sources, but it is a very obscure topic. The source used, Osborn's book Operation Pike. Britain Versus the Soviet Union, 1939-1941 is very well regarded. For example Keith Neilson (who himself is a Professor of history and author of several books on Anglo-Russian relations[26]) reviewed the book in the academic journal "Diplomacy and Statecraft". He writes: "Osborn, an archivist for the American National Archives and Records Administration, has provided a very useful study of British policy towards the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1941 and, in particular, of the little-known Anglo-french plans to attack the Soviet Union in the period from September 1939 to June 1940." In conclusion, Neilson writes: "This is a very good book on a limited topic. It does not promise more than it deliveres, its documentary base is exemplary and its conclusions are judicious and carefully considered."

So given that this is an obscure topic with scant coverage and virtually no prospect of finding additional sources that deal with the topic in detail, and that a published Professor in History has reviewed the only comprehensive source on the topic as exemplary, judicious and carefully considered, is this "single source" deemed sufficiently reliable that this tag is unnecessary? --Martin (talk) 19:05, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

More than one source now, so I suppose the question is moot. :P But I would also advice that you use this to link to the specific pages you used in the book. That allows other users to verify the information. SilverserenC 20:58, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
Okay, good advice, will do. --Martin (talk) 21:33, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

Online article by Peter Chopelas

Is this article also considered a valid resource? [27]

Here is a church website giving commentary on the article.[28]

"An early draft of this article was edited by Archpriest Thomas Hopko, retired dean of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary (OCA), and this final copy has the approval of His Grace Lazar Puhalo (OCA), noted theologian, retired archbishop of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and abbot of New Ostrog Monastery near Vancouver, British Columbia."

The article also appears to confirm what is on the church dioceses webpage states as the church teaching on the subject here. [29] The OCA website is maintained by the editor of the original article Thomas Hopko who is also a main editor on the Orthodox Study bible. LoveMonkey (talk) 19:15, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

  • I would say that the article is not a reliable source, just because of the website it is printed on and the lack of ability to verify the writer's truthfulness. The Preachers Institute appears to be, while slightly exclusive, still fairly inclusive in who it allows in, as long as you have written sermons and things and proved yourself to them. So I wouldn't trust that either. If you want to go with the information, unless you have an alternative source, I would say stick with the primary information on the OCA website until something better is found. SilverserenC 22:09, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
OK will do. Thanks Again. LoveMonkey (talk) 12:28, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

I need an approval on a reliable source on Russia as a superpower

1.A link to the source to on Russia as superpower[30] 2.The article in which it is being used is Russia 3.The exact statement in the article that the source is supporting down below:

The current writing is this: Russia is a great power and a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, a member of the G8, G20, the Council of Europe, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Eurasian Economic Community, the OSCE, and is the leading member of the Commonwealth of Independent States.

text here quote next to superpower on approval to use source as: I would like to replace it saying this: Russia is percieved as a superpower[31] and a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, a member of the G8, G20, the Council of Europe, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Eurasian Economic Community, the OSCE, and is the leading member of the Commonwealth of Independent States.

The source is "Will Russia Be the Superpower That Will Stop Iran from Going Nuclear" - The Middle East Media Research Institute By A. Savyon July 29, 2010[32]

There has been no discussion on this source so I am sending it here to get some views. I looked at this source as it list references in the source as Russia as a superpower and why Russia is considered to the world as a superpower world affairs, using the issue with Iran and the world over Iran, people are wanting and using Russia as the term superpower in its world influence. I think this is a good source personally, maybe not as lengthly but does title it and talks about it in the article and references in at the bottom, it also is written from an institute so it is also education institution source.

Please see if you can give me some views if this would be an accepted source to use or maybe one with a couple of more I could also use as daisey chain source to the subject as Russia being a superpower. I am would like to use this source to use as Russia being a perceived as superpower again or a superpower as I think it is important and I think it is a good source. Thanks--12.40.50.1 (talk) 21:30, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

I did a quick search for "Russia" and "superpower" and the things I found (this, for example) stated that Russia is no longer a superpower, but is still considered a "energy superpower". Then I ran across this, which states that Russia is no longer an energy superpower either, so...not sure where that leaves us. SilverserenC 22:14, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
I did a quick search also too I found this on Russia for energy superpower[33] here[34] and here[35] there seems to be positive evidence Russia accounts for being an energy superpower no doubt and especially with their new pipeline. I did a thorough search and I needed sometime on searching "Russia Federation superpower" and "russia as superpower" this is what I came accross[36] here[37] here[38] [39] here[40] here[41] here[42] [43] here[44] here[45] and here[46]. I am sure I can find more of them but requires more time reading them yet each of these there is some positive evidence out there that Russia has a world view to the world as being a superpower by some important people. Whether as energy superpower or using it as a superpower request it is a superpower in my belief just in what I have read and they maybe some sources that may say different but the quick search pulls these first. Energy superpower is one thing but their nation as a world leader I can agree with that notion as them being a superpower on the world stage.--Globalstatus (talk) 23:34, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
I had a look myself on this and here's something I found a creditable source may also be worth reading ([47]) written by Steven Rosefielde called the "Russia in the 21st Century The Prodigal Superpower" from University of North Carolina by a foreign relations professor. I have viewed a couple of these sources from a above has a lot to do what is in this book for Russia being placed as a superpower. This source you mentioned has some weight itself[[48]], maybe small form but does speak of Russia being a superpower including references is also counted as college material for adding as a verified source for any research paper so it is to me a reliable source. I will concur with you on it that's my take. Good luck.--24.205.238.10 (talk) 05:24, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
Actually, most of those listed above are likely to be found from a simple Google News search. SilverserenC 19:03, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
I don't know if reliance solely on news sources is sufficient, as much of it can be subject to spin and hyperbole. Looking at List of countries by GDP (nominal), Russia squeaks in just ahead of Australia. Sure, Russia has significant energy reserves, but Australia has the world's largest resource base in coal, coal seam gas and uranium and significant natural gas reserves, but nobody asserts Australia is an "energy superpower", let alone an unqualified "superpower". Sure, Russia has nukes, but UK spends more on the military according to List of countries by military expenditures, nobody claims the UK is a "military superpower". Russia has potential to be one in the future, but is has a long way to go in comparison to the USA (which has a GDP 10 time bigger and a military spend a wopping 12 times bigger than Russia). --Martin (talk) 19:36, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
Opinions from news sources (unless you are talking about specialized magazines such as Foreign Policy and The Economist) are generally not RS on international geopolitics. Note on other sources: the Cambridge book is an essay on why Russian could become a superpower, not that Russia is a superpower today. The other source, which is the MEMRI report, the analysis is on how Russia could influence Iran in the current nuclear stand off, while the concept of Russia as a superpower in today's international order was not discussed at all. Both these sources are not valid in supporting the superpower label for Russia. The best we could do with the current non-mass media sources is to support the statement "MEMRI believes Russia is a superpower", but given MEMRI is more of a media think tank than a geopolitics think tank, per WP:UNDUE what MEMRI believes in shouldn't even be mentioned in the first place. Jim101 (talk) 21:11, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
Well the "MEMRI" is a The Middle East Media Research Institute which is why I asked on this because it is not really an opinion but is a credit article since it is from a . org institute of studies. That stirs it away from media material but educational research material. I think it should be labeled as Russia is accountable as being a superpower by the The Middle East Media Research Institute and maybe the supporting sources one editor mentioned about on supporting case sources on Russia proclaimed as a superpower also sort of makes sense Russia is in that direction to use as a superpower. Anyway I am just trying to make a claim here as I think Russia it is in good standing for being a superpower and not a great power is all.--12.40.50.1 (talk) 20:37, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Shiite propaganda sites

There is a simmering edit war at Sahih al-Bukhari with an editor aggressively adding Shiite propaganda to the page. On other pages, these has been somewhat of an agreement that most of the mainstream Islamic sites, regardless of sect, are unacceptable as most are simply not reliable sources. In this particular instance, the strong bias of the two websites in question, as evidenced below, add to that unreliability. I cut and pasted part of what I wrote at Talk:Sahih al-Bukhari#Textual distortion section regarding this issue:

Supertouch (talk) 10:51, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

First, the two sources. Answering Ansar is not a reliable source; as you said, it's self-published. But al-islam.org is a little more tricky. The site claims to be run by "Ahlul Bayt Digital Islamic Library Project", a 501c3 - and as far as I can tell, it's an actual organization (1, 2). Just because it's a propaganda site doesn't mean that it can't be used per se.
Now I'm pretty sure this is the edit in question. What you've got there is a case of original research and synthesis. The editor is using an al-islam source that is just a straight scan of a book to make the claim that "proves that the Arabic text of the hadith and the English equivalent are completely different" and then goes on to do a self-translation of the text. That's just flat out original research and should not be included. So while al-islam.org may be an acceptable source in some cases, the way it's being used here isn't. — HelloAnnyong (say whaaat?!) 12:29, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
First of all, thanks for your prompt response. While I agree that perhaps the al-islam.org site is not necessarily a black and white case, how does its being operated by an actual organization affect its status as a reliable source? The sheer number of websites that criterion would therefore allow — specifically in Islam-related articles but also elsewhere — would allow anyone to say anything. Supertouch (talk) 12:48, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
I meant it more as showing that the site doesn't clearly fall into WP:SPS. — HelloAnnyong (say whaaat?!) 13:05, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
Ahlul Bayt Digital Islamic Library Project, which is used as a source here,has been cited by the Columbia University here (as a main reference on Islam), the British Academy here, the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade here, the George Mason University here, Intute here, and is archived by the Library of Congress and so it can't be considered as an unreliable source. All can send comment, suggestion, information and ... to it, but it doesn't mean they will publish it. The text is verifiable, and I believe as the external link of translation exists in the article, it's necessary to have this section in the article. If a sentence, like what User:HelloAnnyong mentioned has problem, it's better to rewrite it or ask for citation, instead of deleting the whole text. I am ready to help to rewrite this section or a new article with user:supertouch or anyone else as I mentioned before, but for sure I will resist against the deletion of this important section as the text is verifiable and the sources are reliable.--Aliwiki (talk) 13:56, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

Blender Magazine as a source

Is blender magazine a valid source? They had some criticism of Emerson Lake and Palmer which I would like to include in which they named ELP as the second worse band of all time. ELP has been a much criticized band but there is no indication of that from ELP's page here.--UhOhFeeling (talk) 23:18, 19 September 2010 (UTC)

Anyone? Buehler?--UhOhFeeling (talk) 14:59, 20 September 2010 (UTC)
Is there anybody out there?--UhOhFeeling (talk) 00:55, 21 September 2010 (UTC)
From Terms & Conditions:
  • "Dennis does not endorse or control the Submitted Content delivered to this Site, and Dennis has no obligation to monitor such Submitted Content. As such, Dennis does not guarantee the accuracy, integrity or quality of any such Submitted Content."
If the criticism is "Submitted Content", then it's unequivocally not a reliable source. Given that the site itself is published in blog format and has no statement of editorial process for the rest of its content, I'd think it extremely unlikely that it meets WP:RS anyway. --RexxS (talk) 03:05, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

http://www.blender.com/lists/67198/50-worst-artists-in-music-history.html so this article is no good?--UhOhFeeling (talk) 01:20, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

FYI there are many notable and respected authors who contributed to the article including

Jonah Weiner - Currently a music critic for slate, John Harris (critic), J.D. Considine , John Aizlewood writer for The Sunday Times, The Evening Standard and The Guardian who regularly appears on the BBC, Clark Collis a writer for Entertainment Weekly, Rob Kemp a contributing editor to Men's Health and others.

I would say with this stable of authors this article should be considered a valid source.--UhOhFeeling (talk) 01:31, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

Anyone? Any thoughts?--UhOhFeeling (talk) 03:14, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

HELLOOOOOOOO?--UhOhFeeling (talk) 16:14, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

The stable of authors does sound imposing. I'm not sure if the list itself is supposed to be reviewed magazine content, or "submitted content", but if it comes from those authors, it seem reliable, per the part of WP:RS that says "established expert on the topic of the article whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable third-party publications". --GRuban (talk) 20:19, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
I didn't check the author's credentials but it doesn't appear to be user-submitted content. I would say that this qualifies as a reliable source. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 13:53, 25 September 2010 (UTC)
I agree that it does not appear user-submitted. The authors all have strong credentials. Thanks for your help.--UhOhFeeling (talk) 22:02, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

alumnifinder database for personal info

There is a question at Talk:Tommy Wiseau/Archive 1#Sources which cite birth date about whether the "alumnifinder" database is a WP:RS for some WP:BLP information that does not appear to be available elsewhere. DMacks (talk) 16:54, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

Well...i'm not sure if I would just call them unreliable. I mean, their about page does explain a lot and, if they are going through governmental sources to get their info, it would likely be accurate. SilverserenC 21:48, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

RMS Titanic and Good as Gold

Conversation on the article's talk page seeks to add a new theory as to why the ship hit the iceberg, based on a story in the culture section of The Daily Telegraph: "Titanic sunk by steering blunder, new book claims". It turns out that the revelations are made by the novelist Louise Patten ("I was the last person alive to know what really happened on the night Titanic sank") to coincide with the release of her new novel Good as Gold, apparently dealing with financial impropriety by one of the passengers. In turn Patten had heard the tale from her grandmother who was the wife of one of the officers. My contention on the talk page is that this is hearsay and cannot be used as a reliable source for Wikipedia. --Old Moonraker (talk) 07:49, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

RMS Titanic is a long article so the existing passage, with its supporting reference, is copied here:
First Officer Murdoch gave the order "hard-a-starboard", using the traditional tiller order for an abrupt turn to port (left),<reference: Butler (1988: 266) "In 1912, helm orders were given according to the tradition of the earliest days of sail; that is by the direction the tiller bar was pushed in order to turn the ship, not the direction the rudder was turned. Murdoch's order of 'Hard a starboard!' meant that Hitchens turned the wheel to the right...making the rudder pivot left. Helm orders on British merchant ships weren't rationalized until the mid-1930s.">
--Old Moonraker (talk) 10:00, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
Putting it another way, a number of editors are seeking to include recently cited testimony that the family of Titanic's most informed surviving senior officer, Charles Lightoller, received information from him which they kept secret for generations until recently publicised worldwide. The question is not whether the revealed information is true (or constitutes "a new theory") but whether and how the Wikipedia article should report this spectacular episode and its two pertinent allegations in a manner that enables evaluation by all readers. I note that a parallel controversy has been created in the article on Lightoller. Cheers, Bjenks (talk) 14:43, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
WP:UNDUE appears to apply. Active Banana ( bananaphone 14:47, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
Spectacular the revelation may be, but their first appearance on WP nonetheless seems to be undue with respect to the treatment of other topics in the article, and unsustained by its source. Although it opens with "Lady (Louise) Patten has suggested", substantially it was reporting the tale as fact. --Old Moonraker (talk) 15:24, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
Patten's 'steering blunder' allegation does seem like hokum. (If there had been a mistake with a helm order it's improbable that Murdoch would have been discreet about it, at the time. - Apart from anything else, he'd have been enlightening the helmsman and the junior watch officer about the errors of their ways, and everyone in the vicinity would have heard.) - Patten's assertion really belongs in the Titanic 'alternative theories' article. However, the longstanding 'tiller order' / 'rudder order' controversy is an area which needs to be clarified. Possibly there are surviving records connected with the manufacture and installation of Titanic's telemotor gear. Norloch (talk) 09:20, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

haaretz.com is no longer a reliable source

Apparently haaretz.com cannot be loaded inside the UAE (see P-800 Oniks history) and no doubt by other ISPs in the Islamic world.

Should we then consider all Israeli media to be non-reliable sources? And what should we do about all those sites that subjects of the PRC cannot see? Hcobb (talk) 14:51, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

I am wondering if you are being sarcastic, but if so please remember jokes are hard to transmit in bare text. Assuming otherwise then, can you explain why being banned by one country would make a source unreliable? Many good sources have been banned somewhere. I do not know of any WP tendency to see such political events as relevant in any way to sourcing questions here?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 15:03, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
(ec)The fact that one reader, using an IP from Dubai, could not find the citation, does not mean that Haaretz.com cannot be accessed in the UAE. There could be many reasons for this -- parhaps his workplace blocked newspaper sites? How do we know?
And even if, for whatever reason (state censorship, editorial decision or technical reasons) Haaretz cannot be accessed in the UAE, that does not make it any less of a reliable source. The BBC has at various times been blocked by different states. There are probably states which block access to Al-Jazeera. And Wikipedia is full of links to articles which cannot be opened except by readers with access too an academic library. So what? These are all still reliable sources. RolandR (talk) 15:12, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

LeMO (in German)

The website [49] looks reasonably serious (a collaboration of Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM) in Berlin, the Haus der Geschichte (HdG) in Bonn and also the de:Fraunhofer-Institut für Software- und Systemtechnik in Berlin). Of course it is in German, but I was considering using it as a replacement for NNDB in the List of University of Heidelberg people for those people with no on-line reference in English. Or would it we better to use the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie from wikisource [[50]]? Thanks for your advise. --Anneyh (talk) 18:50, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

Given that all sound at first sight like reliable sources, the nature of the question is not so clear. We do not have to choose between reliable sources unless they disagree. But it would be surprising if they disagree in this particular case?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:30, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
Unless the start page is one huge, blatant lie, this is very obviously a reliable source. I don't understand why you want to replace NNDB entries in it with your list, though: Are you talking about LeMO entries which have incorporated the NNDB data or link to it? Then it would make sense. Otherwise, please note that the English Wikipedia tends to use a lot more sources than the German one; most good English articles are heavily over-sourced by the standards of the German WP community. Hans Adler 08:50, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
I actually come from WP:FR where the policy is closer than on WP:DE but there is no source noticeboard, that's also why I asked the question here.
I had a look on this noticeboard and NNDB was not considered as a reliable source. So I was wondering what source to use to get the List of University of Heidelberg people correctly sourced (and then to translate that back to WP:FR). There are also unsourced lines... on the page. For Mathematician, it's easy to find notable ones on Mac Tutor or the mathematical genealogy (I tend to prefer the first one) for other the only source may be in German and LeMo looked very good. --Anneyh (talk) 14:07, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Reliable sources on Ayyavazhi (also evidently called Ayya vali)

God help us, so far as I can tell there are only three WorldCat listings which deal with this subject: Religion and Subaltern Agency, written by a doctoral student and Christian missionary at the University of Madras as per here, Sri Vaikunda Swamigal and the stuggle for social equality in South India, of which apparently only Oxford University holds a copy here, and finally, a government publication called Colonialism, nationalism and legitimation : an essay on Vaikunda Swamy cult, Travancore here. The former is apparently slightly more widely available, the last seems to be only in the Library of Congress and the Indian government library. Does the first qualify as reliable as per our guidelines? John Carter (talk) 15:11, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

I think it may be a matter of transliteration rendering different spellings. It seems to be the same as the Vaikunta sect of Vaishnavism (this connection is made in Indian Church History Review, v. 26. June 1992. Serampore: Church History Association of India, p. 8.). There are likely other such articles with spelling variations in titles which should be merged. • Astynax talk 17:04, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
The Tamil sources listed (other than those published by the Ayyavaikunta Nather Sidhasramam - the sect's publishing house) in the main Ayyavazhi article look like solid RS to me. I am fairly certain it isn't the same as the Vaikunta sect. This is a unique sect/cult in Tamil Nadu--Sodabottle (talk) 06:11, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Secondary school text book

Is this book, which is written for English secondary school students for courses about American government, a reliable source for Libertarianism and if so what sort. According to WP:NOR, "Many introductory undergraduate-level textbooks are regarded as tertiary sources because they sum up multiple secondary sources." But this book is not even undergraduate level.

While common sense tells us not to use the book, are there any policy reasons that state it cannot be used?

