Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 304

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Victory in War of 1812

In "A Truly Pointless War ... The War of 1812" (History News Network), Jon Latimer wrote:

"So this wasn’t a 'war that both sides won.' Only Britain achieved her aims as they stood in 1812; the United States achieved none of hers, and on that basis it can only reasonably be accounted a British victory. But in truth it was a ‘war that nobody won’; certainly not the dead, or the bereaved, or the maimed, or those rendered homeless."

Is he saying that Britain won or no one won? Or is it cherry-picking to form any conclusion from this sentence?

TFD (talk) 16:07, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

It's one person's opinion that even as an expert would need to be attributed, and would probably need to use that quote nearly in full to capture the intent (eg cherry picking otherwise). --Masem (t) 16:16, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

He is saying that in militarily and political terms Britain won, but in social terms no one did.Slatersteven (talk) 16:19, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

If the sentence is to be quoted it should be in its entirety. Hemiauchenia (talk) 16:24, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

The quote has been presented as evidence that there are historians who say the UK won the war and the U.S. lost, so that the info-box can say the outcome is disputed instead of the outcome was a draw. TFD (talk) 17:11, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

Editors who wish to comment should be aware that this one field in the infobox has been litigated for more than ten years, and the dispute is over the *military* outcome. Since we are here though, the reference provided for "draw" is problematic in that its quote essentially says that "most people call it a draw, but I think Britain won." Elinruby (talk) 19:21, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

The info-box has said the result of the war was inconclusive during all that time. Your selective reading of Latimer's statement is part of a ten year attempt to change that into saying the outcome was disputed. There are similar problems in articles such as intelligent design and climate change that unfortunately attract enthusiastic but ill-informed proponents of alternative interpretations. They are adept at structuring their arguments on one-sided interpretations of ambiguous statements in sources. TFD (talk) 19:46, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

Listen here my man, I am not part of a ten-year attempt to do anything but improve Wikipedia, and not just on the talk page of the War of 1812 article btw. Do you seriously think this is some sort of sinister plot? Run report the question as a personal attack again! Meanwhile why are you asking this at the RS noticeboard? Shouldn't it be NPOV if anything? Oh wait, the people might have already read the two arguments you are in over there, or the one at fringe theory ditto, I guess. Why, if the question is sources, don't you produce yours, as I have suggesting? Elinruby (talk) 22:02, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

I will reply to your comments on your talk page. TFD (talk) 00:17, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

No, if we are going to go through the reliability of sources, then let’s talk about your sources for the whole “all *quality* sources” schtick that you do. In particular, one of your references for “draw” in fact does not say it was a draw; it says that most Americans think it was a draw, but they are wrong. The source itself seems fine, but it’s not really a reliable source for what you have to say. Also, since the heart of RS is context, you really should mention that Deathlibrarian (talk · contribs) didn’t use this as a reference; it’s on a list of a dozen or so reliable sources for his point of whereas you have yet to provide any for as long as I have been observing this dispute. At a minimum you really should have mentioned that this is about an info box entry, which is somewhat different than the body of an article. It could affect the way people answer if they don’t know all the facts. PS you also should have notified people on the talk page and a throwaway at the bottom of a section about something else really doesn’t cut it Elinruby (talk) 02:52, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

We are discussing the Latimer source. If you want to talk about other sources or sources in general, please post to my talk page, the article talk page or set up a new discussion thread. TFD (talk) 04:30, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

But I am telling you, as someone who has done time on this board, that something is reliable or not reliable depending on its context. The context here is a list of sources Deathlibrarian (talk · contribs) drew up to demonstrate that the belief that the British won is not WP:FRINGE.Elinruby (talk) 22:28, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

In cases where the answer is not clear,; won/lost/draw becomes a matter of opinion, with no objective standard to answer the question. So it is not a matter of providing information, it would be deciding to put someone's opinion in in a contested area. So, IMO, completely remove that part of the info box. Put the facts in the article without any opinion-type characterizations. Plus include attributed info (including context) of what the best findable sources say. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 04:19, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

North8000, there have been many sources presented for the article. My question is whether this one source says that the UK beat the United States in the War of 1812 and the U.S. lost the war. TFD (talk) 04:40, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Not by you on this topic. Not since I've been watching the page. You just keep saying it's the consensus of historians, and mocking anyone who suggests otherwise. Then when you are called on this, you misuse edit-warring templates and claim personal attacks at ANI. This is the RS board, so let's talk about those RS. Elinruby (talk) 18:36, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

