I am not familiar with the particular dispute, but it is a historical fact that, on Wikipedia, a common strategy that people who are attempting to advance a point of view will use is to challenge the reliability of any source that does not comport with the point of view they intend to advance. The usual strategy here is to conflate bias with reliability, demonstrate that the source that the advocate wishes to exclude is biased, and from that demand that it be excluded as "unreliable". The problem is that bias, even extreme bias, does not mean that the source is "unreliable".Rachel Helps wrote: ↑Mon Mar 25, 2024 6:03 pmBut with the recent discussion, mostly spurred on by JPS over on the talk page for Ammonihah (T-H-L) and a few other places, the reliability of many of these sources is coming into question. But the way jps was talking about sources last week, I was puzzled about his criteria for when a source on the BoM is a RS or not. ARE some of these sources fringe?
For example, the Center for Immigration Studies, a profoundly anti-immigrant public policy research group, is deeply biased on immigration issues, and they will reliably analyze any data they do collect in a manner that they will then use to argue for restricting immigration. Despite their bias, their study methodologies are generally sound and the data they present in support of their flawed arguments are generally valid, and so one can generally rely on the factual claims set forth in their position papers as being accurate.
From what I've read there is currently a pogrom somewhere on Wikipedia to declare the New York Post as unreliable, again using highly specious arguments (including referencing the Post's notorious Page Six). I don't know what has motivated this particular assault on the Post (nor do I wish to research it), but the reality is that all sources are biased, and anyone who does research has to learn how to recognize bias and how to account for it in evaluating how the bias of the source applies, or not, to the claims made by that source. Wikipedia's "reliable source" rules generally reject doing any sort of analysis of this sort, instead imposing a vast array of contradictory and incoherent brightline rules declaring individual sources as either "reliable" or "not reliable" (as a binary matter, which is also analytically suspect, as iii correctly points out above). This is because almost all arguments over reliable sources in Wikipedia are really attempts by someone involve to impose (or oppose) a particular point of view.
The reality is that a huge fraction of Wikipedians are editing to advance an ideological position of some sort, and many of these editors will actively game policy in order to advance their ideological position at every opportunity, with no intellectual concern toward whether the policy forms they advocate for are consistent or advance Wikipedia's purported status as an encyclopedia. Remember that, almost always, in a Wikipedia policy dispute, the winner is determined not by who is "correct", in an academic, intellectual, factual, or moral sense, but rather by which of the parties to the dispute shows greater loyalty to the Cause. As a result of resolving this dispute in favor of that party, who will win for reasons not related to anything related to truth, policy will be twisted in some way that permits whatever the winner was doing to be "allowed", whether or not that twist makes any sense from the broader context of "writing an encyclopedia". The result of this per-conflict outcome-driven process of policy development is that almost all of Wikipedia's core policies are incoherent, having been repeatedly tugged and twisted over and over again to facilitate specific outcomes, with very little if any regard to whether any of this makes sense from a broader perspective.
This is probably wise, certainly wiser than most of your compatriots on Wikipedia. However, it will not be accepted by the POV warrior caste, and since they outnumber you they will probably win in the end.Rachel Helps wrote: ↑Mon Mar 25, 2024 6:03 pmI made my own sourcing guidelines to help my students tell if a source is scholarly or not (there are many devotional sources that must be adequately explained or maybe not used).