TFD (talk) 15:44, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes, it is a reliable tertiary source (published by a reputable publishing house etc.)... however, this does not mean that it is the most reliable source possible. Secondary school level text books often simplify their material to make it understandable by younger students. We aim for better... so, while the source can be used... if there is a higher quality secondary source available, use that higher quality source instead. Blueboar (talk) 16:23, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
Blueboar is exactly right. Jayjg (talk) 16:45, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

The Cambridge history of India, Volume 6

I'd like to see some discussion about whether The Cambridge history of India, Volume 6 and other volumes of the series along with similar Cambridge history for other nations are reliable. The source is to be used for results and Casualties and losses section of Battle of Phillora along with other details described in the book through this section of book. The volume like the other volumes in the series is written by multiple famous and important historians and authors with knowledge of Indian history and even includes works of even historians and authors who lived in 18 and/or 19 century. The publisher of the is S.Chand, one of the largest publisher in Indian subcontinent and publishes the volume for sale in the Indian subcontinent. The information in the book is important because it is probably one of the only reliable neutral review of battle as other reliable medias only concentrated on the whole war rather than individual battles.

However one of the editor had been reverting the changes I made based on the source before I requested protection stating I need to come up with the name of the exact author or historian who wrote the lines in question out of the many who wrote the book. As far as I know Cambridge University would not publish any false information purposefully but clearly I am not the authority or have the power to gather information regarding "who wrote which line??" from Cambridge University.--UplinkAnsh (talk) 22:24, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
Um...that's silly. No, you don't need to say specifically which of the writers wrote that specific line. If it tells you which one for some of them, it would be nice to have that as a part of the reference description, but it is definitely not necessary. You are referencing the book as a whole, not the specific "writer among many". SilverserenC 22:32, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
It looks like a reliable source to me. Zuggernaut (talk) 22:44, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
Agreed, reliable and no need to specify what author(s) wrote the specific content in question. PЄTЄRS J VЄСRUМВА ►TALK 22:51, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
Actually you need to provide a full citation including the author of the section of the whole text you relied upon. The object you describe has individual authors for chapters or entries. The author of the chapter you used, and the title of the chapter, should be cited. As the author of an individual chapter goes to its reliability, just as much as the publisher, the chapter's author and title need to be cited. This is also because you didn't reference the entire work, you referenced a subsection of the work. Fifelfoo (talk) 01:20, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
I didn't notice that. Well, if the author is listed at the beginning of each chapter, that's easy enough for the OP to list. The opposing editor in this situation (whomever the OP is talking about) though should have taken the time and initiative to look at the reference and add the writer's name to the description, instead of removing it entirely. SilverserenC 01:30, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
Unless the editor of a work is merely a compiler and "chapters" are position papers representing diverse views of different authors exploring a particular topic, that level of citation (author of particular section) should not be required for a work which is considered encyclopedic in structure, either general or on a specific area of study. That said, if individual authors are specifically noted at the start of each section, then I agree the actual author should be noted in the citation. PЄTЄRS J VЄСRUМВА ►TALK 01:42, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
I would agree that it isn't necessary, but it does add that extra level of detail for a reader and it seems easy enough to list for this source as it is. SilverserenC 01:46, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
User:Fifelfoo's suggestion is the preferred one but it should not be mandatory. User:UplinkAnsh is citing a book which lists five different people as authors. As long as he complies with the minimum requirements of the citation template being used, i.e, as long as all five authors are listed and the correct page numbers provided, there's shouldn't be a problem. Zuggernaut (talk) 04:03, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
This is a 1964 reprint of a series that was published between 1922 and 1937, and should be avoided because as the New Cambridge History of India (2004) says, "it has inevitably been overtaken by the mass of new research over the past sixty years". TFD (talk) 21:10, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
Since the discussion concerns the book's treatment of the Battle of Phillora, which took place in 1965, it can't be merely a reprint, nor one of 1964! But if extra stuff has been added for an Indian edition, distinguishing chapter authors becomes that much more important. Johnbod (talk) 04:04, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
User:The Four Deuces's comment is a valuable one and to be kept in mind because the New Cambridge History of India (2004), a different book is often quoted/cited in WP articles. I couldn't help but think of Grays Sports Almanac when I read this :) Zuggernaut (talk) 04:15, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Well I found that the section Political Developments Since 1919 (India and Pakistan)was written by Vidya Dhar Mahajan in the extended digitized version in 2009.--UplinkAnsh (talk) 10:22, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

This is clearly a reliable source. Citing the authors of the individual chapters/sections is best practice, though citing the work and page is enough to start. Jayjg (talk) 16:44, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

"How to Build a Superluminal Computer" -reliable source?

I am concerned particularly with this article: [51], referenced here: Hypercomputer#cite_note-11.

It caught my eye because this has been proposed again and again for decades, and always the answer is no. and this is no different, and no more significant. From the article: "So-called "nonlocal" phenomenon cannot be used to transmit information faster than the speed of light but Putz and Svozil today ask whether it can be used to process it, to carry out computational tasks at superluminal speeds." The problem here is that processing information 'is TRANSFERing it. Processing is just another word for entropic transfer. (transfer with loss of information entropy). So the question of whether "it can be used to process it" IS the question of whether "[it] be used to transmit [it]". A question whose answer is a definite "no". So the blog makes the mistake on notability on account of a rather egregious error. My question is does it still meet RS? And in any case, should it be removed from WP? Kevin Baastalk 18:29, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

arXiv is not a reliable source, and a blog post about an arXiv article should not be considered a reliable source either. Looie496 (talk) 00:02, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
thanks, i'm removing it. Kevin Baastalk 13:54, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Agree. Jayjg (talk) 16:41, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Suzuki vs Consumer's Union

Having tried to edit the Suzuki Samurai/Jimny etc article I was depressed by the amount of space given to the controversial lawsuit of 1996. There was an inordinate amount of battling back and forth between pro-Suzuki and pro-CU editors. In an attempt to remove this from my field of vision I started a new article, Suzuki Samurai v Consumers Union‎ where these back-and-forths could take place out of view. Lately, I checked back and noticed that a link to a video (made by Suzuki, and clearly labelled as such) had been removed. Meanwhile, other, rather dubious accusations taken from a ambulance-chaser website remain. I don't know if this is the right place to ask questions on this topic, but I do feel that if anything an official Suzuki video (including actual Consumer's Union footage) is more reliable than some website like this one: http://www.crash-worthiness.com/ Thankful for any assistance,  ⊂ Mr.choppers ⊃  (talk) 21:01, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for opening this discussion. As stated on the article's discussion page, my objection at this point is that the video is one that appears on a social networking website. Again, if it is genuine it would be better if a link to Suzuki's own website was used. ThatSaved (talk) 23:01, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
To me the video, while posted on a MySpace page (that's still around?) seems legit. I don't know who found it or where, that'd make the video better as source material. But I'll definitely hold back a day or two or three while more disinterested editors ponder the matter, before I do any more editing on the article page.  ⊂ Mr.choppers ⊃  (talk) 03:06, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Both the Suzuki Corp video and the Suzuki internal documents seem legitimate to me, but both have rather dodgy present locations. It would be better to trace both to more legitimate sources, if possible. Pete Tillman (talk) 04:33, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
We now have a better source for the Suzuki documents and safety statistics, thanks to editor ThatSaved: [52], which is sourced back to CU. Now we just need a link for the video back to Suzuki & its law PR firm -- note that the video itself does assert this, is that good enough? Thanks, Pete Tillman (talk) 18:39, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

question

If there are policies or guidelines how to deal with book references without page numbers. --CarTick 01:10, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

If you mean that there's a reference from a book already in a Wikipedia article which doesn't have page numbers on it, you can read this quite long thread from a week or so ago - the executive summary of which might be something like: ask the editor who placed the citation for page numbers, or try to find the page numbers yourself, but don't remove the citation unless you have reason to think that it is bogus.
If, however, you mean that you have a book you want to use for a source, but it has no page numbers in it, then I would think the best thing would be to indicate what chapter or section the cited information is in, or if the book is short and has no such divisions, have the cite indicate that the book is "unpaged". Beyond My Ken (talk) 01:47, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
wow. that is a long one. [page needed] and requesting the editor for page numbers seem like an idea everyone would agree on. guess, it is context dependent what to do if the editor fails to provide page numbers. The problem is you cant even search using the index if the page you are looking for doesnt even mention the key word or subject. of course, this happens only if it was added by a dishonest editor. --CarTick 02:45, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
It's a problem that the quality of indexing seems to have deteriorated lately (says the old middle-aged coot). Beyond My Ken (talk) 02:52, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
I recently tried to quote from the beginning of an old instruction manual, whose page numbers only begun circa twenty pages in. I called everything before that by i-xxii. Don't know if that's of any relevance, or if perhaps I done wrong.  ⊂ Mr.choppers ⊃  (talk) 03:08, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Unnumbered front matter should be normally referred to as such, "Unnumbered front matter starting at the Introduction and the following 21 pages." Pages numbered unusually (i-xxii) should be referenced as pp. i-xxii; A-AF. Pages with implicit numbers (the first page of chapters are often not numbered) should be numbered with their implicit number. Pages which are unnumbered in sequence but containing numbered section or paragraph numbers should be referenced by section or paragraph number §57¶5, or 5.f.IV.71.A-G. Pages which are unnumbered in the sequence (for instance, the obverse of a numbered page, normally unnumbered and blank containing a plate or other illustration) should be described as "Obverse p. 2" or "Opposite p. 3". Pages with no numbering sequence should be referred to by their chapter, section, or first line of the paragraph. For example "Chapter 3, §Ducklings, ¶"The ducklings slowly waddled down…" and the following 7 pages." Your choice if you like using stuff like passim. versus found in passing; ff. versus following pages. When describe unusual page numbers, like "Fly sheet" or "Rear fly sheet" or "Note inside front wing of dust jacket" you should ideally spell out the information very clearly. Fifelfoo (talk) 03:29, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

This issue was discussed recently on the board. Assuming the book has page numbers, you should ask for the page numbers first, using a tag. If the person adding the citation refuses to provide it after a reasonable amount of time (give him/her several days at least), despite having clear opportunity, then you should remove the citation, and replace it with a citation requested tag. If you feel the information itself is untrue, you should remove the material as well. Jayjg (talk) 16:41, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. --CarTick 17:24, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

classical liberalism - another editor refuses to accept sources and keeps reverting away what is sourced

I have a user who claims that the following sources are not good enough to be used to state in the classical liberalism article that what is now called classical liberalism used to be called simply "liberalism." I know it sounds crazy that he is disputing something so obvious, but he is. Here are the sources he is claiming are not reliable:

"The Industrial Revolution that began in Britain saw the development of economic liberalism. That is, first of all, the belief that the free market was the optimal form of economic life, providing the greatest prosperity for all, and necessitating maximum economic freedom for everyone. This went hand in hand with a wider view of liberty which saw the maximisation of social freedom as the best way to run society in general. It was this version of liberalism that was the first to actually be called 'liberalism', which was in the nineteenth century. It is better known by the name 'laissez-faire liberalism', although it is sometimes called 'classical liberalism'." Page 13: [53] This book, as you can see, is cited in many other books as well as in peer-reviewed publications: [54] The author, Ian Adams is Honorary Fellow at the University of Durham, where he was a lecturer in political theory until his retirement in 2001. [55]

"It would be difficult to adequately characterize Jefferson's philosophy. It come closest to what was called "liberalism" in the nineteenth century, and classical liberalism after that term was appropriated by the progressive movement..." Page 846 [56]

""Classical liberalism - or simply liberalism as it was called until around the turn of the century - is the signature philosophy of Western Civilization." Page ix [57]

First I just gave one source, then he said that wasn't good enough, so I get another, he says it's not good enough, then another. It seems ridiculous for me to continue on when I'm sure he's just going to say the next one is not good enough either. Please give me some back up here. The above sources appears to comply with Wikipedia reliability standards. Bullet Dropper (talk) 04:07, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

The book is an introductory polisci textbook for high school/junior college and has no references and is therefore considered a teriary source. The problem with this type of book is that concepts are often simplified for students and all views or even sometimes the most common views may not be presented. The book does not actually say that classical liberalism "was formerly called simply "liberalism"". It mentions that the term came into use in the 19th century but there were other ideologies called liberalism at the time: Whiggery, radicalism, and reformist liberalism, and conservatives, like Robert Peel pursued liberal policies too. The reference to liberalism as an ideology as opposed to a political movement probably did not take place until later. The other source is from a chapter on Jefferson in an encyclopedia about civil liberties, which is not the most direct source. The text you removed was sourced to a high quality secondary source and should stand. TFD (talk) 04:28, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
This is the guy ^ Bullet Dropper (talk) 04:29, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
If there was something else called liberalism at the time, that doesn't take away from the fact that classical liberalism was called liberalism too. But now you're changing your resistive strategies. Before your only complaints were that the sources weren't reliable. Now that I bring them here where other more objective people can judge them, all of a sudden you start disputing something else. Bullet Dropper (talk) 04:35, 28 September 2010 (UTC)


Adams (1998) is a senior secondary or undergraduate textbook. It will not adequately discuss this level of minutae. Unreliable: User higher quality sources in preference.
Finkleman (2006) is an encyclopedia of civil liberties. As there is no author or article title here, I am assuming an unsigned article by a non-specialist in a Tertiary work. Even if it were a signed article by a non-specialist, it does not appear to be a technical discussion of the term liberalism. Unreliable for this level of technical debate: User higher quality sources in preference.
Denson (2001) "Introduction" is an introduction to a work published by a partisan press with some scholarly merit. It appears to be reliable for the point of fact, that "Classical liberalism - or simply liberalism as it was called until around the turn of the century." However, a specialist work on the topic of liberalism, rather than on the topic of the US presidency, ought to be used instead. This is a trivial fact of etymology, not a substantive scholarly opinion on the history of liberalism.
We aren't here to give you back-up. Concur with TFD. First two unreliable for claims. Third minimally reliable for a minor point of fact, highly desirable to replace with a specialist scholarly work actually written on the topic of the history of Liberalism. Fifelfoo (talk) 04:40, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Can you cite anywhere in policy that textbooks are not good sources? They're explicltly stated as being reliable sources in WP:TERTIARY policy: "Many introductory undergraduate-level textbooks are regarded as tertiary sources because they sum up multiple secondary sources. Policy: Reliably published tertiary sources can be helpful in providing broad summaries of topics that involve many primary and secondary sources.This one certainly meets Wikipedia standards for reliability." This is not "minutae." This is something very broad, that you would want a tertiary source for. These sources are simply stating the obvious that classical liberalism has the word "classical" in front of it today, because it used to just be called "liberalism." It should be obvious, but the reason it should be noted is because someone not very bright that comes across the article may think it was always called classical liberalism. Bullet Dropper (talk) 04:48, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
The expected level of reliability for a source discussing the history of liberalism is a scholarly publication explicitly discussing the history of liberalism. A scholarly encyclopaedia of liberalism, containing signed articles by experts, would be appropriate. Policy clearly state that the reliability inheres in the author, work and publisher on a situational basis. The authors may be reliable (I have no idea for Finkleman, the author and title of the specific article is not given). The reliability of the presses is not in doubt. The reliability of the kind of work is the problem here: undergraduate textbooks lacking sufficient specialist depth, unsigned and off topic encyclopaedia articles, an introduction to a work on another topic. To address the encyclopaedia article and textbooks in relation to TERTIARY, you are not arguing a broad point, you are arguing a specialist technical point. Specialist technical SECONDARY works in academic publication are the expected standard of reliable sourcing. Fifelfoo (talk) 04:53, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Apparently writers of articles in peer-reviewed publications who site Adams' book disagree with you. [58] Bullet Dropper (talk) 05:02, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
They are conducting original scholarly research and have that luxury. We are writing an encyclopaedia from the best available sources and do not. Fifelfoo (talk) 05:06, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

This discussion makes we wonder what content is being disputed. The word classical has a meaning in English, and obviously as this WP is in English we do not need to source the meanings of every English term we use. Part of the nature of the word classical is that it is added as an adjective to distinguish the "old style" of something from the "new style". Obviously however, like 1+1=2 obvious, the "old style" would not have been used in the "old times". So if there is any level of sourcing for "classical liberalism" being called "liberalism" why would that be objected to? Is it being argued that liberalism is a neologism being applied to old movements retrospectively? Liberalism is obviously an "-ism" coming from "liberal", a term used in politics since the 1800s at least, and then obviously without "classical". I think I am right in saying the "-ism" also starts to appear in several contexts in the 19th century. More to the point though, it does not at first sight look like a "redflag" type of statement needing the highest quality of sourcing? Wouldn't we give the benefit of the doubt on a lesser source in such a case?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 06:54, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

It is technical language related to scholarly ambit claims made by various post-Austrian economics authors and think tanks about the past extent of particular contemporary ideologies; and, as such, has been taken up in the polemic of non-scholarly believers in that particular politics. Fifelfoo (talk) 06:58, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Looking over the article in question, the disagreement appears to be over some subtle points concerning how the term 'classical liberal' came about, and how it was first used. The evolution of ideas over the history of liberalism is complex, a senior secondary/introductory undergraduate text is not an appropriate source to use. I agree with Fifelfoo that appropriate sources to use are scholarly publications explicitly discussing the history of liberalism. LK (talk) 07:07, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
OK Thanks. So, just to try to understand, you are perhaps thinking that liberalism in the 19th century had a looser and less technical meaning, and so indeed you are saying that "classical liberalism" is a retrospective definition for predecessors of a particular "technically defined" liberalism of today? That could be, but in fact the word liberalism still has a loose meaning. So then I wonder if a wording change might help. Looking at the quote above, "simply liberalism as it was called until around the turn of the century" it does not state that classical liberalism was the only thing called liberalism at that time, but maybe you are objecting to the fact that this wording implies it? --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:40, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
OK looked at the article and see this:

The term classical liberalism was applied in retrospect to distinguish earlier nineteenth-century liberalism from the newer social liberalism.[5] The phrase classical liberalism is also sometimes used to refer to all forms of liberalism before the twentieth century, and some conservatives and libertarians use the term classical liberalism to describe their belief in the primacy of economic freedom and minimal government. It is not always clear which meaning is intended.

So in effect the argument is really about whether the text book is good enough to "trump" this summary? I think the summary is better and more comprehensive, allowing for the variations in meaning at the time, so I do not really see why anybody would want to replace it with an over-simplification. I believe liberalism was indeed not a "technical term" in the 19th century.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:19, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

List of Philippine restaurant chains

I recently created an article List of Philippine restaurant chains. I purposefully made it about a list of chains so as to increase the likelihood of notability. For those chains that did not have their own Wikipedia article I also included a link to the chain's website. In the external links section I have also included a link to a website that can be used to verify the existence of such establishments and other details related to them. Another editor has removed some of the chains I included because they do not have their own Wikipedia article or a reference to a secondary source. Here's a diff, before and after. Reason given seems to be WP:Linkfarm. On the other hand sources were given even if they were primary sources. Their removal seems excessive. For an entry on a list article, what is the threshold for inclusion? For comparison there is List of restaurant chains in the United States where I am seeing red links and no banner requesting verification. Lambanog (talk) 04:29, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Lists like this are always controversial. Ideally you're looking for reliable secondary sources, but notability isn't really a RS issue (though the two are often related), it's more an AfD issue. Jayjg (talk) 16:37, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Sorry that I didn't see this sooner. The description of the dispute is misleading, as it doesn't involve sources. Being discussed at article talk. Related discussion here. --Ronz (talk) 19:16, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

www.responsesource.com

This website appears to be a compendium of press releases, and hence in general not a reliable source. In particular, International Pole dancing Day, a press release from "The world’s largest independent pole-dancing-fitness school, Polestars" does not seem to be a reliable source for the history of pole-dancing at Striptease#Recent history. Kenilworth Terrace (talk) 16:59, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Does typical WP practice demand "plagiarism lite", and does it matter?

I would like to ask if others are sometimes uncomfortable with the following, and whether anyone has any practical suggestions about it. The most common scenario is something like this made-up case:- "this online review article looks well-written and well-sourced, great, but because RS debate is possible you should just use its handy bibliography for what you wanted to put in and not mention what led you there". Sound familiar?