We are discussing the Latimer source. If you want to talk about other sources or sources in general, please post to my talk page, the article talk page or set up a new discussion thread. TFD (talk) 20:24, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

As per Slatersteven, Latimer here is saying that it had a high social cost, many people died, and it achieved little, but in terms of military achievements, Britain won because it achieved its goals. So yes, he is saying Britain won the war, but it was a stupid war that achieved little. Latimer wrote a whole book on the War of 1812 " 1812: War with America" and he says that he believes the UK won the war in that as well, its pretty clear what he thinks about who won, to quote from that, page 3. "“It was by no means a second war or independence, nor was it a war that both sides won. It was fundamentally a failed war of conquest. Americans desire to possess British North America dated back to the earliest days of the revolution and the ill fated attack on Quebec…for the United states in 1812 the goal was to conquer Canada, and more than two and a half years it tried and repeatedly failed to do so”…. “Britain was content to settle for the 1812 status quo, and that is what Britain got. The United states, in contrast, achieved none of its war aims, and in these terms, the War of 1812 must be seen as a British victory, however marginal.” So in fact, we have two quotes from Latimer, from two sources, where he says Britain won and the US lost.Deathlibrarian (talk) 07:06, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Are you going to notify the other editors of this discussion? Deathlibrarian (talk · contribs) is here because I told him (it's his source) but other people were involved in this on the talk page Elinruby (talk) 17:54, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

I provided notification on the talk page shortly after creating this discussion thread.[1] TFD (talk) 20:38, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Way down at the bottom of a section on whether I can put citation needed templates in this field, a different, boring topic of limited interest. You got away with that when you did it for the ANI nonsense because that was my personal page so I was notified anyway. That is not the case here. Some of the other editors who have doing this for ten years may have something they want to say about this. I have made a general post at the talk page for you but other people who may wish to comment include Moxy (talk · contribs), Tirronan# (talk · contribs) and Yronen (talk · contribs), whose name I am probably spelling wrong and will correct if so Elinruby (talk) 21:50, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

The boring topic of interest was a discussion of the Latimer source. Now please note this discussion thread is for discussing the source, not a forum to air your grievances. If you need to do so you may post on my talk page any hour of the day or night. TFD (talk) 22:00, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

it isn’t some personal grievance that there is a rule that you are supposed to notify interested editors of notice board discussions, especially when you have been arguing with them for ten years about exactly this field. Stop playing victim. Shakespeare (talk · contribs) may or may not wish to comment, also Rjenson (talk · contribs), Red Rock Canyon (talk · contribs) and Davide King (talk · contribs) Elinruby (talk) 22:09, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Ykraps (talk · contribs) also in is that thread on the talk page.

Personally I'd say de facto British tactical victory; de jure status quo ante bellum. Just a suggestion. The C of E God Save the Queen! (talk) 20:26, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, I thought Ykraps (talk · contribs) and myself should have been notified, as we actually commented on the original post. But anyways, I think from the comments here, this would appear to be a reliable source. Deathlibrarian (talk) 02:15, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

As has been explained on the talk page, [[2]] that article is a poor summary of Latimer's book. Latimer is clear that in terms of the fighting, he thinks the war was a British victory but nobody profited in terms of what the war achieved. This is clear in the book. The two parts of the quote TFD has got hold of aren't together in the book and indeed, I don't think the second part appears at all.--Ykraps (talk) 07:42, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

@Rjensen: since I got his username wrong above Elinruby (talk) 17:28, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

Sounds like a bit of shopping for a result with Lambert. I have noted that while his area of expertise as a historian on Royal Navy matters is quite complete, his lack in other areas he ventures into was also noted.I have also noted that I was not notified. This seems to be an ongoing issue. I have also noted comments from "editors" whom I have never seen on the page showing up. It doesn't look good at all.Tirronan (talk) 00:00, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

This is about Latimer, not Lambert and the people commenting here are those that watch the page so they can offer an impartial opinion.--Ykraps (talk) 07:50, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Ykraps, it's not something I got hold of but a quote from an aritcle that was presented in the discussion as evidence of Latimer's opinions. Of course as you seem to agree, the passage is ambiguous. It turns out that in his book Latimer says it was a "marginal" British victory. When someone presents a source, I read it. And if it doesn't say what they claim it says (which has happened a lot in this article), I challenge it. I don't think it is reasonable that someone can cherry-pick a sentence that appears to them to support their position, then expect other editors to read through everything that author wrote. Especially when with Google it is easy to mine for quotes that appear to support one's position. So I ask please be sure that before presenting quotes that editors are familiar with the sources they were taken from. TFD (talk) 06:43, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

