Wikipedia:Fallacy of selective sources

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Shortcut WP:FSS

This page in a nutshell: The argument that consensus discussions about content may only (or should primarily) consider those sources already used for citations is patently false.

An uncommon but long-term-recurrent argument suggests that if the sources presently used for citations in an article seem to agree on something, that this constitutes some kind of finding of fact or establishment of consensus (real-world or on-wiki). That is, of course, nonsense. It is sometimes recast in other words, e.g. that the sources already cited should be given primacy over all other sources (as if they have been through some kind of formal vetting process, which they haven't); or that if the sources we're using now seem to agree on something that this is good enough, and further examination of source material is unneeded, even unwarranted.

Wikipedia editors consider the real-world consensus (scientific, historiographic, English-language-usage, etc.) as determined by a preponderance of all available relevant, modern, independent, reliable, secondary sources we can bring to a consensus discussion. If this were not true, then:

• It would not be possible to do a
  WP:Due and undue weight
  analysis of anything that all, since only the sources cited right this moment could be used to assess viewpoint balance.
• Several forms of
  WP:Original research could not be identified and removed, chief among them the use of cherry-picking
  of some carefully selected sources that seem synergistic, so as to "lead" the reader to a conclusion not actually found in those sources, while omitting sources that made it clear that this seemingly inexorable conclusion was a misinterpretation.
• Imposition of
  WP:Most common name
  in reliable sources was in fact "Ke$ha". Yet not only is that false today, it has always been false, even back when Kesha was using that stylization in her marketing.
• WP:Requested moves and other processes would be subject to gaming with trivial ease: For example, if you didn't like the fact that our article title used lower-case for something you thought should be capitalized, despite most reliable sources not capitalizing it, you could "win" by just swapping out all lower-casing sources with upper-casing ones of otherwise equal quality and pertinence, then request a move with the so-called proof that "all of our sources capitalize this".
• Our articles would be frozen in time, against
  WP:Wikipedia is not paper
  policy, failing to use newer source material to update formerly accepted but now disproved claims, or other changed facts, that we'd gotten from older source material.

Wikipedia consensus formation considers all available, valid source material. For simple matters like titling and style questions, we directly depend on aggregate results (

• Wikipedia:Common-style fallacy
• Wikipedia:Specialized-style fallacy