Even when people then get copies of the articles in said bibliography (as per WP:SAYWHEREYOUGOTIT) in many cases of course, what ends up being put into Wikipedia is structured and worded in ways which are inspired by the helpful author of the good but potentially questioned source. However, editors are effectively told not to say so. (Indeed many are presumably doing this the whole time and not talking about it.) Structuring of subject matter, simple observations, basic ways of explaining uncontroversial things, are often not "OR", raise no red flags, and their sources are hard to prove, so no one cares where they come from. But if such influences are so uncontroversial why is being honest about it considered such a no-no?

I was recently involved in an example where a sourced quotation which had been subject to some questionable RS debate was removed, and a re-written sentence openly intended to capture something in the old material was then inserted without sourcing. The wording change possibly improves the article, and is (and was!) obvious enough not to need special sourcing, but I don't feel good about the deliberate lack of attribution.

In academic literature one still sees authors who are correct enough to quote a source as something that they read in another source. Indeed this is often quite useful. In WP, it seems odd to see people on WP argue quite strongly sometimes that an apparently good source should be used indirectly and without attribution supposedly due to WP rules. In reality of course what people mean is that it is better to avoid a long RS debate about how the WP rules might apply, and to find a "path of least resistance".

Just trying to think why this is happening, it occurs to me that it is relevant that if you put words in an article without sourcing, then someone needs to actually look at the content and understand it before they can judge if they need more sourcing. Feedback is likely to be informed in such cases. OTOH, if you try very hard to mention all sources, you can expect "feedback" which is generalized and awkward to deal with: based not on any reading of the content but upon quick browsing for theoretical sourcing warning signs. Are the incentives wrong?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:17, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure that I understand the question, so let me tell you what I'm hearing:
  • You read Mary's paper.
  • Mary's paper cites John's book.
  • You read John's book.
  • You write about the subject, and cite John's book.
This is 100% acceptable: It is not necessary to document how you found John's book, or how many other sources you read before writing a sentence.
What's not acceptable is to read Mary and then falsely claim that you read John. If you only read Mary, you must cite Mary. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:32, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
I agree with WhatamIdoing. There's an unwritten rule when blogging to make sure to mention the intermediate steps (the ubiquitous "hat tip") but while that's of some importance to bloggers who are looking to take credit for their blogging, it is not an issue when assembling encyclopedic content. Having said that, if I felt that Mary's paper was the key to finding the info in John's book, I might try to find a way to cite Mary, if it could be done without compromising integrity.--SPhilbrickT 16:37, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
I think the two responses are both looking at the most controversial type of example. I'll try doing a rewrite of WhatamIdoing's useful summary which is both based on real (but more messy) experience and also more designed to show how this can become more ethically dubious in more realistic and less extreme cases:
  • You read Mary's paper. You consider it an RS.
  • Mary's paper reviews works by 10 authors in a particular are of research, categorizes them in a neat uncontroversial way, and gives some neat comments about them which are not particularly controversial but handy nevertheless.
  • You make an WP article citing Mary's paper as a source. You use Mary's neat way of summarizing the field, as well as some of her observations.
  • Another editor arrives and a content debate ensues during which the editor claims Mary's paper is not a good enough RS. Let's say for example the field is a quite technical one and Mary published in a less technical journal (not a blog). Let's say the visiting editor cites WP:REDFLAG for example.
  • After some circular discussions the two of you come to the practical compromise of getting around silly debate by simply pretending Mary is not a source, but instead the 50 authors. Direct quotes are simply reworded into new words that mean the same thing.
  • When the visiting editor sees what the result looks like after simply deleting mention of Mary, they are satisfied there is now no sourcing problem because nothing stands out as the kind of thing you would tag as needing a source. Nothing adapted from Mary was controversial. (Yes, this raises the question of why redflag was incited, but in the real WP, people are not always that consistent and you have to get past an argument.)
  • Let's say for the sake of making a clear example that you have actually read the 50, but the person who insisted on deleting mention of Mary has not and was basically a visitor to the article who noticed a perceived sourcing issue but does not really know the field.
  • Let's say this editor is unable to debate what is really controversial in the field and so simply takes a hard line of saying redflag can be assumed to be relevant whenever an article in a less technical journal seems to be trying to review something in a more technical field.
  • The implied defense of this compromise is that deleting mention of the source was OK because everything Mary wrote might have been arrived at by someone reading the 50 authors.
It seems to me that if an academic or student got caught plagiarizing and gave this excuse it would be laughable?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:07, 19 September 2010 (UTC)
It would be, because the academic wouldn't have to deal with drive-by editors. We do. Our work is the product of committee, so we must make compromises. If you want to soothe your conscience, you can remind yourself that we are quite different from academics or students, because they are expected to do original research. We're specifically forbidden to. An academic who writes what would be a Wikipedia featured article as a dissertation will rightly be criticised because it has no original work or at least analysis. All our work is required to be copied, and we are not allowed to enter our opinion. That's a much greater difference from academia. --GRuban (talk) 23:18, 19 September 2010 (UTC)
Hmmm. But just considering WP's own statements "to itself" so to speak, isn't this also a case where we break our own "rules"? Consider WP:SAYWHEREYOUGOTIT. Of course BTW I would not think this subject interesting if it was something that happened here and there at random. The pressures and incentives (including the way things like this noticeboard can work, or be worked, sometimes) appear to me to create a positive tendency towards this particular type of compromise at the expense of principles like WP:SAYWHEREYOUGOTIT. I'd even go one step further and hypothesize that there are probably people who have learnt from the same pressures simply to avoid sourcing as much as possible, as a way to avoid drawing attention from drive-by editors in the first place.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 14:35, 20 September 2010 (UTC)
I'll call your hypothesis and raise: there are definitely people who have learnt not to edit the Wikipedia at all due to its multitudinous slings and arrows, and this one is by no means the most painful. But ... where does this lead? If you have a specific workable suggestion, please propose it. Just "say where you got it" doesn't work, because the article doesn't have just one owner/author, there is just the amorphous Wikipedia community, that can edit it at any time, and often do. Just because editor A got the information from source Bar by reading about it in Foo which references Bar, doesn't mean editor B can't get the same information from Bar directly. Does that mean that editor B isn't allowed to delete the reference to Foo, even though Foo isn't a reliable source, and the article now contains no information that directly depends on Foo, just because someone else who once edited the article once read Foo? --GRuban (talk) 22:56, 20 September 2010 (UTC)
People leaving WP no longer affect WP. I think you are missing the point that I am noting cases where WP accepted habits seem to be pushing people to break WP's own stated policy, on WP. Your scenario section seems to amount to saying that no one will normally notice the plagiarism?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 15:10, 21 September 2010 (UTC)
No, merely that I don't see a solution in which we can credit everyone on the chain of references. The problem is that our articles don't have a single author, so there isn't a single chain of where that author got it. "Say where you got it", doesn't mean what you think it does, it's the plural "you", meaning any editor who has ever edited the article, not the singular "you" meaning any one of them in particular. Let's look at your example from the other perspective. Joe read Mary's paper, which cites 50 sources, and then read the 50 sources. Frank read the 50 sources directly, he never saw Mary's paper. Should the way our article should be written really depend on whether Frank or Joe got to it first? Surely not, our articles don't have original and secondary authors.
Or let's actually quote WP:SAYWHEREYOUGOTIT: "For example, a webpage may provide information that the page's author attributes to a book. Unless you examine the book yourself, your source is the webpage, not the book...It is often better to read the original source material yourself, in which case you can simply cite the original source." That means that, much as it may seem unfair to Mary, we don't cite her, we cite the 50 directly. --GRuban (talk) 20:09, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
No. Please look at the example as I explained it. I am talking about cases where people knowingly used the secondary source also, and not just its bibliography.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:49, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

I'm inclined to agree with the OP, and this is a problem that many WP editors try to dance around. Time and again, after I've put work into an article, using good sources and working to achieve a balanced, reliable text, on my won or together with others here, I run into editors (or they approach me) who are a complete PITA because they pretend that every single statement - whatever kind it is, even if it's uncontested or so obvious no one has ever needed to phrase it as a fact in print - must be shown to have been taken raw from a "reliable source" (however they define that) and that any attempt to rephrase, explain or bring out why something is important within the context of the subject makes it "original research" and inadmissible. In their view, the way to keep WP clean and reliable is to insist that every article should be a patchwork of statements that are vouched for, or verified/made falsifiable and controllable one by one, by the external source that says, or implies that "statement (p) is true".and put the citation for (p) in a footnote.

In reality that doesn't solve the issues, and real scientiests, scholars and encyclopaedic writers do not stop at simply saying a certain source has generic validity all the time because of what it is (reliable, an "honoured newspaper", a high-rank university etc). If a statement or a line of reasomning comes under scrutiny, it's those statements that should be discussed, not whatever source they were quoted by and the generic reliability of that source (which is most often not the ultimate source, anyway). Real encyclopaedias such as the Britannica are full of statements whose underpinnings are a swarm of minor facts, theories and inferences: the real voucher is the reputation of the guy who wrote the article and his knowledge, because unlike the average WP editor he risks something if he puts blatantly false, faulty or overstated stuff into his text. His colleagues might detect it and ruin his reputation. If any Jack Bass writes "Barack Obama is a practising muslim /source S1/ and he was born in Kenya /source S2, perhaps obamacrimes.com/" all he risks is an edit war and eventually, if he is really blunt, having his account blocked. The next day, or even before, he may open another account and keep on writing. So a standard view of what would make current WP policy says WP editing is a kind of collecting of raw facts that are sort of plagiarized, openly or thinly veiled, but in my view, and according to scientific standards, that isn't enough to make the outcome reliable.

If the idea here is to provide texts that are as reliable and s valid as a good paper encyclopadia, then it's just not helpful to pretend that this can be achieved simply by laying a million small "directly sourced statements" side by side but avoiding any discussion of those statements as such, and any attempts to bring them together. But if the hyperdeletionists who insist that's the way keep up their good work, the only way to avoid being clobbered with "original research!" seems to be to blatantly plagiarize whatever you can get accepted as a "good and reliable source".

Of course, sometimes this doesn't happen. It's just as pointed out here: sometimes the plagiarizing/rewriting thing is more discreet but it still sticks to rephrasing whatever you can find and which seems to vaguely fit with preconceived ideas of what should be in the article, "what it's like". Or you simply write a good article (or improve an existing one) according to your own solid knowledge - the article you'd have written for the Britannica if you'd have been asked to - and sprinkle it with some references although you know that it would be impossible to nail down every single statement, every nuance of the text, to a previous rock hard source. You add a list if books you know are central to the area. And then yoiu hope not to have some 15-year old newbie running onto it and deleting half of it, saying "not sourced" and "whattya mean by that? POV!!" (RS and citation discussion on purely generic terms). I find this unsatisfactory, but I'm not sure there's a way out of it as long as the Wiki bureaucracy insists on that every John Blow is allowed to write about everything but they must only parrot what one or another "reliable source" (in reality, there can never be an indisputable solid list of such sources, and what counts as "good sources" is in drift from article to article) has had to say in exactly those same words on the subject.Strausszek (talk) 04:41, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

I think your remark about "generic" good sourcing and good sourcing which context relative is a very important point. It is already how WP policy is phrased, but this is widely ignored by some "sub-cultures" within WP. If it were not so widely ignored, then it would probably help reduce many types of problems including the one I have described above where a source's name is deliberately deleted, even though what it taken from it is considered OK without sourcing. If sourcing questions were always properly handled in a context relative way such cases would be immediately recognized as simply illogical.
OTOH, I am not sure my point if fully being understood:-
  • This is not just a hidden problem. There are cases where you can see quite clearly on the talk page how people have been told to remove a citation but not whatever useful ideas were drawn from it. There must be cases which are hidden also, but right now it is something people do proudly in the open. That's what makes this kind of case "interesting". People think this is demanded by WP. It would not have been worthwhile to post hear about cases everyone agrees to be wrong.
  • I would also say that it is not the newbies who cause the most of these problems, but rather experienced editors who are more willing and able to confidently claim that this is the way WP should work. In general I think experienced editors sometimes exaggerate about the amount of problems that come from newbies. This is I think something which has changed over time. The minority of newbies causing real problems seem to be picked up much quicker these days.
Thanks for comments. My understanding is that basically WP as a community does not yet think much about this particular point. OTOH, if everyone would remember that sourcing should always be discussed in a context the problem might well reduce a lot.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:49, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
Yes, I've run into this kind of crummy behaviour too. We're discussing a few different facets now, so here's a few outlines of the varied issues:
  • cropping out a section that contained valid points without bothering to discuss the content, the new editor only throwing in a quick argument to the effect that the stated source is not RS, or that he has an RS statement himself, one which he adds inline notes to. he then claims this new source trumps what you or other people have written, adn your sources, and argues that his new text can only be contested or modified by finding a fresh RS statement to contest his. In reality, what he's written is largely his own ideas and the RS support is just a token.
  • the new editor removes a section even though it has several good sources, saying "what those sources say can only be verified (shown to be finally true) with complete certainty by asking person X, or by going to archive documents. But those methods can't be rapidly checked by every WP user, so we must remove the entire section". This confuses two senses of verifiability - verifiable as in "demonstrably and finally true" (e.g. a person's birth date or education from valid archive documents, or their presence at a given time and place, or sometime during a certain span of time, from photographs that have been shown to be genuine) and "possible to assert and put to the test with the help of sources". The latter really is falsifiability (Popper) from accepted sources or authorities, but because many statements on WP are "interim true" and used to support more statemnets in turn, people confuse those two senses of 'verifiability'.
  • Cutting every instance of the use of a certain word on the grounds that it is "vague" and "can't be defined properly" except in a very narrow way, the way user X likes and which he claims is the Wiki way to define it. The other day I saw a user who had been running about masses of film articles and cut every instance where the words "surreaiist film" or "surrealist cinema" - meaning, inspired by surrealist aesthetics or strikingly relying on subconscious or juxtaposed disparate images - were used. In the process he cut a good deal of useful, sourced and relevant content too, but his only argument was that "surrealist film" is a dummy concept, except when it relates to the early French surrealist film makers. There's no way of knowing how much he knew of the subject: by avoiding discussion he kept off having anyone find out.
  • the content of a section or a few lines is largely based on a few sources quoted and fully summarized with page references by the main book used at hand by user A - an intermediiate source. user A footnotes the WP text with those ultimate sources and their page refs, but also paraphrases the book that he found them in. User B comes in and is hostile to the intermediate source, so he removes the entire bit saying it's vitiated by an unreliable source. not bothering to discuss the value of the statements that were culled, of what the WP article bit in question said, or whether the article is helped by cutting that bit or just becomes less coherent. Or even prone to misunderstanding. In the really bad cases, and I've seen those, user B wants to encourage misunderstanding in a certain direction, but without having to put the cards on the table.
  • Working to keep a certain line of thought out of an article, or a bunch of interrelated articles, by insisting on very high demands for when a source can be classed as "reliable" and denying anyone the option to use sources that support an opposing view, or claim such a view exists, saying they are non-notable sources, polemical sources etc. Most often this is done bt a gang of people who have taken it upon themselves to keep articles in line to their views, but I've seen it done by indefatigable single persons too.
Newbies or experienced but determined veterans? Well, I've seen these kinds of edit turf war and control strategies both from people with tens of thousands of edits, and sometimes it seems with good academic credentials, and from people who are complete newcomers and who don't really know the dough they're trying to knead. But both kinds can be just as unwilling to discuss what they do. In the bad cases, they just crop away and add their own material, without any prior discussion, claiming that they're executing 'sanctified WP policy'. In reality, they are claiming that the principles they find are WP laws, not guidelines, which cuts the space for any discussion that would take the context or interpretation problems into account. And quite often, too, the limits of which sources are RS are completely different from one article to the next, or from one subculture or editing gang to another.
Essentially, sometimes RS is whatever you can get classed as an RS. I've been trying to make people understand that an op-ed comment or a lighthearted, provocative column in a big morning newspaper, or a tv interview with some journalist or politician, isn't necessarily as reliable as the news reporting of that paper or tv channel, - the standards from the paper are simply not the same for different kinds of material, and a column or an interview isn't meant to be an indisputable lecture. But if people are committed enough to keep a certain angle out of an article, or to avoid criticism over blunt editing, they tend to resort to "it must be true because I read it in such and such newspaper" or "because I heard it on this tv channel", and if you reply 'that the statement they quote and lean on is overstated, or false, or it in turn obviously relies on a partisan train oif thought, a partisan definition of something supporting it - or that it's simply illogical - then that criticism is ranked as "original research" as long as you don't come up with another notable source who has said what you said (your discussion of the state of reesearch and knowledge on the matter, and of the sources and writers invoked) in exactly the same terms. Of course this is often impossible, or it would take a hopelessly long time, prowling dozens of books to come up with citations matching your critical points, and some of what you end up with might be in a language the other guy doesn't understand and he and his editing buddies will then discard it. That kind of thing means dumbing down any discussion and unfortunately it's quite frequent on Wikipedia talk pages. Strausszek (talk) 12:00, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
Yes, I'm confident we've all seen similar things. Not sure these are all facets of exactly the same problem. Some are related. Many have in common that they are areas where judgement is required, and as such are "natural" places for arguments to happen - something we'll always have. I think for practical reasons we have to be careful about bracketing problems based on similar attitudes or intentions, as bad intentions can cause all kinds of effects. As I mentioned above, the main reason for posting on this noticeboard was a particular type of behavior which, whatever the intentions, appears to be openly encouraged and proclaimed as the way WP works. Many of the other examples are the sorts of things people do while claiming to be aiming at one thing but apparently aiming at another - again something we'll always have to some extent. The problem I am talking about is one that people do not make any effort to hide. It might be related to the fact that it often seems even on this noticeboard, which I've taken to watching lately, that in RS discussions people make no effort to say anything about the context a source might be being used for.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 14:45, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
Yup, the most stubborn editors are not often interested in discussing the argumentative or historical context of the statements they pick up. Neither in their original place, nor where they get quoted and reused. Sometimes they don't want to discuss with you at all, except from a hilltop. They tend to take everything they find at face value, and of course the most histrionic comments and most striking statements will often be the ones that are given pride of place. Absolutely agree.Strausszek (talk) 15:31, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

Reference "Mary" as a general reference or add her work to the "Further reading" section. Inline citations are not the only acceptable way to acknowledge sources. It's something editors have apparently forgotten with the trend on Wikipedia to drench articles with inline cites. Lambanog (talk) 10:15, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

Might just be me but I would never think of anything in the Further Reading section of an article as somehow an implied source, and indeed it is often a very mixed bag and hardly connected to the article? I agree that one effect of trends like the ones I am describing is "drenching".--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 14:30, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
If we are closely reproducing the style, order, or organization of Mary's work in our article, it is likely that a citation of Mary's publication would be appropriate. In such a circumstance plagiarism looms large as a concern (and I feel that she should be credited on that basis alone), but there are other, Wikipedia-specific issues that apply. In the absence of a reference to Mary's published guidance, how are we sure that the list of sources and statements present in our article are not the result of cherry-picking among primary sources? Without the guidance of suitable secondary sources and review articles, we are at risk of presenting works of original synthesis. In the alternative, if Mary's original work wouldn't qualify as a proper reliable source on its own, then is it inappropriate to rely on it to structure our article because it represents original research and synthesis?
Obviously there will be specific circumstances governing each individual article and each individual 'Mary', but if all of one of our article's (or article section's) references are being drawn from a single review article then that should raise some flags to say that citation might be necessary. In grayer areas, we might be able to get by with a more general entry in a 'Further reading' section, but that's an ugly hack — it really ought to be under a 'Works consulted' or 'Bibliography' heading. Perhaps a subheading within the 'References' section dealing with review articles? TenOfAllTrades(talk) 16:33, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
The example I gave covered the details quite specifically. You appear to be implying that we can ignore the example I gave because it was impossible? You appear to be suggesting that there would be something else controversial about the material taken over from Mary, and therefore there would always be some justification for one editor deliberately and clearly demanding that other editors remove mention of her, but still use her. It was realistic, I can assure you. People are not as logical as you think. Just because material is non-controversial and even desired in an article does not mean that the same people who want it in the article will not also want the source covered up because of some other "issue".--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:28, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
You seem to be reading things I didn't say into my words. Without knowing the specific article or references involved I cannot make a final pronouncement, but my comment essentially agreed with you that we should cite 'Mary'; why are you biting my head off? Yes, I offered some more general comments, principles, and guidance — if you didn't want general discussion then you shouldn't have opened this thread with a hypothetical case. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 19:31, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
My sincere apologies. I certainly did not mean to bit your head off. My above post is how I understood you. I used words like "appear to be implying" because I was not entirely sure.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:51, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
Apology accepted. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 01:03, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
  • I don't know about all the intermediate step stuff, but plagiarism is a risk which is difficult to avoid if you want to say precisely what the source says and avoid original research. Using a thesaurus to come up with synonyms will often change the meaning. There's a WP article on the topic at Wikipedia:Close_paraphrasing. There was a very good editor, User:Eubulides, who cited very close to the source for accuracy, but because of this he was closer to this issue than others (see my comment the first nomination of water fluoridation for featured). I've adopted this practice and accidentally cited too close in sentence structure to a source a couple times. However, I think the other point is that you can't plagiarize simple facts, and often what's being added to the encyclopedia is simple enough that it's not a big deal. II | (t - c) 14:48, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
I think what you are describing are methods of hiding plagiarism? If the source was good enough to copy from then even if you re-word it, it is a source, right?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 15:49, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

I can note an interesting case, still at issue: the intro paragraph to Atheism. it's basically a concatenation (via WP:SYNTHESIS, ironically) of plagiarism form 3 other poorly/biasedly-worded encyclopedias. I and others have argued on there about how articles aren't supposed to be a mosaic of plagiarism form other encyclopedias and that would just make for really bad prose, esp. for the intro. clearly there's a trade-off; good balance point. don't inject your own facts / analysis, but that doesn't mean you can't rephrase things and summarize them, or change how information is organized to make a better narrative. practically speaking it's not even possible to avoid doing those things, so isn't it better to at least be conscientious about them, rather than simply deny their existence? I don't know, it seems I can never phrase it to them such that they will understand what i'm saying. But my opinions aside, it's interesting case for your question. Kevin Baastalk 16:14, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Tell me about it! People will go to ridiculous lengths on here sometimes in order either to stop an article from actually becoming readable or to obstruct other editors from trying to achieve a balanced text, or to state facts that are needed to make the text cogent, nuanced, true (in non-contested terms) and relevant. And the cheap idea that every article could be simply a patchwork of statements with no real intellectual input, no rephrasing or organizing effort from the writers other than mimicking what they found in other sources - that is a misunderstanding that makes things worse, because it gets people thinking there is no *need* for any critical scrutiny of what got tossed into the article, only of the places where it was found and whether the stuff that's written is exactly in parallel with those named 'sources'.
  • Verifiability of a statement, of the fact-based negation of a rumour or of a notable opinion is not always the same as sourcability in letters and in exactly the same terms.
  • "Verifiable" means that someone will be able to verify a statement from some specified or quickly inferable source, not that every John Blow with a computer and a smalltown public library has to be able to do it in ten minutes.
  • It is possible for two statements from the same mostly reliable source (the same author, the same newspaper/magazine title, the same tv show) to be in contradiction. Perfectly possible in fact. It follows that critical handling of your information can't just be limited to checking if the source is reliable and saying "if you contest this statement, you have to find another notable RS making the very same critical points of said statement as you wish to make. If you can't come up with such citations, that means they're not valid critical points and can't be included in the article, either directly or indirectly (as a referred or implied underpinning, part of a chain of logical reasoning underlying a statement which is part of the article.."
Okay, that was a bit of thesis nailing, but while those points are obviously true to me and, I hope, to most of the people in this thread, they are at odds with what many WP editors think we're doing.Strausszek (talk) 03:06, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

Encyclopedia of the Nations (website)

I discovered a couple of articles that had been plagiarized from a website calling itself Encyclopedia of the Nations and have added copyvio tags to them.

But has anyone noticed this website before? What is the origin of the content of this "encyclopedia"? It seems to be run by a company called Advameg, describing itself as "a fast growing Illinois-based company", but I see nothing indicating who the editors or authors are. --Hegvald (talk) 12:37, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

Unreliable, unsigned tertiary with no evidence of editorial oversight. Fifelfoo (talk) 12:58, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
It appears that the material has been reliably published elsewhere. The same content is published as the "Worldmark Encyclopedia of the Nations" under license by Thomas Gale Co., i.e. The Gale Group owns Macmillan Reference, Charles Scribner's & etc. This encyclopedia is one of many available at Encyclopedia.com (although, that doesn't help with the original copyright problem mentioned above). harlan (talk) 06:30, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

Removal of sources from Philippine cuisine

Not sure if starting a whole new section is appropriate but it's a problem with a different article. A while back I found the article Philippine cuisine riddled with errors and badly written and have been gradually improving it over time. The same editor who had problems with my List of Philippine restaurant chains article came in and removed references I added to a Further reading section. I restored them and put them under References to indicate that they can be considered general references. He has removed them again saying many of them contain external links. Diff, before and after (with some intervening inconsequential edits). I find the notion that published sources with convenience links should be removed, simply for having convenience links, kind of preposterous. There is room for the article to be improved and that is recognized but I do not think the actions being undertaken in the name of getting it to conform to Wikipedia standards helps the article as much as they obstruct and dissuade contributions. Could people take a look and give outside opinions? Lambanog (talk) 18:12, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

I disagree with the description of the dispute. As I identified the problem , the dispute is over external links in the Further reading section, which I moved to the External links section, proposing that most be moved to article talk. When my edits were reverted and the Further reading section renamed to "References" [59], I restored the Further reading section and moved the external links that were once in that section to the article talk. --Ronz (talk) 19:02, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Ronz, I think you need to take a look at WP:FURTHER, as that section should be titled Further Reading (you are correct about that), but none of those links should be moved to the External links section. When both a further reading and a external links section are utilized in an article, the external links section should only contain relevant web pages, such as a home page or similar things, but not news articles and such. News articles not used directly as references should be placed in a further reading section. Thus, Lambanog is correct in keeping those links in further reading, they should not be removed. SilverserenC 19:20, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Thanks. I hadn't looked at FURTHER in some time. It doesn't make a strong case for keeping the links there. I prefer to keep them out because they tend to become an exception to applying WP:EL.
Still, FURTHER makes it clear that a Further reading section shouldn't be changed into a References section. --Ronz (talk) 19:41, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
I put the sources in Further reading as a convenience both to those reading and myself as I sometimes work on the article. But they can and do serve as general references. So when Ronz took issue, I moved them to the References section and noted in the edit summary they are general references. He still removed them. Correct me if I'm wrong but as I understand it they have been removed because they have external links. Looking at WP:EL with which Ronz seems to be intimately familiar, it is not categorically stated that such convenience links to referenced sources are accepted by consensus. My understanding though is that they are accepted by consensus regardless of what WP:EL may currently state. The sources moved as far as I know are valid and I do not know why they have been otherwise removed from the article. Simple questions I wish to be answered are "Why have they been removed?" and "Should they have been removed?" Lambanog (talk) 19:59, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
If they were intended as references, they shouldn't have been added to Further reading.
If they were added by you, then you should be able to add them as in-line references. --Ronz (talk) 20:34, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
There is no prohibition on Further reading sources being later used as references. Removing perfectly valid references on the other hand is questionable.
Adding inline cites to an article started by someone else is not as simple as removing the same. An editor who regularly adds references should know this. Lambanog (talk) 21:19, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
"There is no prohibition on Further reading sources being later used as references." Not according to WP:FURTHER, which specifies that entries "were not used to verify article content." --Ronz (talk) 22:29, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Well, essentially, if they are later being used as references, then they need to be inline citations and then taken off the Further Reading section. Ideally, you would be working toward making most of the Further Reading sources into inline references in the article, so you can eventually do away with the Further Reading section. SilverserenC 22:31, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

We have a discussion but the bottom line is I wish to restore the references taken out by Ronz. Here are a sample of three items out of seventeen that were removed. I do not see any issues with them that warrant their removal. I'd like to see if anyone else aside from Ronz thinks otherwise and the reasons warranting their removal. From what I gather Ronz took them out based on WP:EL although I don't know what specific provision applies. I contend that removal for such reason is a misinterpretation of WP:EL that has the rather significant implication of making any citation using cite templates with a filled URL field subject to removal.

  • Barreto, Glenda R., Conrad Calalang, Margarita Fores, Myrna Segismundo, Jessie Sincioco, and Claude Tayag. (2008). Kulinarya – A Guidebook to Philippine Cuisine (Michaela Fenix, Ed.). Manila: Asia Society. ISBN 9712721086.

Absent any opposition from other parties I will interpret it as meaning that Ronz's interpretation of WP:EL as they apply to these refs is his alone and I will restore all 17 sources he removed. Lambanog (talk) 13:01, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Interpretation of WP:SPS

During a discussion where I believe this point is not relevant anyway, a question of interpretation of WP:SPS arises. WP:SPS states that

"In some circumstances, self-published material may be acceptable when produced by an established expert on the topic of the article whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable third-party publications."

But putting aside the author, what if the WP:SPS, for example the website itself is frequently cited in the strongest possible sources in a way which shows it is authoritative?

This possibility is not mentioned at WP:SPS, but is perhaps presumed to be an obvious higher bar not worth mentioning? (I would personally think any such source would not even need to be defended as an SPS?)

A clear example I can think of would be the "haplogroup predictor" website of Whit Athey which is cited by most major peer-reviewed Y haplogroup papers in the last few years (at least when they contain STR based haplogroup predictions). (Try google scholar with "Athey haplogroup". I can of course post examples if necessary, but for the sake of discussing principle I keep this short.) This is a website set-up by Athey to run a prediction method described by him in an article he wrote which is also very widely cited in the best possible sources in this field. However am I right that such a website would either pass WP:SPS or else not be considered an SPS in the first place?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 06:49, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Well, I would say that if the website is published in other reliable, strong sources in that field, then that is an implication that the site is 1) notable and 2) reliable. With that implication in mind, I would think that that would mean that, yes, information from that website itself can also be considered reliable. Though this is only true on information in that specific field it is considered reliable for. Anything that the website puts out on unrelated subjects likely shouldn't be used for those subjects, since it has not been determined that it is reliable in those unrelated fields. Does that help? SilverserenC 14:35, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
It might. Thanks. I would say you agree with me 100%, but as mentioned this is a side question in a bigger discussion, just trying to eliminate one possible disagreement. I am wondering what others think.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 15:01, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
Just to be clear, the issue here is a re-hash of whether or not jogg.info in general and Athey in particular (one of the people who run it) is a reliable source. jogg.info is a website that has the appearance of being an online genetic genealogy journal, but is run by people who actually work in other fields (e.g. family lawyers, economists, physicists, engineers (like Athey), etc.). Jayjg (talk) 20:40, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
The question is what it is Jayjg, and can and should be discussed. The bigger JOGG discussion you mention has many aspects including behavioral ones. The above question is based on a specific point which was raised at a specific article discussion which has been confused and diverted in striking ways by yourself[60]. I would like to try to avoid drama and handle specific RS questions as specific RS questions. If the questions seem odd then that is in itself interesting, because the questions are based on the bars being set by you, and indeed moved around by you, in various places.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 01:39, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

A second example

OK, here is another related question. I really hope I can get a few responses. Suppose:-

  • Combination of Article X1 by Author Y in publication Z is one of the most cited sources in the best peer reviewed journals, in a field. (Author Y has other reasonably well cited articles in other publications also, but less cited, he was a co-author etc.)
  • Wikipedian A cites Author Y also from publication Z but another article, X2.
  • Wikipedian B argues that publication Z is not strong because published online etc. and wants it removed.
  • Could it ever be valid for Wikipedian B to claim that the reliability of the citation X2 can not be based at all on the evidence of reliability of citation X1? (Perhaps it makes it easier to say that you can assume there have been no special challenges about the common sense likelihood of the content of the citation. It is not surprising or in conflict with anything widely known or believed etc.)

Cheers--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:55, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

This is all very theoretical. If you want to open another section on jogg.info, which don't you just do so? Jayjg (talk) 20:40, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
Maybe we will need to try another approach Jayjg, but as mentioned above, I am splitting out specific aspects for discussion at this time. Would you be so kind as to allow me to attempt that?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 01:39, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

Less theoretically

Here is Jayjg's current position in one place, in his own recent words. I would like community feedback on this statement:

What satisfies me "personally" is something that complies with WP:V and WP:RS. Neither of them mention anything about being cited in reliable sources, they talk instead about being published in reliable sources.[61] (emphasis added).

My questions above are about whether this is a logical argument. Do WP:V and WP:RS envision cases where an author+publication which is one of the most widely cited in the field can NOT be an RS? Jayjg also says that

If Athey's posting itself were cited by reliable sources, that might be an indication that that specific posting had a degree of reliability. However, it's moot, since it hasn't been. (Same post, emphasis added again. Note that unlike academics who cite it, Jayjg refers to the journal as a website and its articles as "postings".)

Is it reasonable to demand that for an Author+journal combination which is extremely strongly cited in a field, for several articles, that another article by the same Author+journal needs to be cited independently and specifically to be an RS? Feedback from neutral Wikipedians would be very welcome.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 01:52, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

Website quoting a magazine

Would this be accepted as an RS, a website quoting a magazine article? I guess the question is, is the website itself a reliable enough source to accept that they're quoting the magazine appropriately. WikiuserNI (talk) 23:39, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Well the writers appear to be professional. With a site like this it is best to use I saying something like " according to X magazine, quoted on SciFiPulse.net, blah, blah..." Of course it would be better to get a copy of the magazine from a library. Jezhotwells (talk) 23:44, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
I'm not entirely sure about the website. The editors appear to have credentials, according to them, but is there any way for us to verify those credentials? Otherwise, I agree with Jezhotwells, getting a copy of the actual magazine would work better. SilverserenC 00:50, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

In the article Ken Livingstone, the following material describes Ken Livingstone's speech at the Durham Miners Gala 2010 as it appears in the Wikipedia article: 'In his speech he suggested the "solidarity" and "strength" the "working class culture" of the Gala gives could have reduced "some of the problems and alienation" in London had it been brought there during his time as Mayor.' The quotations are supported by a video of the speech on YouTube here. Specifically, the quotations are taken from a section of the speech made between approx 1:00 min - 1:20 min. However, one user has objected to the use of this video, stating that "I do still think a personal users uploaded video is not a correct place to support any content, we use youtube extremely sparingly and only use official content from recognizable uploaders". I object as it represents a primary source. It seems quite absurd that I have to look for a secondary source (somebody who heard it and wrote it down), which is inevitably likely to be less reliable. I propose using this YouTube link as a primary source. The discussion can be found here (most relevent material is found towards the bottom of the discussion). 79.79.186.76 (talk) 11:30, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

The uploader is not a reliable source. He does not have a professional structure in place for checking or analyzing facts, legal issues, evidence, and arguments. We don't know if he shot it or if it is someone elses. We don't know if it was modified. Those might be unlikely but we simply don't know. Are those points you are looking to add from the speech discussed in reputable secondary coverage? If not, it simply may not be worthy of inclusion. But it is safe to assume that it was if you do a little searching. It looks like the speech is out there. We don't need the video since Wikipedia is not a mirror of what could be on the subject's website or for campaigning. It is not a primary source since it is not published by the subject. See an essay I am working on here: Wikipedia:Video links It is all based on current guidelines, policies, and previous discussions. Cptnono (talk) 11:51, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

I would say the real issue is notability. A you-tube video doesn't establish notability. But if you can find a secondary source to establish it, i see no harm in the the video, but then again, what's the point, now that you have a better source for the same content? Unless the video itself is the notable part... Kevin Baastalk 13:30, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Actually, a Youtube video can confer notability (say, if it was of a news broadcast), but the video itself has to be hosted on a Youtube channel that is understood to be reliable, like an artist's channel or a news channel's channel. If it is not hosted on a reliable Youtube channel, then it cannot be used, period, per WP:YOUTUBE. SilverserenC 15:12, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
A little off topic but a quick note: "The subject of this guideline is external links that are not citations to sources supporting article content." (emphasis not mine and that is from the guideline that WP:YOUTUBE is in a section of)Cptnono (talk) 01:23, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
There's no indication that this Youtube video is in any way official, and therefore it does not satisfy WP:RS. In addition, videos of speeches etc. are primary sources, so there are inevitable issues of notability and OR. Jayjg (talk) 16:35, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Agreed. Unless the video is on a recognized channel on Youtube it can't be deemed as reliable. I mean think about what some famous documentarians have done with videotaped speaches... there are plent of examples (from award winning shows/documentaries) that have doctored speaches!---Balloonman NO! I'm Spartacus! 17:36, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
I think Kevin_Baas made the relevent point that if the speech (and particular elements of it) are just in the YouTube video then it is probably not notable, so therefore using notable secondary sources establishes this notability. I think it's absolutely absurd to suggest that the speech might be doctored (in terms of motive, the technical skill required, and the track record of the uploader). Seriously, I think WP:COMMON is needed here. Anyway, I agree that notable secondary sources should be used to establish notability. Thanks. 79.79.140.195 (talk) 15:20, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

bitterlemons.org

What do we think of www.bitterlemons.org as a source for historical fact in Israel/Palestine articles? It's run by Ghassan Khatib and an Israeli editor. For example, for the 1940s section in Israel, Palestine and the United Nations? I'm sure that the website editors are serious, and Khatib is an expert on the area as well as a politician. But we set the sourcing bar high for history articles. Itsmejudith (talk) 06:30, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Can you give example claims and the sections of the web site sourced to them? Fifelfoo (talk) 06:34, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
Thanks. This is the one I'm looking at at the moment, but there are likely to be others. Israel, Palestine and the United Nations, which I'm slowly working through to try and improve the referencing:
Resolution 181 laid a foundation within international law and diplomacy<ref>[http://www.bitterlemons.org/previous/bl130904ed34.html#is1 Palestinian-Israeli crossfire 181 - A Palestinain view - The first milestone, Ghassan Khatib]</ref> for the creation of the state of Israel; as it was the first formal recognition by an international body of the legitimacy of a Jewish state, to exist within a partition of the territory along with an Arab state. Israel's [[Declaration of Independence (Israel)|declaration of independence]] soon followed on May 14, 1948, the [[Nakba Day]] for Palestinians.
Itsmejudith (talk) 06:48, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
Thanks! bitterlemons is a non-partisan internet magazine with editorial oversight by experts (Khatib for example). A problem with "181 - A Palestinian view" is that it is an opinion piece authored by an editor; standard scholarly generosity ought to indicate that the other editor had an oversight of some kind over its publication, for instance, at the policy level or at the broad presence of content level. The claim "181 laid a foundation within international law and diplomacy…" is a scholarly claim about international law and diplomacy. Sourcing what should be a scholarly opinion (re: international law and diplomacy's foundations) from a partisan opinion piece in a magazine is highly problematic. I would suggest _not_ using Khatib for this, but using a scholarly source. Statements of fact, in pieces authored by experts, in bitterlemons, where the expert is making an expert opinion (but not a scholarly opinion) which is not declared partisan (Khatib declares his opinion to be "A Palestinian view") ought to be okay. Treat like any other non-peer reviewed periodical with editorial oversight. I hope that this helps with reliability questions. Fifelfoo (talk) 07:31, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
Really helpful, thanks. Itsmejudith (talk) 08:09, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
We just had a few threads on Bitterlemons and the gist there was that since it's principally a website that publishes opinion pieces, it's not an RS despite having people who collect the texts. Some texts they host are usable on a case by case basis, if the authors are established experts in the field who have published in WP:RS. The site apparently tries to collect pieces from notable persons, so several of the texts may qualify under this heading. Cheers, --Dailycare (talk) 20:12, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
They also collect PRIMARY documents, which should be used rarely, if ever, and generally only then as illustrations of points found to be significant in RS. Fifelfoo (talk) 00:29, 30 September 2010 (UTC)
One of the people most involved in the article has suggested on the talk page that the article ought to be written up from primary rather than secondary sources. More eyes would be welcome. Itsmejudith (talk) 11:36, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

"Haunted Places Index"

I'm currently removing non-notable/unsourced entries in the article List of magnetic hills. Several entries cite the website TheShadowLands.net's Haunted Places Index as a source, such as their North Carolina page. The entries tend to be unsourced and poorly-written. Additionally, this page says that the website relies solely on visitor additions. This would presumably make it subject to hoaxes. As of now, I'm removing non-notable entries in the list that cite this as their only source, but I'd appreciate input. --- cymru lass (hit me up)⁄(background check) 03:10, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

If the site relies entirely on visitor contributions with no sort of other editorial oversight, I'd say it should be treated as an open wiki, which are never considered reliable. So the site should be expunged wherever it's found here, as well as the information the site is being used to source (unless a better source can be found). Good find! — e. ripley\talk 16:32, 30 September 2010 (UTC)
Thanks! Will do. --- cymru lass (hit me up)⁄(background check) 00:03, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

Is Gawker a reliable source?

Hi. I am not sure where to ask this question, and I hope I asked in the right place. There was an addition to Columbia writing professor Janette Turner Hospital's wikipedia page because of an article on the Gawker website that listed her as "The World's Haughtiest Professor." I guess... it just doesn't sound very nice to do to someone. It was just ammended today, apparently, and the wikipedia article's sentence acts like it has happened in the past. Is Gawker really that credible of a resource to list an article like that? It just to me, seems very cruel. I think this professor's email did come from a place of wanting to better her former USC students and from the excitement of her new place. Several other people (on the Gawker comments page) have also wondered if the wikipedia reference is a little "scary."

I apologize if I am asking this in the wrong place. If anyone can can explain to me how or if that edit was fair and why, I would be grateful. I can't quite put my finger on it, but something about the way it is written seems a "off". Thank you for your time. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.71.19.247 (talk) 07:15, 30 September 2010

Gawker is one of those that can be a borderline case, as I understand past discussions, but based entirely off of your description I would say that this kind of detail isn't really appropriate for a BLP. It's titillating and tongue in cheek but not really of any encyclopedic value. — e. ripley\talk 16:35, 30 September 2010 (UTC)
This query relates to the repeated addition of unflattering and possibly defamatory material to a BLP, by an editor who has a history of negative and poorly sourced edits to this article. The addition of this material, sourced only to Gawker, drew the comment from Jimbo Wales that "you are way off track in your edits to Janette Turner Hospital"[62] RolandR (talk) 18:30, 30 September 2010 (UTC)
It sounds more like an issue of due weight than an issue of reliability. Taemyr (talk) 19:50, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

RCU page reliably sourced?

Read-copy-update contains a large number of citations of works solely or primarily by User:PaulMcKenney, who also added them to the page. Some of them seem at a casual glance to be on hosted sites or articles like Linux Weekly. Could someone with more experience than me double-check these are reliable? --Chris Purcell (talk) 08:23, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

  1. ^ McKenney, Paul E. (December 27, 2003). "Introduction to RCU". Paul E. McKenney. http://www.rdrop.com/users/paulmck/RCU/. Retrieved September 24, 2010.
    Not RS, SELF.
  2. ^ McKenney, Paul E.; Walpole, Jonathan (December 17, 2007). "What is RCU, Fundamentally?". Linux Weekly News. http://lwn.net/Articles/262464/. Retrieved September 24, 2010.
    Edited news source, reliable.
  3. ^ McKenney, Paul E.; Slingwine, John D. (October 1998), "Read-Copy Update: Using Execution History to Solve Concurrency Problems", Parallel and Distributed Computing and Systems: 509-518, http://www.rdrop.com/users/paulmck/RCU/rclockpdcsproof.pdf
    No such publication? There is a "Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing Systems", there is a conference "Parallel and Distributed Computing and Systems" but this is not a correctly formatted conference publication citation, for instance, it doesn't indicate it is a [Conference] Probably reliable
  4. ^ Hart, Thomas E.; McKenney, Paul E.; Demke Brown, Angela; Walpole, Jonathan (December 2007), "Performance of memory reclamation for lockless synchronization", J. Parallel Distrib. Comput. 67: 1270-1285
    Reliable, peer reviewed
  5. ^ Guniguntala, Dinakar; McKenney, Paul E.; Triplett, Joshua; Walpole, Jonathan (April-June 2008), "The read-copy-update mechanism for supporting real-time applications on shared-memory multiprocessor systems with Linux", IBM Systems Journal 47: 221-236
    Reliable
  6. ^ McKenney, Paul E. (January 4, 2008). "RCU part 2: Usage". Linux Weekly News. http://lwn.net/Articles/263130/. Retrieved September 24, 2010.
    Reliable
  7. ^ Desnoyers, Mathieu (December 2009), "Low-Impact Operating System Tracing", Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, http://www.lttng.org/pub/thesis/desnoyers-dissertation-2009-12.pdf
    Incorrect citation of a thesis. If EPdM is a research university, if the thesis is accepted, if this is a research higher degree thesis this is reliable. (It is PhD, it appears accepted)
  8. ^ McKenney, Paul E. (January 17, 2008). "RCU part 3: the RCU API". Linux Weekly News. http://lwn.net/Articles/264090/. Retrieved September 24, 2010.
    Reliable
  9. ^ McKenney, Paul E.; Appavoo, Jonathan; Kleen, Andi; Krieger, Orran; Russell, Rusty; Sarma, Dipankar; Soni, Maneesh (July 2001), "Read-Copy Update", Ottawa Linux Symposium, http://www.rdrop.com/users/paulmck/RCU/rclock_OLS.2001.05.01c.pdf
    Reliable
  10. ^ McKenney, Paul E. (October 2003). "Using {RCU} in the {Linux} 2.5 Kernel". Linux Journal. http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6993. Retrieved September 24, 2010.
    Reliable
  11. ^ McKenney, Paul E. (July 2004), "Exploiting Deferred Destruction: An Analysis of Read-Copy-Update Techniques", OGI School of Science and Engineering at Oregon Health and Sciences University, http://www.rdrop.com/users/paulmck/RCU/RCUdissertation.2004.07.14e1.pdf
    Incorrectly cited thesis; same criteria as before (appears accepted, PhD, Oregon State is a research university)
  12. ^ Kung, H. T.; Lehman, Q. (September 1980), "Concurrent Maintenance of Binary Search Trees", ACM Transactions on Database Systems 5 (3), http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=320619&dl=GUIDE,
    Reliable
  13. ^ Manber, Udi; Ladner, Richard E. (September 1984), "Concurrency Control in a Dynamic Search Structure", ACM Transactions on Database Systems 9 (3)
    Reliable
  14. ^ Pugh, William (June 1990), "Concurrent Maintenance of Skip Lists", Institute of Advanced Computer Science Studies, Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland (CS-TR-2222.1)
    Incomplete citation; incorrect citation; departments and institutes are not publication titles; suspect unreliable
  15. ^ Adams, Gregory R. (1991), Concurrent Programming, Principles, and Practices, Benjamin Cummins
    Incomplete citation, publisher and place missing; unable to determine reliability
  16. ^ Gamsa, Ben; Krieger, Orran; Appavoo, Jonathan; Stumm, Michael (February 1999), "Tornado: Maximizing Locality and Concurrency in a Shared Memory Multiprocessor Operating System", Proceedings of the Third Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation, http://www.usenix.org/events/osdi99/full_papers/gamsa/gamsa.pdf
    Reliable
  17. ^ McKenney, Paul E.; Walpole, Jonathan (July 2008), "Introducing technology into the Linux kernel: a case study", SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev. 42: 4-17
    Reliable
Improve the standards of publication formatting by improving the fullness of the citations, particularly by noting that conferences are conferences, theses are PhD theses, etc. Fifelfoo (talk) 08:41, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
I moved the web page to "external references". Parallel and Distributed Computing and Systems really was a conference; I was there. I marked the PhD theses, which Wikipedia now notes as "(Thesis)" in the references list. I am guessing on how to do this because [63] does not provide that level of guidance. If I still have the PhD dissertations incorrectly cited, please point me at information that will show me how to do it correctly. Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal is a legitimate research PhD-granting university. The Pugh reference is a technical report, but one that is cited in refereed publications -- and I do believe that it is important to give Pugh credit for this contribution. When I get home, I will double-check the Adams book. PaulMcKenney (talk) 19:41, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
I note a potential conflict of interest with User:PaulMcKenney inserting content as sources written by Paul McKenney. Active Banana (bananaphone 19:47, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
I believe that I have been following Wikipedia's guidelines, so please tell me exactly what about my recent changes you find objectionable. The page was recently marked as needing citations, so I added them. I suppose that I could (for example) cite the materials for an MIT class covering RCU, but their course material refers back to one of my papers, so it is not clear to me that this would be helpful. Please let me know how you would like to proceed. If I don't hear otherwise from you, I will re-apply my changes. PaulMcKenney (talk) 20:12, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Chris Purcell and I have been discussing this on the RCU talk page [64]. The proposal is to: (1) expand the scope of the RCU page to include uses of RCU as well as the underlying mechanism, which will bring in citations from other authors, and (2) update the "History" section, which will bring in more recent discoveries of RCU-like mechanisms, again bringing in citations from other authors. If there are no objections, I will move forward with this approach on Friday October 1st Pacific Daylight Time. PaulMcKenney (talk) 22:10, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Done. PaulMcKenney (talk) 20:10, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

About.com sources from Hyde Flippo

Would these two articles by Hyde Flippo be considered reliable sources that pass FA 1(c)? About.com describes Flippo as an "About.com Guide". He is a published author who has written The German Way (published by Passport Books), Perfect Phrases in German for Confident Travel (published by McGraw-Hill), When in Germany, do as the Germans do (published by McGraw-Hill), and is cited by several books. One book calls him a "cultural historian".

I have read the comments at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive_16#Huffington Post, Gawker and About.com, especially the one by SandyGeorgia (talk · contribs) on 05:29, 7 July 2008 (UTC) and the one by ImperfectlyInformed (talk · contribs) on 06:27, 7 July 2008 (UTC) and believe that this source is reliable but am unsure whether it passes FA 1(c). Cunard (talk) 02:35, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

I have searched for "Schönen Tag noch!" ("have a nice day" in German) and "Hyde Flippo" (Google search link) but have been unable to find any mention of it in any of his books. A Google search for "Schönen Tag noch!" returns mostly unreliable sources and the articles by Hyde Flippo are the best ones I could find about the subject. Cunard (talk) 06:22, 1 October 2010 (UTC)
Cunard asked me comment here. I'm not qualified to discuss Hyde Flippo's articles and I think the earlier comments are right - there's usually a better source, but it can be used with caution. I would double-check it - what statements are you using it for? Have you checked Google Scholar and Google Books? II | (t - c) 06:42, 1 October 2010 (UTC)
Agree w II. One of these is at best a primary source, while the other is an anonymous commentary in response to a blog entry. Without knowing what statement you want to support, it's hard to tell if they're any use at all, but they certainly are not very high quality sources. LeadSongDog come howl! 14:52, 1 October 2010 (UTC)
The second source is also by Hyde Flippo. The author of the article wrote:

In an earlier feature, "Language and Culture," I discussed some of the connections between Sprache and Kultur in the broadest sense. This time we'll look at a specific aspect of the connection, and why it is vital for language learners to be aware of more than just the vocabulary and structure of German.

Cunard (talk) 18:11, 1 October 2010 (UTC)
The statements I want to use from the source are:

Trying to say "Have a nice day!" in German is a good example of language that is culturally inappropriate—and a good illustration of how learning German (or any language) is more than learning just words and grammar.

It is becoming more common in Germany to hear the phrase "Schönen Tag noch!" from sales people and food servers.

In an earlier feature, "Language and Culture," I discussed some of the connections between Sprache and Kultur in the broadest sense. This time we'll look at a specific aspect of the connection, and why it is vital for language learners to be aware of more than just the vocabulary and structure of German.

as well as:

Beyond smiling, most Germans consider the phrase "have a nice day" an insincere and superficial bit of nonsense. To an American it's something normal and expected, but the more I hear this, the less I appreciate it. After all, if I'm at the supermarket to buy anti-nausea medicine for a sick child, I may have a nice day after all, but at that point the checker's "polite" have-a-nice-day comment seems even more inappropriate than usual.

I want to use the source to provide information about how "have a nice day" is being used in Germany. Written by a German author, the analysis from the source will help counteract the US systemic bias brought up by reviewers.

I have checked Google Books and Google Scholar for "Schönen Tag noch!" but have been unable to find any other substantial coverage of it in relation to "have a nice day". Hyde Flippo's article appears to be the best source available. I believe that because Flippo's work about Germany has been published by the major publisher McGraw-Hill, his article published on about.com is also reliable, though I acknowledge that it likely does not pass FA 1(c). Cunard (talk) 18:11, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

About.com varies. Most principle articles are made or at least checked by a selected list of contributors, whom they claim to screen for expertise--read the article on it. It s furthermore published under the control of an undoubtedly reliable publisher, the NYT company--it's not a bunch of miscellaneous amateurs like here, though one does not know their actual standards. I would not automatically reject such content. I wouldn't use it for negative BLP, but the part they prepare themselves does have editorial control and is therefore usable. Actually, I think it has as much editorial control as a normal dictionary, though they seem to design the site to obscure the fact. . Certainly it is usable for description of contemporary usage, as here. The article is explicitly stated as staff written; it would, of course, be much better to know by whom--some of their features & some of the more academic articles are in fact signed--those are in my opinion perfectly good RSs. . Why the rest of them, likethis, are not signed is something I do not understand, especially as they're normally written in the first person.It puts them more in the category of a somewhat RS, if there's nothing better. (the stuff the readers write in as responses are another matter entirely, just as anywhere else, unless they happen to be a signed posting from a known authority) DGG ( talk ) 18:38, 1 October 2010 (UTC)
Would the fact that Hyde Flippo has been published by McGraw-Hill, and the fact that About.com has editorial control, make this a "high-quality reliable source" as required by FA 1(c)? Cunard (talk) 18:50, 1 October 2010 (UTC)
Ah, as you've told me on my talk p. that the statement of authorship is in an earlier column: [65]. That removes any doubt--just find some way of giving the authorship in the reference. DGG ( talk ) 19:26, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

Foundations - Journal of the Foundation for Medieval Genealogy

I've become aware that several articles (including at least one on the Norwegian Wikipedia) have the following source, in this format:

Sjöström (2007): "Scandinavian medieval descendants of Charlemagne: A detailed genealogy of the issue of Agnes Haakonsdottir, of the so-called Fairhair dynasty", Foundations - Journal of the Foundation for Medieval Genealogy vol 2 (2007:4, July), ISSN 1479-5078, pp 253..276

The journal is paywalled: this link takes one to abstracts of the articles in the issue, but when one clicks on the particular article, a dialogue box appears asking for payment, and does not go away until one has clicked repeatedly to close it and been transferred to a registration page or back to the issue contents list. This makes the article inaccessible as a source and there are other sources on scholarly doubts as to the reliability of accounts in Heimskringla and elsewhere of the Fairhair dynasty (main article on the matter). I was able to get 2 quotes from the article using Google, which I inserted into that article in this diff along with another source. I have subsequently added information on a Norwegian source also. I have qualms about the tone of those 2 quotations from Sjöström as well as the nature of the site, so I am asking here about the journal. My instinct is to remove all citations of the Sjöström article except in the main article on the issue, Fairhair dynasty, and where a citation is needed to replace them with one or more of the alternates. (I have done so at Harald III of Norway and posted to the talkpage: diff.) But possibly Foundations is a respected journal, in which case I should be more reluctant to replace these cites? It's hard for me to evaluate it without paying money, which I am loath to do given the obnoxious programming of the site.

So that is my question - the merit of that journal as a source. Yngvadottir (talk) 20:06, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

First a declaration that I've published in this journal, and that reflects the fact that I also knew of it before I submitted a paper there and felt it to be a decent journal. (I am also a subscriber and although I obviously can't copy-paste slabs of material for you here, if you mail me with questions I can perhaps try to help you.)
Anyway just trying to look at the "rule book", the paywall itself should not be a reason for deletion. See WP:PAYWALL. :Concerning how respected the journal is, this is where discussion and consensus needs to be sought and we should hear from others. One obvious question is whether it gets cited in this field. Medieval genealogy is not the easiest of fields to judge this in because there are not lots of journals (indeed this is a field where people still go looking up journal articles from the 1800s when more work was being done) and libraries don't necessarily bother stocking journals on this. You might want to check whether national archive libraries know of it. Obviously I know from experience this journal comes up if you try scanning around the internet to see what Medievalists who are actually still alive in the internet age are citing.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 20:25, 30 September 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for the response, as well as for being so measured about it. Clearly you do personally consider this a trustworthy journal, which is a valuable datapoint since I am completely unable to judge (they don't even fully identify the author of the article). It's not just that it's paywalled though - it's that the dialog box is programmed in an obnoxious way that makes me suspect I'm going to get a virus from the site, and makes it a disservice to readers to link to the article. Also, I did find alternate sources: one being a well reasoned article in Saga-Book which unfortunately focuses on a period earlier than the one Sjöström is being cited about, though it gave me enough to improve the referencing of the article. For medieval material, I tend to trust medievalists specialized in the region rather than seeking out genealogists per se, but that is partly because genealogy on the web is such a minefield. And partly it may be that my own background isn't in genealogy. Hence the question; I think unless someone else speaks up I'll supplement the references to the Sjöström article in most cases rather than simply replacing them. He/she does seem to be saying things said by other scholars - albeit as I say, the snippets I've seen strike me as overly vehement or dismissive of the texts we have. I would have liked to see at least part of the argument to judge whether it justifies the tone. Yngvadottir (talk) 18:34, 1 October 2010 (UTC)
Do "national archive libraries know of it"? The Library of Congress doesn't. WorldCat shows only two libraries in the United States that hold it. The British library calls it "Foundations : newsletter of the Foundation for Medieval Genealogy", and the the website of the Foundation for Medieval Genealogy calls it "Foundations - the Journal of the Foundation for Medieval Genealogy." It seems to be a little known journal about which there is confusion about the title. That makes it fairly hard to evaluate. ProGene (talk) 19:17, 1 October 2010 (UTC)
I have one on my desk and it is called a journal. Maybe it started out as a newsletter? I've said my bit above, but perhaps you could try writing for information?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:58, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

I would like to know more opinions about who is more reliable in some aviation problem

From them just Harry Stine (but possible W. Boyne too) had acces to all documentations related with the subject. So, i would like to see more opinions about who's more qualified, especialy from technical and scientific point of view, to talk about (jet) engines. Thanks

They are all authorities on the subject. If they give conflicting facts, then seek sources that explicitly adresses the conflict. Or quote both facts Pr. WP:NPOV. Taemyr (talk) 10:19, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

Does "fringe author" affect Reliable Source criteria?

Disclosure: I'm COI on the topic I'll bring, and I also contributed to the editing of the subject paper and am mentioned in it. I'm asking this to verify my impression of Wikipedia policy and guidelines as they apply to alleged "fringe" topics.

I pointed, on Talk:Cold fusion, to a very recent secondary source, a review of the field of Cold fusion, published under peer-review at Naturwissenschaften, perhaps the most notable of many secondary sources that have appeared in mainstream publications on the topic in recent years, after the 2004 U.S. Department of Energy recommended further research and publication, all of which may have reversed the presumption, previously properly held, that Cold fusion was Fringe science, as distinct from emerging science. No "negative" reviews under peer review have appeared since then.

An editor commented on the author as not "independent or neutral."[66].

My understanding is that we depend on independent publishers, to filter out fringe views and not allow them to be presented as being acceptable to the mainstream. Naturwissenschaften is solidly mainstream, published by Springer-Verlag, which is also solidly mainstream. The "neutrality" that we depend on is that of the peer reviewers and/or publishers, not the authors. The publishers will not, presumably, allow a fringe author to trample neutrality, for their reputation is at stake. If they are going to present a view that is fringe, for some reason, it will be tagged as controversial, not presented as a neutral review.

There is no doubt that at one time Cold fusion was widely considered fringe or even "pathological science." However, scientific consensus can change. We depend on mainstream publishers for determining what is "reliable source," and especially the publishers of peer-reviewed scientific journals, and most especially those journals when they publish secondary source reviews, which is our gold standard.

My concern here is the allegation that an author is biased, fringe, with the implication that everything the author writes is therefore suspect, even if accepted by a major mainstream journal, under peer review, as a review of the field. Do we expect that a review of the field would be written by someone unfamiliar with it? This attitude toward fringe is circular, for we determine what is fringe by preponderance of reliable sources, and if we, ipso facto, exclude any "fringe source," based on the POV it supposedly represents, or the identity of the author, we make it impossible to neutrally determine the actual balance.

I am aware of 15 reviews of the field, published in mainstream journals since 2005, see Wikiversity:Cold fusion/Recent sources. Their conclusions have generally been excluded from our article on this claim that the authors are "fringe." So this is a generic problem. The publishers involved are solidly mainstream. (On the Wikiversity page, I did not count as "mainstream" the Journal of Scientific Exploration, for obvious reasons. Unlike the others, they are deliberately not mainstream.)

So, my question: Is the recent paper reliable source? May facts and conclusions presented there be used in the article? This is a recent source, supported by many recent secondary sources. Does it therefore carry more weight than old responses from twenty years ago, when far less was known about the topic? Thanks for looking at this issue. As a COI editor, I will not be editing the article itself in any controversial way, but I want to be able to better advise the actual editors. --Abd (talk) 19:45, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

Reliability when it comes to people is essentially a function of reputation. The reputation of an author directly affects his or her reliability as a source. When an author becomes known for supporting ideas that are generally considered fringe, we should not be surprised when that support negatively affects the authors general reputation. When the reputation becomes poor enough it carries over into the assessment of his or her other works. Blueboar (talk) 20:18, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
Just to be clear, we're talking about mainstream science journals here, and opinions based only an ad hominem circumstantial in turn based on another opinion. The question is largely rhetorical. The policy is unambiguous on the matter. Kevin Baastalk 20:24, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
That's correct, Kevin, yes, I believe I know the "correct answer," per policy, but what if I'm wrong? Reputation of the author would be important for ordinary reliable source, outside of peer-review. In this case, yes, Blueboar, what happened was that writing about anything related to cold fusion, for years, was considered a sign that the person was deluded, and it didn't matter what they actually wrote, it might have been as sober and careful as possible, if it was seen as "supporting cold fusion," it was enough to besmirch reputations. Wikipedians simply picked up on that, and continued it, losing track of what was actually happening at the peer-reviewed journals. After all, why bother reading the actual sources, which can be hard to obtain and read, if you are sure that cold fusion is fringe and that anything that seems to support it must therefore be fringe. --Abd (talk) 20:45, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
cold fusion is totally discredited in mainstream's eyes, only a small group of scientists keeps working on the field, and it's still discredited. Abd, stop spreading misinformation and POV-pushing. --Enric Naval (talk) 21:30, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
Cool, Eric, I like that, quoting your own evidence, which only shows two things, both of which I agree completely with: First, cold fusion was totally rejected, seriously so. Back then. Secondly, even when signs began to appear that it was being accepted, most notably with the 2004 review by the U.S. DoE, which didn't at all treat Cold fusion as if it were "fringe," people in the field continued with an assumption that they were still being rejected (and certainly in some areas, among those not informed about the evidence, they were). Further, it is still certainly true that it is being neglected, compared to the potential significance, hence the JSE publications last year.
Please point to specific misinformation above or elsewhere, or please retract your allegation. Your evidence doesn't contradict, at all, what I've written, which is about how the field developed after the 2004 U.S. Department of Energy review. However, this is all really irrelevant. It has no bearing at all on the reliability of this specific paper. I was merely establishing why some caution should be exercised.--Abd (talk) 21:49, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
  • Keeping myself completely separate from the argument above, I would definitely say that that source is reliable. The author, the publication's own sources that it utilizes, and the place it is presented at all point to it being completely a RS. Whatever the issues with the "fringeness" of the subject, that source is most certainly perfect to use for info and content creation. SilverserenC 22:04, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
There is a scientific disagreement going on here. The proper place for the disagreement is in the scientific journals, not on Wikipedia talk pages. The vast bulk of the physics community is pointedly ignoring the whole topic of cold fusion, considering it a fringe line of enquiry likely to lead nowhere, but a few scientists continue to research it. One scientist, Kirk Shanahan, has published two papers suggesting that effects that have been found in the past may be due to measurement error. This puts the onus on those who think there evidence of nuclear reactions to rule measurement error out. The Storms paper discussed above rejects Shanahan's findings. Whether it does so effectively or not is up to physicists to judge. We have no subsequent papers to draw on, but Kirk Shanahan himself contributes to the article talk pages and says that the Storms paper has misrepresented him. As far as I can see, then, the debate is ongoing. The Storms paper is not an independent review of the literature but a salvo in the debate. It should be treated as one of the primary sources. There has already been a suggestion on the talk page to this effect, and I think it could gain consensus except for a couple of editors. As far as sourcing policy goes, we should note that the papers on both sides have been in scientific journals, but not the the top journals for new physics research. In our natural science articles we usually regard individual papers as primary sources. I am involved in the sense of having made some posts recently, mainly to try and unpack the disagreement. Itsmejudith (talk) 07:49, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
scientific disagreement? Where? Yes, the proper place for that is journals. The journals appear to consider the matter closed. But I have no crystal ball, some critical comment may yet appear. Shanahan's papers are isolated, and not confirmed in any secondary source, and Shanahan has been complaining that they won't publish further response from him. Storms does not "discuss" Shanahan's "findings," he, like others, simply rejects them with no more analysis (he responded to them four years ago). If this is a "salvo" in the "debate," where is the other side? That interpretation of a peer-reviewed secondary source, explicitly a "Review," confirming fifteen other peer-reviewed secondary sources over the last five years, as a "salvo" is completely an assumption, unbased in sources. It's not like Storms (2010) is some isolated freak. So, Judith, are you arguing that this isn't a reliable secondary source? Can you be specific about your reasons for that? I don't see how what you claim above relates to our guidelines. Yes, papers on both sides have been in scientific journals. But the "negative" side disappeared from PR secondary sources, somewhere before 2005. As to "top journals for new physics research," that's not a basis for rejecting a source, at all. What's appeared in those "top journals" and when? Naturwissenschaften explicitly solicits material like this, and they are, in fact, a "top journal", and they cover physics, they are Springer-Verlag's "flagship multidisciplinary journal." You are raising a balance issue, not to be resolved here. This is about a single paper, proposed as reliable peer-reviewed secondary source, vs. our guidelines on that. If this is a "primary source," as claimed, we have demolished our standards. --Abd (talk) 14:49, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
"Shanahan's papers are isolated, and not confirmed in any secondary source," neither are Storms' papers. --Enric Naval (talk) 16:21, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
That's totally incorrect, but this isn't the place. Itsmejudith raised Shanahan, proposing that his unpublished claim that Storms has misrepresented him somehow calls into question Storms as a source, which is giving far too much weight to an isolated opinion, not reflected in recent decisions of peer reviewers. The place to discuss this is article Talk, if and when it becomes relevant. Not here. Is Storms (2010) a peer-reviewed secondary source, a review of the field, in a mainstream journal? That's the question. --Abd (talk) 16:37, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
Of course it is. But it's not in a physics journal, it's authored by a fringe author, and you are trying to give it WP:UNDUE weight. --Enric Naval (talk) 19:20, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
If you look back at the archives of the article talk page you'll find that I defended Naturwissenschaften when others didn't. My judgement now, and it is a question of judgement and where to draw the line, is that it is RS. But it is not possible to argue that it is the natural place to publish a major paper in physics. We might be able to settle it by metrics. Itsmejudith (talk) 19:43, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
Does "natural place" figure into our RS guidelines? And how is "natural place" determined for "Chemically Induced Nuclear Reactions" (Hoffman, 1995)? Chemistry or Physics? Thanks for the comment on RS, that was obvious. Is it peer-reviewed secondary source? Above, you implied that it was a primary source, apparently contradicting the plain presentation of it in the journal. --Abd (talk) 21:00, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Firstly, I believe we're talking about the Naturwissenschaften publication. secondly, RS is based on the publisher, not the author, and finally, we already had a very clear definitive answer from someone on this board regarding the topic of this section. notice answers from ourselves, "talking to ourselves" in this section, is utterly pointless. we're here for outside advice regarding a very specific RS question. and so far we only have one, so let's try not to discourage more. Kevin Baastalk 19:48, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
It appears to be a reliable source. What matters is the publication not the writer. The problem is WP:NPOV. If the opinions have been ignored then they are fringe. Fringe btw applies not only to crazy theories but to scientific theories ignored by the mainstream. Today's orthodoxy is yesterday's fringe. But we must follow scientific understanding rather than lead it. TFD (talk) 20:34, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
Yes (though we also shouldn't drag it, we should follow the best mainstream literature, if it shifts, we shift). --Abd (talk) 21:15, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

Is this really an RS question, or a question of due weighting of sources?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 15:19, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

RS question, of course. There really is debate about this and articles like it on the talk page with regard to WP:RS / WP:OR. As Abd states above, it seems we need some clarification. Kevin Baastalk 13:47, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
I guess there is a fine line between weighting questions and RS questions sometimes. I was wondering what RS-related issues are really the subject of disagreement? I guess no one is arguing that Naturwissenschaft is an unreliable source in any absolute way, just a less strong source than would normally be needed to make "redflag" claims? And on the other hand is anyone really claiming that the source is of the highest strength for this type of field? Also, I wonder (I have not spent time looking through this BTW) whether anyone is arguing that cold fusion claims simply can't be mentioned, at least as notable fringe theories. So if those three things aren't the debate, isn't it more a question of balancing to get the right weighting? If it really is one of those three things, then my mistake, but I don't see it straight away.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 14:36, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
I think we all recognize the importance of weighing issues with controversial subjects such as this. Sometimes, perhaps, to our detriment. The problem is that often times there will be circular reasoning and arguments or confusions of policies and all in all way too much subjectivity and chaos to really get anything accomplished. I think this is sort of an attempt to really deal with things that can be evaluated objectively, one at a time, answer the easiest questions first, so we can get something concrete so that we can get it out of the way and thus simplify discussion a little. i.e. the thinking here is that it's become apparent that if we are to make any progress we must deal with one issue at a time. and the most productive starting points are always the most independent, definable, and simple issues. (and all the better if they are among the most recurrent.) that, i believe---though i can only speak for myself---is why abd is asking what he is here. and i am fairly confident that failing a very clear and specific answer, repeated a few times, our discussions will continue to be plagued by confusion, misinterpretations, and distortions on the issue. Kevin Baastalk 15:38, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
Good point about getting going through steps one at a time. So: In the post above I mentioned 3 types of RS question that might be relevant here, and suggested that I don't see much evidence that any of those three are in play. Do you agree?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 16:23, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
I don't think any of those questions are in play, but I think that's besides the point. The point is to get an altogether different set of WP:RS - related questions answered by neutral parties with a lot of experience. Maybe there's a better forum for that? I don't know. I didn't start this section but it seems like a reasonable place to ask them. We've had a frustrating history of chaos related to sourcing concerns, some of them rather tenuous and even suspicious. So it seems it would be productive to try to get them out of the way in a more, formal, definitive manner. One less thing to debate, you know? Could help lead to less circular and more linear discussions. Kevin Baastalk 20:37, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
The fact that this discussion, and other discussions so similar that they are sometimes confused with each each other, are occurring in several different places at once makes it difficult to have a sustained and coherent discussion among editors on the issues raised, or for outside observers to follow along. But of the part of it that's represented in this thread, I agree with Four Deuces and Andrew Lancaster that RS may not be the issue here so much as NPOV or its subclause, UNDUE. I also agree with Itsmejudith that there is an ongoing scientific debate on the question of how much measurement error has affected the conclusions of cold fusion research, and it isn't Wikipedia's role to become part of that debate; we wait until the dust has settled and then we present the mainstream consensus.
I have two concerns: (1) the source in question hasn't been published yet except online, and even online one can only see the abstract and first page without paying, so Abd is the only one as far as I know who has seen the whole paper, and yet he's pushing for its inclusion in our article. He has offered to send preprints to anyone wishing one, but this seems to me like jumping the gun a bit; why don't we wait until the paper is more accessible before we cite it in the article? (2) The question of this thread was posited on the idea that there have been attempts to discredit this source by labeling the author as "fringe" (My concern here is the allegation that an author is biased, fringe, with the implication that everything the author writes is therefore suspect) but the only diff that was offered as evidence for the allegation simply said that the author is "not independent or neutral." That's not quite the same as calling him fringe and "implying that anything the writer writes is suspect" so the way the question was framed here seems a bit of a red herring.
To answer two of Andrew's questions, I don't think anyone is arguing that Naturwissenschaft is an unreliable source in any absolute sense, or that the claims of cold fusion researchers shouldn't be mentioned in our article, and I agree that the issue is weight rather than reliability. As to whether anyone is really claiming that the source is the highest strength for this kind of claim, in this field, I couldn't answer for anyone else, but as an observer it does seem as if in some of these discussions the source is being shined up to be more stellar than is warranted; for example much has been made, in some iterations of this discussion, of the fact that Einstein published there (well, yes, he did publish some short pieces in this journal, but they were mainly book reviews and short comments, not the theoretical physics papers that he is famous for) and scorn has been heaped on those who characterize the journal as a "life sciences" journal. I haven't taken part in these discussions, and I don't think how the journal is categorized is sufficient to the question of whether this is/isn't a strong source for the claims, but I was curious and looked for myself. Springerle, the publisher, classifies this journal under Biomedical and Life Sciences and although it makes a point of characterizing itself as a multidisciplinary journal, what's more telling than how the journal characterizes itself is what they publish. I looked at the titles of all the articles published in this journal for the last three years; there were 440 of them, and only 18 of the 440 were not immediately and obviously life sciences topics, with fairly heavy emphasis on evolutionary biology. (Typical titles: "Evolution of a new sense for wind in flying phasmids? Afferents and interneurons," "How do animals use substrate-borne vibrations as information source?" "Neurobiology of the homing pigeon," "Host manipulation by the orange leafhopper," "Delayed onset of vocal recognition in Australian sea lion pups," etc.) Of the 18 non-biology articles published in the three years, 8 were related to the environment and global warming concerns (fossil fuel CO2 emissions, aerosols and pollution, contaminant geochemistry, etc) two were editorials related to internal concerns of the journal (change in editorial direction, peer review) four were isolated science topics (polarized muons as spin labels, supramolecular chemistry, uranium oxidation states) and four were cold fusion-related. That half of the eight non-biological, non-environmental-science articles published in this journal in three years were related to cold fusion, when mainstream science in general has lost interest in the topic, is noteworthy, but I don't know what it means, if anything. Abd has also mentioned elsewhere, though not in this thread I believe, that Storms is on the editorial board of the journal. I don't know what that means either, but just a piece of information. At any rate, I agree with others that this is not fundamentally an RS issue.Woonpton (talk) 16:03, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
So it sounds like I was right to suggest that none of the 3 potential RSN-relevant arguments that there might be in such a case are actually the subject of the active disagreement. Apart from those three points, where there seems to be a rough agreement, is there some other aspect to this dispute which is relevant to RSN?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 16:31, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
Since this question was indented under my post, I assume it was intended for me. If I wasn't clear before, no, I'm not seeing this as an RSN issue. Woonpton (talk) 20:28, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
Firstly, I'd like some clarifications on your answers to Abd's specific questions here, per my concerns above. If I understand you correctly (and correct me if i'm wrong), you are saying that the recent paper is a reliable source? His second question, "May facts and conclusions presented there be used in the article?" was not answered, now was his third: "Does it therefore carry more weight than old responses from twenty years ago, when far less was known about the topic?". After that it seems that the most prudent and appropriate direction for a discussion like this is to address the more philosophical questions and concerns that were brought up in the preamble to those specific question. Otherwise, we're not really answering the question. So I'd like to know your thoughts on some of those. For instance, the title of this section "Does "fringe author" affect Reliable Source criteria?" remains an important unaswered question. To rephrase it: does WP:RS policy include caveats related to ad hominem opinions of the author (as distinct from publisher), and if so where is said policy and what does it state? That seems to me to be the main question being asked here. There are other concerns and understandings that Abd has (tacitly) asked for feedback on in his preamble. I, too,would be interested in feedback specifically addressing these things---as i'm sure would others on Talk:Cold Fusion. Kevin Baastalk 17:01, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
Hi Kevin, My question is prior to any of these. I am wondering if any of these questions are really RS questions. As you said above, we should "really deal with things that can be evaluated objectively, one at a time, answer the easiest questions first, so we can get something concrete so that we can get it out of the way and thus simplify discussion a little".
1. "May facts and conclusions presented there be used in the article?" could be interpreted as an RS question or a content weighting question. But if it is an RS question then it is a question about whether the source is so bad that it fails RS absolutely, and can not be used for anything at all, which would be unusual. I see no one making that strong argument.
2. Does it therefore carry more weight than old responses from twenty years ago, when far less was known about the topic? This odd and leading question is even phrased as a weighting question. It surely seems to be something for editors working on the subject.
3. "Does "fringe author" affect Reliable Source criteria?" Again, if this is an RS question then it is asking for an unusually strong RS/N decision of a general and absolute rule. I think we can expect no such absolute and strong consensus, and that this is again normally a content "weighting" question. (So, no, I know of no simple policy on this, but if someone else know of one, let me know of course.)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:05, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Questions from Andrew Lancaster: I guess no one is arguing that Naturwissenschaft is an unreliable source in any absolute way, just a less strong source than would normally be needed to make "redflag" claims? And on the other hand is anyone really claiming that the source is of the highest strength for this type of field?

Andrew, it depends a lot on what claims an editor is seeking to support. I believe that Abd wants the paper in question, Storms (2010), to be presented as a neutral and mainstream review of cold fusion. His statement at user talk:Newyorkbrad that cold fusion is now at worst "emerging science" suggests to me that he sees the lack of recent criticism of cold fusion as proof that the mainstream have accepted that cold fusion is no longer fringe - which simply is not the case. To support a claim like cold fusion is not fringe, I would argue, requires publications in much more prominent physics journals or in something like Nature, and written by someone who hasn't been researching cold fusion for the last two decades.

Further, one critic of Storms who has published alternative explanations is Shanahan, and Storms (2010) apparently states that earlier Storms publications refuted Shanahan. On this topic, I suggest, Storms is not a secondary source but rather a primary one. A blanket declaration that Storms (2010) is a secondary source would allow it to be used to present Shanahan's work as published but refuted.

In short, I don't doubt that Storms (2010) is suffiently reliable and notable to be included in the article, but I have serious reservations about what sort of statements it might be used to support. In that sense, yes it is an UNDUE / redflag issue.

Also, I wonder (I have not spent time looking through this BTW) whether anyone is arguing that cold fusion claims simply can't be mentioned, at least as notable fringe theories.

The problem here is that we have editors who earnestly believe that cold fusion is no longer fringe. Editors who believe that being ignored by the mainstream scientific community can mean that a run of unchallenged positive publications means that the consensus has moved. Editors seeking to right what they see as a great wrong, in other words. The facts are simple - cold fusion will not move away from being disregarded fringe until a paper is produced that describes an experiment that can be reliably reproduced by independent researchers and the results of which cannot be explained by conventional science. The first part of this has not been achieved - evidence of excess heat is spotty at best, and can be conventially explained - yet Abd's comments (off-wiki) include assertions that fusion is proven.

In short, we have agenda-driven editors who who seek to use wikilawyering about policy and the fact that the scientific community mostly ignores anything about cold fusion to present what they see as the truth. I suggest that you bear in mind these issues when looking at comments about this topic area. EdChem (talk) 17:02, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks EdChem. It sounds problematic in your description, but it does not sound like an RS/N question. According to your description this is an attempt to state what mainstream consensus is without using secondary sources, nor the least controversial primary sources, and that seems to me to be an OR question? If this is indeed emerging science, then it is too early for WP. In WP we only report what the outside world is saying, even if it wrong.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:08, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
That's correct, Andrew. The source here is definitely a mainstream publication, of high reputation. How it is actually used is up to article consensus. (As I noted above, it is not my decision, and what I supposedly want -- which is mischaracterized -- is irrelevant, I am COI, I'm merely taking the position of someone knowledgeable about a field and who is also COI: advisory only, in Talk.) There is no attempt to state the "mainstream consensus," which is undefined. What I'll claim is that this alleged consensus -- categorical scientific rejection of cold fusion -- hasn't appeared in mainstream publications in secondary source reviews of the field for over five years, whereas there have been about sixteen positive reviews in such, over the same time, and I've made it easy to verify that claim. We won't resolve this issue here, but EdChem is pointing to a straw man: that I supposedly would want to claim that categorical rejection by "scientists" has disappeared. It hasn't. But it seems to have disappeared among some peer reviewers, at least, at mainstream publications. I'm pointing to a basic problem: What is "mainstream"? Is it the opinion of your average scientist, like EdChem, who is absolutely not familiar with the evidence? Or is it the opinion of experts who review evidence, as part of a task they take on, for a publication or as part of a review panel, and reject fringe that pretends to be acceptable? And, in the other direction, accept what is acceptable, perhaps as "emerging science"? --Abd (talk) 19:59, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
Hi Abd. I can see an RS problem in what you say though. If you are trying to get a source which says the consensus has changed, and you only have WP:primary sources, then this is very difficult. It would have to be an undisputedly strong primary source. I can imagine the source you are mentioning would be objected to for such a difficult job. Is that a source of disagreement in this case?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 20:25, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
Andrew, thanks. I'm not "trying to get a source" which says something. I'm looking, rather, at what peer-reviewed reliable sources, over the last five years, are saying, when there has been increasing publication in this field. (It's tripled since 2005). I'm also looking at what they imply, but only for one purpose, to interdict the abuse of allegations of "fringe" in determining article balance by rejecting "fringe sources." Which are, of course, fringe because the authors support a "fringe theory," which is circular. --Abd (talk) 20:53, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
extended comment on this by Abd

What's been happening is that, for years now, what would be otherwise peer-reviewed reliable secondary source, the supposed gold standard, has been rejected on the synthesized argument that it is "fringe." That is a violation of policy as clarified in RfAr/Fringe science. The issue is article balance, generally, and we determine article balance by the weight of sources. If we reject sources as "fringe," we have lost the only way of determining what is "fringe," and what might, then, be undue weight. Rather, there are really two subjects here, crammed into one article. One is the history of what Huizenga called "the scientific fiasco of the century," in 1992. The other is the current state of the science. Different kinds of sources may be used for this; for science, we rely on PR secondary sources, as much as possible. And science changes. Generally, if the quality of the review is similar, later sources supersede earlier ones, because we may assume that the later sources were informed by the earlier. The current review is absolutely the strongest source that exists in the present state of the science. It is not about "sociology" or "popular opinion among scientists." The argument given above by EdChem is synthesized, there is no source for it. It's certainly relevant to the history of cold fusion, but not to the present state of the science. The review itself is quite cautious, but it also states, clearly, what is known and established. Which is not at all what EdChem and many others, not familiar with the research, believe. Parts of this field are no longer controversial (in both directions, by the way!). Please notice the original question here: is a peer-reviewed secondary source, in a major mainstream publication -- and Naturwissenschaften is major, and covers physics, unlike some implication here -- to be deprecated because the author is allegedly "fringe"? Notice that if an major review article is to be written, it certainly wouldn't be surprising if it is written by someone who has been a researcher in the field! The issue is the peer review and the publisher decision. It is simply preposterous that a journal like NW would risk their considerable reputation on fringe nonsense! Controversial? I'm sure.

But this does not mean that I'd try to put some synthesized statement in the article, not amply supported by reliable sources, as to this "overall scientific consensus" that seems to be so important to some. Yet, in fact, the article presently has statements like this from the past, from relatively weak sources, which, at best, covered the situation as it existed more than five years ago, and simply assumed to continue, without considering the very considerable evidence. They are presented as if they were presently true, when some of them were written more than ten years ago, and attempts to make the language more neutral have been resisted by those who clearly believe that this is the present situation.
A judgment here that this source is reliable source, which does seem to be the general consensus, is not going to abused to synthesize from it or conclude from it what is not found in it, and it's fine if it's attributed properly. Presently, it's been put in the article, but with no indication of where it was published but an attribution to supporter Edward Storms, implying that this was simply his point of view. Whereas immediately above that, a very skeptical rejection of cold fusion, in a publication not matching the quality of this as to scope of review, sourcing, etc., is attributed to Physics Today, not to the author. It's been quite imbalanced. --Abd (talk) 20:53, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
So you are are you really arguing that this periodical should be seen as "gold standard" in terms of defining what the mainstream is, even if it conflicts with more mainstream physics journals? In other words do you want to argue that it "trumps" all other sources? That would sounds like a big call to me.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:45, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
I've edited this a bit to make it clear that I am not certain about how strong the position is. BTW note I am trying to focus on the RS aspects still.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:02, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
EdChem, I was going to say that with all due respect all that was off-topic. I'm sure we will get to the issues you mentioned (we always do). But they're not RS issues and I, and I presume others, want to get any RS/N questions out of the way first because they're easier to settle. (And after all, if it fails WP:RS, everything else becomes moot anyways.) Kevin Baastalk 20:00, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
  • Regarding the initial question of whether the author being fringe affects the reliability of the source, "The word "source" as used on Wikipedia has three related meanings: the piece of work itself (the article, paper, document, book), the creator of the work (for example, the writer), and the publisher of the work (for example, The New York Times or Cambridge University Press). All three can affect reliability." As the overview states, "Articles should be based on reliable, third-party, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. This means that we only publish the opinions of reliable authors". I have no opinion on the reputation of the author for fact-checking and accuracy, leaving that to others to find evidence about, but he or she is clearly not a third party in this issue. The author can be expected to give a reliable account of his or her fringe views, and the source is reliable to that extent. Secondary sources would be required to show significance. The views would be appropriate in the article to the extent that they're significant to the topic, and if included should be presented in mainstream context to meet WP:WEIGHT which is another policy area. . . dave souza, talk 20:39, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
  • (edit conflict with below) How do we know, Dave, what the "mainstream context" is?
  • We are looking here, not at general reliable source, but peer-reviewed secondary source, papers which are themselves reviews of a field, and where the publication isn't just a kind of "op-ed," which might present a fringe view, but where a journal is presenting this as the state of the science in a field. The view you are expressing, here, makes sourcing issues highly subjective, for there is no crisp way of distinguishing an author as "fringe," other than by an assumption that they hold a fringe point of view, and, then, the point of view is "fringe" because it is allegedly only held by a few. What if the "few" are all the experts who have become informed? Is "mainstream science" about the opinions of non-experts, is it some kind of popularity poll among all "scientists"?
  • Rather, my understanding has been that, instead of depending on subjective judgments of "fringe," we depend on publishers to filter out fringe, to not present fringe as if it were mainstream among the experts. We know and accept that "most scientists" may think cold fusion is as phony as a three-dollar bill. But publications lead the fields by publishing what expert peer reviewers and editors will pass. No individual fringe author can bypass this, and Naturwissenschaften and Springer-Verlag are not going to jeopardize their enormous reputations by presenting fringe as if it were mainstream.
  • Nothing will be suggested for the article, by me, based solely on the opinion of Dr. Storms, unless it's attributed. This publication, though, may establish prior work by others, as being confirmed in an "independent secondary source." In the end, decisions will be made by consensus at the article, not by a decision here, this is just laying a neutral foundation, toward a presentation of the field as found in peer-reviewed secondary sources. If everyone who is familiar with a field is excluded because they are "fringe," who will be left to do the very considerable work of going over the thousands of primary sources involved? It is not our job to second-guess the reviewers and editors at mainstream journals. --Abd (talk) 23:45, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
I'm making a narrower point, without prejudging the decision. In assessing a source, both the WP:RS guideline and WP:SOURCES policy require us to take into account the reputation for fact checking and accuracy of the author and the work itself as well as the publisher. Your question here appears to be more about the weight to be given to this source, and in my view that's something best determined on the article talk page. If we accept for the sake of argument that the author, work and publisher all show good reliability, then at the least that means that it's a good source to be used in the article. It doesn't make it a majority view, and I don't see anyone arguing that it is. The question is then of how much weight to give to this minority view, and this isn't the noticeboard to answer that question. Find reliable third party sources commenting on this new review paper, and bring them up on the article talk page. Of course if other sources question the reputation of the author and work, that should also be taken into account. . dave souza, talk 08:37, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Just in case my other comments did not make it clear, I do agree with Dave that an author's reputation, if it can be reasonably ascertained, can certainly become relevant in deciding due weighting in a content discussions. In my comments I've been responding to the more simplistic idea of whether being associated with a fringe theory means an author will absolutely fail RS in some way.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:44, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
How can an article published in a respected journal not be RS? Of course it is a reliable source, it does not matter who authored it. mark nutley (talk) 20:59, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
The question is "an RS for what"? If I understand Abd he is might be saying it should trump all other sources and claim that cold fusion has become mainstream, not just arguing that it should be able to be cited? Whatever the merits of cold fusion work being done, this sounds that would sound like like WP trying to be "on the cutting edge".--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:57, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Thanks, Andrew. No, I'm not saying that. I'm not claiming that cold fusion has "become mainstream," because this is not well defined. Cold fusion is, quite precisely, by our definitions, "emerging science," which can very well be leading the mainstream. There is a huge amount of evidence for this, but this isn't the place for it. The only question here was Storms (2010) as reliable source. How would we know when a field moves from "fringe" to "emerging science"? Some here seem to think that it must become completely accepted, or accepted by a "majority of scientists." I'm saying that when the field is being published under peer review in mainstream journals, which are treating it as emerging science, with valid research being published, "plausible theories" being advanced -- read the abstract! --, it is, at least, emerging science, even if the majority of "scientists" still think it's totally bogus. Will it continue to emerge, or will it slide back into the swamp? We don't have a crystal ball, do we? --Abd (talk) 16:54, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

I wish we could all keep proper perspective on issues like this, but I guess that's a forlorn hope. Can we all at least try to keep the game in the right ballpark? pointing out the obvious:

  • Changing the temperature at which fusion occurs would be a major scientific advancement, if possible, and no scientist would sneer at the idea if someone managed to do it.
  • The problematical aspects of the cold fusion debate occurred because a couple of scientists (whose names I forget) jumped to publication before they had all their facts in line, and then a whole bunch of 'popular press' and 'conspiracy theory' types jumped on the (unwittingly flawed) research.
  • A scientist who can get an article published in a peer-reviewed journal is not dismissible simply because he's working in a topic area that has suffered setbacks. Scientists are constantly revisiting outmoded ideas to see if there's anything of value that new technology and methods can dig out of them. This is a normal part of the scientific process, and the fact that a team of other scientists reviewed the article and didn't find it wanting is sufficient indication that the research is acceptable scientific research.
  • wp:Fringe only enters into this debate to keep Wikipedia editors from using that (perfectly reliable) scientific article to make claims about the topic or the state of the discipline that the article in no way can or would support. One article does not mean a revival of the concept, but just that there's still some scientific interest in the idea. It's just a matter of balance: does this article add anything of significance to the discussion without unduly skewing the perception of the topic?

that's where this discussion should be. --Ludwigs2 21:00, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

  • I agree completely with Ludwigs2 on the issue of acceptance of peer-reviewed sources, based on the review process. However, a few things were stated here that are misconceptions about the history, as is shown in reliable sources. Because this is really off-topic here, I've responded on User talk:Ludwigs2, and I thank Ludwigs for his comments. --Abd (talk) 02:22, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Before anyone goes to read those comments from Abd, be aware that they present a novel and imaginative summary of the history of cold fusion. It includes the statement (emphases in original) "We need to use the balance of publication in peer-reviewed secondary sources, which now could imply almost excluding the skeptical position, as to recent science"; this displays a substantial ignorance of the way scientific consensus is reached and altered. As I said above, cold fusion will not move away from being disregarded fringe until a paper is produced that describes an experiment that can be reliably reproduced by independent researchers and the results of which cannot be explained by conventional science. Until then, it will continue to be essentially ignored by the mainstream of science. Until then, very few scientists will bother to provide genuine and independent critique. Until then, the small CF community can continue reviewing its own work and talking amongst themselves and produce a pile of paper, and it will continue to be ignored by the mainstream, and that growing pile of paper will continue to be meaningless in representing the mainstream scientific consensus. Note, however, that if reliable and independently reproducible inexplicable results are produced, the mainstream will re-engage in a hurry. That it hasn't happened yet tells you pretty much all you need to know about a claim that such results exist. EdChem (talk) 05:24, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
That comment was placed on the user Talk page because it was off-topic here. EdChem has quoted me out of context, causing an implication to appear that I don't support. And he bases his comment on an opinion that no "reliably reproducible" experiment exists. It does, and the current paper focuses largely on the evidence for that. Perhaps he should read it. This experiment was first reported anecdotally by Bush and Lagowski, confirming earlier controversial work by Fleischmann, it was confirmed by Miles. It is simple to describe, but quite difficult to do. Nevertheless, it's been done by multiple groups around the world, always with the same result, with extremely little exception. This isn't the place for this debate. EdChem claims considerable knowledge. It would be useful if he were to demonstrate it, by helping with the article, instead of ridiculing what he doesn't understand. --Abd (talk) 16:25, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
EdChem, dial it back a bit. First off, mainstream science consists of small communities of researchers competing with each other over advances in tiny little pockets of knowledge. They share a common, broad set of theories and assumptions for their particular discipline, but tend to ignore all material that isn't related to or useful for their particular bailiwick. I think it's safe to say that any researcher who deals with nuclear fusion knows about the research in cold fusion, knows where and why it went wrong, has it filed away in the back of his/her head on the off chance that some new idea about it might occur, and doesn't give one flying fig about what lay people think about the issue. Scientists don't care about whether something is fringe; scientists care about whether something is useful. Please remember that 'Fringe' is a wikipedia concern - a worry about the proper encyclopedic presentation of material - not a scientific concern, and please stop arguing it as though it's a scientific problem that we ourselves need to resolve. --Ludwigs2 06:45, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Ludwigs, thanks for your thoughts. I particularly appreciated being told about what scientists and research are like. Being a research scientist who has published peer reviewed articles, I was obviously made all my comments in complete ignorance of anything useful / relevant to the topic. </sarcasm> In all seriousness, the idea of fringe / pseudoscience / pathological science extend well beyond Wikipedia. For the third time, cold fusion will not move away from being disregarded fringe until a paper is produced that describes an experiment that can be reliably reproduced by independent researchers and the results of which cannot be explained by conventional science. That is the reality of the situation. EdChem (talk) 13:58, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
EdChem is asserting his opinions about cold fusion. I have responded to the issue of an "experiment that can be reliably reproduced" at User:Abd/Cold fusion/Single reliable experiment. In short, the experiment is known, was published in the early 1990s, was recognized as significant by Huizenga (1993), and Storms does the meta-analysis in his book (2007) and in the subject paper (2010). It's been reproduced by many different research groups, and, in fact, this approach can use all the so-called negative replications as part of the evidence. And, again, all this is off-topic, though it does point up, perhaps, the importance of this paper, because it is a review of that evidence, as well as showing the severe prejudice met on this topic. --Abd (talk) 18:33, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
I'm not sure you phrased yourself as you would have liked. By your logic, cold fusion has long since and many times over "move[d] away from being disregarded fringe". Yet clearly this is not the case. Kevin Baastalk 14:29, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Cold fusion is still "disregarded as fringe" by many. Perhaps many who should know better, but scientists are like other human beings: once they form a strong opinion, it tends to persist. The best scientists overcome this, but many don't. Science changes. The change doesn't necessarily propagate rapidly. However, we know that something has shifted when a topic that found it very difficult to get published in mainstream journals, for over a decade and a half, starts being considered and passing peer review in such journals, reviews of the field appear in such journals that treat it as legitimate research and that answer the earlier objections to the field, and when this has gone on for years, with no contrary publications, we can start to recognize the shift. Except that someone like EdChem will vigorously protest, because he doesn't understand the specific issues.--Abd (talk) 16:33, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
EdChem: If you have a conflict of interest in this discussion, you should make it explicit so that we know where you stand professionally. This is not a correct venue for you to pursue your academic disputes. Beyond that, your personal experiences as a scientist are not a reliable source for topics in the philosophy of science. 'nough said? yeeee... --Ludwigs2 17:05, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
I would agree that the concepts "fringe" and "mainstream" as they get used on WP, sometimes verging on a sort of pseudo-legalistic approach, sometimes gets us tangled in knots. But all sides seem to be using them here? I would agree that an author associated with a fringe theory should not be automatically "black balled" on WP if he has managed to get through a decent peer review process. So I think a lot depends upon how "hard" Abd and co want to use that source in order to imply anything about what is "mainstream". --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:57, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
The answer to the heading "Does "fringe author" affect Reliable Source criteria?" is yes, as stated above. We have to consider the reputation of the author for reliability, as well as considering the publisher and the work itself. However, Abd seems to be asking a different question, "does a reliable publisher mean that an author isn't fringe?" Wrong noticeboard, and the question of whether the paper presents a minority view, or a view that strays over into coming under fringe guidelines, is best resolved on the article talk page. The paper is clearly a reliable source of the author's views, but that doesn't automatically make those views mainstream or even reliable. . . dave souza, talk 08:44, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
No, I'm not asking what Dave is suggesting. He would be correct. A reliable publisher may choose to print something from a fringe author. This establishes something about the content, not the fringe or non-fringe status of the author. What I'm claiming here, and asking for confirmation, is whether or not allegations of "fringe author" (which tend to be synthetic, themselves) are a reasonable basis for rejecting a source that would otherwise be reliable, based on the publication and peer review process, and how the publication presents the material. A publication may present a fringe view, but a reliable publication will not do so in such a way as to imply some reasonable acceptability of the ideas. Many here seem to be assuming something about how considering this as RS would be used. That would represent, then, arguing premises from conclusions. I.e., this isn't reliable source because, if we consider it so, someone may make some wikilawyering claim about what it establishes. If it is reliable source, it becomes a basis for asserting certain possible texts as adequately sourced, that's all. It doesn't establish any particular text as necessarily forced. --Abd (talk) 17:13, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Dave, keep in mind that this is a science paper in a science journal. It's not an opinion piece, it's a journal of a scientific experiment. BIG difference. The paper is not about anybody's views so the idea that it could be a reliable source for such simply isn't meaningful. It's about an empirical test setup and the empirical results. Any question of reliability is with respect to that, and the science involved (e.g. did they do the calorimetry right, etc.). And again we're not talking about the paper, but a secondary source: the publisher. In this case, a reputable peer-reviewed science journal. Peer-reviewed means many scientists have reviewed and vetted the reliability - not of the author's opinions or "views" - but, again, of the empirical methods and observations described in the paper. Kevin Baastalk 13:49, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

In my view, the most pertinent question for this board is whether the article should be regarded as a secondary source. I would say no, on the basis of precedent. Quite often in science articles single papers are proposed as sources. We have often considered them to be primary sources. Reviews of the literature are definitely secondary sources. Which side of the line does this article fall on? I would say primary, because it is not a systematic review carried out by an independent team. It would be useful to get this one right in order to inform future cases. Itsmejudith (talk) 09:12, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Good point. But is it possible to ever have a clear definition? Would it really be a good idea for WP to try to define things so tightly? Just as "fringe" and "mainstream" are flexible terms, the distinction between "primary" and "secondary" can also sometimes be blurry. I think it is sometimes better in such cases to go back to using non-WP language and saying, as you do, that "it is not a systematic review carried out by an independent team" rather than trying to define a "line". That seems clear to me. In other words it is "weakly secondary"?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:40, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
I would have thought the paper itself was the primary source, once peer reviewed and published does in a reputable journal does it not then become a secondary source? mark nutley (talk) 10:12, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
We don't necessarily treat individual papers in that way. I agree with Andrew that boundaries may be blurry. We must also consider WP:REDFLAG in this particular case. Itsmejudith (talk) 10:17, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Mark, it depends on the field. Many fields have occasional "big event" review papers in journals which are definitely secondary sources. I think Abd is arguing that this is such a case, and Judith is saying it is not always quite that simple.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 10:28, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Mark, it depends on the field. For instance, in the field of science, there is no room for interpretation: the answer is a resounding "yes". Kevin Baastalk 13:40, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Kevin, maybe I am missing something here, but isn't the normal meaning of a secondary source not one that has been checked by more than just the original author, but actually one which is not even written by the original (i.e. primary) author, such as a review article? See WP:SECONDARY.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 14:07, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
I just checked the policy: Wikipedia:No_original_research#Primary.2C_secondary_and_tertiary_sources, and it is ambiguous on its usage of the terminology. in one sense it uses "source" to refer to an account, in another it uses it to refer to publication. Using these distinct senses in their respective contexts, the journal itself would be a "secondary source", which publishes "primary sources" that have passed their review. In referring to the journal in the same way that WP:OR refers to scientific journals, we would refer to it as a "secondary source". In referring to articles that have been published in it in the same way, we would refer to them as articles that have been "published in a secondary source". Kevin Baastalk 14:18, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
  • (ec)Andrew, that's certainly how I read your link. An original research paper, published in a peer-reviewed journal, is a primary source, "... a scientific paper is a primary source about the experiments performed by the authors." A review, critique or meta-analysis conducted by a third party independent researcher(s) is a secondary source. As the linked page puts it: "They [secondary sources] rely for their material on primary sources, often making analytic or evaluative claims about them. For example, a review article that analyzes research papers in a field is a secondary source for the research." I can't agree with the interpretation offered here that peer review confers "secondary source" status to a research paper. A third party source considering the research paper is the secondary source. Woonpton (talk) 16:35, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
I hope that wasn't directed at me, for I am not saying that peer-review changes a first-hand account into a second-hand account. What I am saying is what is explicitly stated by WP:PST and is what people mean when they talk about secondary source status conferred by publishing. Though they may speak more concisely and thus less precisely, they mean that the status of having been published in a secondary source is conferred upon a paper, which, in itself, remains a first-hand account.
That is what people are saying. The interpretation that people are saying that having it published in a journal magically makes it a second-hand account is just ridiculous on its face. Kevin Baastalk 17:19, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Though i should add that i understand the particular paper we are talking about is a review, which in itself does constitute a second-hand account as defined by WP:PST. (Though being published in a secondary source certainly doesn't promote it to a tertiary account.) Kevin Baastalk 17:19, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Wikipedia:V#Reliable_sources explicitly states the three senses that "source" is used. (Which, perhaps is the cause of much of the confusion.) And with regard to the importance/unimportance of peer review, as well as the importance/unimportance of a scientific paper being published in a secondary source, that very section explicitly states "Academic and peer-reviewed publications are usually the most reliable sources where available, such as in history, medicine, and science'". Kevin Baastalk 17:04, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Well, no, if my post had been directed at you, it would have been indented under yours per talk page convention, but you've misstated my comment at any rate. I did not say that "people are saying that having it published in a journal magically makes it a second-hand account." I said that I don't agree with the interpretation that peer review confers "secondary source" status on a research paper, as offered here. Woonpton (talk) 17:26, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
So you do not disagree that being published in a peer reviewed journal (what WP:V explicitly identifies as a "a secondary source" and WP:OR does grammaticly) confers the status of "being published in a [secondary source]". (a status that is notable because some policies (such as on the aforementioned pages) refer to it.). I believe this is what people actually mean when they say what you interpret to be the interpretation that "peer review confers "secondary source" status on a research paper". That's how i've always interpreted that. Kevin Baastalk 17:36, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Let's be clear. Peer review does not establish "peer reviewed secondary source," because peer reviewed papers, as original reports, can still be primary source. However, what establishes "secondary source" has been well-described here, it is that the publication reviews and covers and other independent reports, confirming (or rejecting) them. Peer reviewers are tasked with ensuring that such coverage is balanced and fair. Sometimes they will present a fringe review, for the sake of debate, but, if the editor and reviewers are doing their job, they will not present this as an overall review of the field. Storms is quite clear as to what is his opinion, in the review, and what is based on other sources. As with any source, this should be used with appropriate caution. For the most solid sourcing, there should be multiple independent secondary sources. --Abd (talk) 18:57, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
I don't see that anyone is claiming that peer-review establishes "secondary source." Most peer-reviewed papers, indeed, are mostly primary sources. The paper described here, however, is a secondary source on the research it reviews. Now, Storms did himself conduct some of that research, which raises an issue. But set that aside. What about his review of the research that he did not conduct, which is the large bulk of the paper? He is a "third party independent researcher," reviewing the published papers in the field. He made "analytic or evaluative claims about them." He is thus a secondary source, as you say, considering the extensive collection of research papers. And his review is more important and weightier because it was published under peer review, than had it merely been printed, say, as an article in a popular magazine without peer review. --Abd (talk) 16:46, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Issues are getting mixed here. A primary source is an original report; in science, this would be a report of an experiment, say, or some new theory. A secondary source is a source that reviews or comments or reports on a primary source. We use this to establish notability, by insisting that the publisher of such secondary sources be independent (normally) for the secondary source to be considered reliable. Peer review is irrelevant to this, we are depending on publishers.
However, because we want the project to fairly reflect mainstream scientific opinion, in terms of balance, we rely, then, for scientific topics, on the filtering and validation involved in peer review. This review means that a paper is not merely the opinion of an author -- unless it so states --, for the paper has been reviewed by multiple experts. A paper may contain a mixture of opinion and report of fact based on other primary and secondary sources. We may consider that being published under peer review establishes basic notability, even for a primary source, in some cases, and a PR review paper is reliable secondary source on for material reviewed by it, and might be primary source for other content.
But as to scientific "fact," to be reported as such, no single source establishes fact, no matter how reliable, not fully, if there is any controversy at all. To the extent that a PR secondary source is a review of a field, though, it establishes significant notability to cite and attribute text to it (to the author and/or publication, preferably both; for fact, if there is attribution, the publication is probably more important than the author, for opinion, the author, though this itself can create problems), and where it confirms primary sources, the collection of them is a kind of multiple sourcing. However, it is best is if there is more than one independent peer-reviewed secondary source. Those exist, in abundance, for the topic of the Storms review (2010).
The question asked here was whether or not "fringe author" was relevant. Were this simply the unreviewed and unapproved opinion of the author, it could be relevant. But under these publication conditions, it is not. To reject the source as "fringe," and to claim that citing it will cause "undue weight," simply because the author is someone who has worked in the field for twenty years, would be to do violence to the principles of neutrality underlying Wikipedia guidelines. --Abd (talk) 16:14, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
That's no longer the point under discussion. It's the interpretation of WP:PST. "...similarly, a scientific paper is a primary source about the experiments performed by the authors .... a review article that analyzes research papers in a field is a secondary source for the research...". Is this a review article as envisaged by policy? As I've said various times before, it isn't a classic example of a review article. Furthermore, common sense and WP:REDFLAG apply because "cold fusion" has been described on many occasions by scientists as "fringe", "pathological science", and goodness knows what else. Rightly or wrongly, etc, etc. Itsmejudith (talk) 16:32, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Thanks, Itsmejudith. Can you explain why this is not a "classic example" of a review article? There is no doubt that cold fusion has been described as you state. Years ago, but with much reliable source, also, rejecting the characterization as ever having been accurate. It was an opinion, notably expressed. Nobody is claiming that this should disappear from the article! --Abd (talk) 16:39, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Not by an independent team. Itsmejudith (talk) 16:41, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
For comparison, see citations in FA Fluoridation. Footnotes 11, 12, 53, 55 and 57 refer to "reviews". Two of these were commissioned by government health bodies (Australia and UK). These are not things that individual scientists decide to do off their own bat. I can't really add any more. Itsmejudith (talk) 16:48, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Storms told me, long before the paper was accepted, that it had been invited. He didn't decide to do this on his own. Naturwissenschaften has been publishing individual papers, primary sources, since 2005, apparently they decided it was time for a review, so they asked an expert to write it. All this is irrelevant. Storms (2010) is a review of the literature in the field. Do you expect such to be done by someone not familiar with it? Storms review of his own work is a very minor part of this paper. This was an "independent team": Storms and the peer reviewers. Are you claiming, Judith, that there must be more than one author for a review paper? --Abd (talk) 17:03, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Come to think about it there have been instances where independent experts familiar with the appropriate sciences, but not the particular study of CMNS have been invented to witness, evaluate, even perform CMNS experiments. However, after-the-fact critics of the field vociferously classify these once-reputable scientists as "fringe" so then by definition it's no longer an "impartial / independent" review. Kind of a catch-22, if you will. In any case it explains why the field never will, have independent review, even when it does. Kevin Baastalk 17:24, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Sometimes I wish that whole 'primary/secondary/tertiary' thing had never been adopted. it's a lit-crit term that doesn't really work well for the kind of issues that wikipedia faces, and it confuses way too many people to be particularly useful.

at any rate, I think we can summarize things as follows:

  • Is the source reliable? yes, clearly: it's scientific research published in a peer-reviewed journal.
  • Does the source reflect a mainstream perspective? no, clearly: it's revisiting a theoretical view that is currently (and probably justifiably) out of vogue.
  • Does the article have any use in the wikipedia page? excellent question: the article shows (at least) that there is still some ongoing research in the topic in some odd corners of the scientific community. However, a single source does not show that there is a resurgence of interests, an ongoing research programme, or any sort of upward trajectory for the topic or the field. the source might be includable in a FYI capacity (just to indicate that the subject is not as dead as, say, phlogiston theory), but I doubt it can be used to make any significant claims about the state of the discipline as a whole. It will take a few more years of replication and publication for it to reach a state where we can comfortable suggest that it's on the rise.

does that strike people as a correct assessment of the situation? --Ludwigs2 18:24, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, Ludwigs2. There are aspects of your response that are satisfactory and aspects that aren't. The "theoretical view" that is "revisited" is not the one originally rejected, and, in fact, it's never been rejected in peer-reviewed reliable source. That original view was that cold fusion would be d-d fusion, Huizenga (1993) is extremely explicit on this. It was assumed that if there was fusion, that's what it must be. And, of course, there were -- and remain -- extremely good reasons to reject d-d fusion. Absolutely, you are correct that a single source doesn't show a "resurgence of interests," but, actually, that change hasn't been proposed as a change to the article. I was only interested in the state of the science, which will be seen in what peer reviewers pass, not just in one publication, but in many. The paper covers a basic experimental approach (I've now described it at User:Abd/Cold fusion/Single reliable experiment; Storms doesn't call it that, but it is obviously what he devotes a few pages of his review to), and this work was done long ago, and has been very amply replicated. Storms is not with this paper, presenting it originally, he is reviewing the literature. "On the rise" is dicta, background. I wouldn't dare try to put that in the article without explicit source for it, which Storms (2010) is not. His concern, and mine, is the science of this. Not the "popularity." --Abd (talk) 18:45, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
the first two, yeah. the third: as to whether the review or publication in question demonstrates a "resurgence" of the field, i believe we all are in agreement that it does not. and i agree that it's too early to say that "cold fusion has made a comeback", esp. regarding concerns of recentism. though at the same time i believe it's safe to say that saying or suggesting that cold fusion is a "dead field" would be equally, if not more inappropriate at this point. more of what you wrote there, though, and especially the original question (does the article have any use in thewikipedia page?), seems largely a matter of weight and notability, both things that should be addressed in the particular context of the proposed edits, which i think in any case is beyond the scope of discussion on an RS noticeboard. Kevin Baastalk 19:10, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
Yes, and no; it's okay except it seems to presume that the question is whether the source should be used in the article. That has never been the question. The source is in the article now, and has been for a week or so. Tell truth, I'm not sure any more what this thread is about, or what its purpose here, but here's a brief history:
  • Sept 21 Abd brings up this new paper on talk: cold fusion [67] followed by discussion (if anyone wants to understand what this issue is all about, I recommend reading the entire discussion, including its four or five subsections)
  • Sept 23 (10:30) Enric Naval edits the article to add this source not in the lead as Abd wished and incorporating some, but not all, of the language in Abd's proposed edit. If I'm not mistaken, Enric's edit still stands, and has not been reverted or disputed by other editors.
  • Sept 23 (19:45) Abd started this thread. As I think I may have mentioned before, the thread title seems misleading to me, because no one is arguing that the source should be excluded for any reason, including that the author is "fringe"; the source is included, and no one is objecting to the source being included. The objection is apparently to the difference between Abd's proposed edit and Enric Naval's actual edit. For example:

Cold fusion is a cross-disciplinary field. NW [Naturwissenschaften] is a cross-disciplinary journal, one of the top such in the world, covering all the "natural sciences," which includes physics and nuclear physics. I don't know that there is any better place for an article like this. But this is all pretty minor. That's a peer-reviewed secondary source, comprehensive, detailed, heavily sourced, and published under peer review in a mainstream journal. And it contains a whole lot of material that effectively contradicts our article. Don't you think we should start looking at that? Starting with what is in the abstract, some of which you chose not to include. Why? Do you have a better source to contradict it? There is no better source in the science of this field. That's the point. --Abd (talk) 01:09, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

Woonpton (talk) 19:14, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Not bad, Woonpton. Some quibbles: I immediately and explicitly accepted Enric's placement of the text. I objected to his removal of the overall conclusions taken from the abstract, and his attribution of the paper to "supporter Edward Storms," when, just above, an older negative source, not peer-reviewed, and simply opinionated about the state of the science recently, was not attributed to the author, but to Physics Today, giving it more apparent weight. The "fringe" argument has been used many times to exclude secondary sources that were published under peer review. That absolute exclusion didn't happen this time, but the treatment of the source was still based on this synthesis. My question here, though, was not based on that specific edit, because it does not go much into the substance of the paper. It may affect later edits to be proposed. Notice what I asserted in what was last quoted from me: "it contains a lot of material that effectively contradicts our article," and that contradictory material, found in the article, is from weaker sources, not peer reviewed secondary sources. This will come up case by case, where the relative strength of sources will be considered. The last thing I'd want is an imbalanced article, with notable material from quality sources being somehow excluded. Thanks for looking at it. --Abd (talk) 20:04, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
I can understand the confusion as given the history you gave. I read this as not really being tied to the particular source, but in response to much friction and disagreement in the past, where often people will use things like RS as justification, though in a double-standard and/or specious way. which really turns out to be rather unproductive. so i think the main goal here was really to get the policy(es) clear, in hopes that we can avoid such problems in the future. in sum i think this was more of a general discussion, to clarify certain aspects of certain policies. and i think it has been productive in that regard. Kevin Baastalk 19:22, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
  • Ludwigs, I do not have a conflict of interest in relation to cold fusion.
  • Abd, I am not going to try and go point-counterpoint, it is not worth my time and I could never match the effort you put in to responding endlessly.
  • Everyone else, most especially regulars here, the cold fusion dispute involves continuous debating of policy and editors with definite agendas. My advice is to look for what is motivating the comments being made and questions raised (yes, on both sides) because if anything appears obvious / straight-forward there is likely something behind it. EdChem (talk) 16:45, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
I would recommend the opposite. Rather than looking for malicious intent in other editors and being suspicous of things that are clear and simple, I would recommend assuming good faith and focusing on impartial and objective application of policy and recognizing that the simplest explanation is most likely correct. Kevin Baastalk 16:50, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
Thanks, Kevin. It seems we have two basic kinds of editors. Those who routinely WP:AGF and those who suspect the motives of anyone who seems to disagree with them, who tell themselves stories about the motives of these people, and then appear to believe their own stories. It's a classic problem, and it can ruin the lives of people who get stuck in it. I'm two or three times the age of your common Wikipedia editor and admin, and understanding my motives isn't terribly likely, unless one reads with a sympathetic eye. I disclose my agenda frequently, just as I disclosed my COI in starting this section. Accurate mind-reading takes rapport, difficult on-line under the best conditions. --Abd (talk) 00:20, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

The author sits in judgment of his own work

[68]. Edmund Storms, cold fusion extraordinaire, is an editor of the journal Naturwissenschaften. It is disingenuous to claim independent peer-review verification when your ace-in-the-hole work was published in a journal for which the author is a member of the editorial board. IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science suffers from the same problems with respect to plasma cosmology. It's an interesting fringe tactic, but one that is beautifully transparent.

Ask Storms why he doesn't publish in Physical Review or any other top-tier journal for whom he is not sitting on the editorial board. See what he says.

ScienceApologist (talk) 04:55, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

This is pure fantasy. Storms was asked to be the LENR editor for Nauturwissenschaften, last December, apparently, but they had been publishing papers in the field since 2005. I pointed this appointment out on Talk:Cold fusion, as soon as I noticed it. Did he review his own work? That would be the issue, you know. Naturwissenschaften has access to plenty of other review resources. The real news here is what developed there since 2005, when the highest-quality work in the field started being published by them. They are perfect for it, it's a multidisciplinary field, and, as pointed out by Bauer (2002) and others, the field of cold fusion crosses chemistry and physics. Bauer, in particular, details the problem of separate expertise; the physicists had no serious experience with electrochemistry and precise calorimetry, the chemists had no serious experience with measuring radiation. Both made mistakes.
Is it chemistry? The chemists say, no, what they are observing is not ordinary chemistry. They are experts on that. The physicists say, this could not be nuclear physics, and they are experts on that. So who is right? In science, it boils down to experimental evidence, and what is that evidence saying? Why did so many physicists reject cold fusion? I know. They had very good reasons. Unfortunately, they missed something. They were rejecting an unjustified hypothesis, assuming that if there was cold fusion, it must be one particular thing, and that it was not that thing underlies the entire rejection argument, I know the literature well now. The field moved on, and itself rejects that same explanation. There is no conflict in the sources, if one reads carefully. It is only assumed conflict.
ScienceApologist wants to reject reliable source because it conflicts with his POV. He's a particle physicist, I understand, and [He] shows utterly no interest in looking at the evidence, but he sure wants to cherry-pick the sources to support his POV, which he imagines is "science," which he imagines is "NPOV." Enough. Are we done here? I thought we were. --Abd (talk) 12:43, 30 September 2010 (UTC)corrected per SA comment below --Abd (talk) 15:01, 30 September 2010 (UTC)
You know nothing of me. I'm not a "particle physicist". ScienceApologist (talk) 13:23, 30 September 2010 (UTC)
Sorry, don't know where I got that idea. What's your training and level of expertise? Good news on not being a particle physicist, it is possible there will be a surplus of these in the near future, when the hot fusion boondoggle shuts down. It was a Bad Idea fifty years ago, and remains so. Even if Cold fusion is completely bogus. --Abd (talk) 15:01, 30 September 2010 (UTC)
Well I think the tokamak approach to hot fusion isn't exactly alluring. But more attractive approaches such as polywell and focus fusion don't suffer from the same physics bottlenecks. It's nice to see polywell's finally getting some funding now that we have a scientifically literate administration. I'm watching developments with great anticipation, though it'll be about a year before we hear anything new. In any case, not as much of a "bad idea"---from a practical perspective---as tokamaks, in my opinion. Kevin Baastalk 16:08, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

(←) All very interesting no doubt, but the question for this board is whether a paper in a mainstream peer-reviewed academic journal is a reliable source, and whether it becomes any less so if the author is a member of the journal's editorial board. If the answer is that such a paper is in general a reliable source, is there evidence that this paper should be considered any differently? Kenilworth Terrace (talk) 18:08, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

I do see why people are nervous but indeed when you bring it back to that question I don't see anybody arguing strongly enough for saying that this is not an RS. A person being an editor on a journal like this would not normally make him a one-man band and it would not make the journal a self-published source. So then it still seems to me to be more of a weighting question.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 20:02, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

I can't see based on the discussion here why this is not an RS. --Cameron Scott (talk) 20:07, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

Yes. But I think the debate (as usual in RS cases) is or should be "reliable for what?" --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:06, 3 October 2010 (UTC)
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