I know where you got the quotes from thanks and even commented when you first presented them. I didn't think they were ambiguous and nor does anyone here by the look of things. Yes it is easy to mine for quotes on Google, and present them, deliberately or otherwise, out of context. This is what you did here.[[3]] And you don't need to tell me what Latimer's book says; I have read it. A marginal victory is still a victory so now you agree that that is what Latimer is saying, perhaps we can close this as resolved.--Ykraps (talk) 07:50, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Ykraps... yep! TFD If you want to look at his book, portions of the book are on Google books War with America , including the page referenced above. I'd recommend you buy it though. Deathlibrarian (talk) 10:56, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

You've got no chance at all of marking the War of 1812 as a British victory on Wikipedia, even though it self-evidently was. I do suggest choosing a different topic area.—S Marshall T/C 16:52, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

guns.com

Would guns.com be considered a reliable source for firearms-related articles? I'm unfamiliar with this source, and I can't find any past discussion in the archives here. It's particularly relevant at the moment as the reliability of it is a point at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Lazzeroni rifle. Hog Farm _Bacon 05:37, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Not a reliable source. It is just a online website that connects gun buyers with licenced gun dealers. Assume that anything you see on guns.com is an ad. --Guy Macon (talk) 06:39, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Meh... while it is mostly ads, it does have a “news” section - which contains reviews of and articles about various firearms (modern and historical). I would say that this section may be borderline reliable. That said, having quickly read through a few of those articles, I would say that anything of value for wikipedia can probably be found in a MORE reliable firearms source. So... while I would not prohibit it, I would definitely say we should look for better sources. Blueboar (talk) 20:19, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Not reliable: it's a commercial web site, as evidenced by a large banner on the home page: "Free shipping on orders of $500 or more". --K.e.coffman (talk) 01:46, 21 July 2020 (UTC)
- Eh, the NYTs has worse for subscriptions. Hobit (talk) 05:29, 21 July 2020 (UTC)
- The difference is that NYT has a reputation for accuracy and fact checking, while guns.com does not. --K.e.coffman (talk) 17:53, 21 July 2020 (UTC)
  - That I agree is the important distinction. I continue to disagree with your original reasoning--being a commercial website, in-and-of-itself, isn't a reason to call it "not reliable". That said, I wouldn't be surprised if guns.com does have a reputation for accuracy and fact checking wrt guns. Do you know otherwise? Hobit (talk) 20:22, 22 July 2020 (UTC)
Seems like they would be considered reliable, they have staff writers and editors.[4][5] So things from their news section I would see as fine. PackMecEng (talk) 18:16, 21 July 2020 (UTC)
Reliable as subject matter experts. Like many firearms sites we would need to be careful when using them for things other than technical information about firearms. They are probably good for a "firearm's owner perspective" on topics but in that regard I would treat them a bit like a SPS. So if a new law is passed and guns.com says "firearms owners are concerned about this law because of X" then I think we could use it. We should not use it if they are opining about will the law reduce crime or similar. Springee (talk) 22:48, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH)

National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH)
Formerly National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM)
Formerly Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM)

Is this a

WP:MEDRS

reliable source?

Cited on various pages on the topics of medicine and alternative medicine. Example:

Turmeric#Medical research says

"Turmeric and curcumin, one of its constituents, have been studied in numerous clinical trials for various human diseases and conditions, but the conclusions have either been uncertain or negative. Claims that curcumin in turmeric may help to reduce inflammation remain unproven as of 2020."

with a citation to [ https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/turmeric ].

(I ran across the above while investigating Ulcerative colitis#Alternative medicine, which paints a different picture:

"Curcumin (turmeric) therapy, in conjunction with taking the medications mesalamine or sulfasalazine, may be effective and safe for maintaining remission in people with quiescent ulcerative colitis. The effect of curcumin therapy alone on quiescent ulcerative colitis is unknown."

A bit different from what the Tumeric page says.)

Previous RSN coverage::

Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 32#Usage of Quackwatch as RS in medical quackery (mentioned in passing)
Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 55#How can Quackwatch be considered a "reliable source"? (mentioned in passing)
Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 186#NCCIH -- discussed in 2015

Criticism from

The Journal of the American Medical Association, the Chicago Tribune, and Skeptical Inquirer

:
National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health#Criticism

Criticism from the American Association for the Advancement of Science:
Will a name change make NIH research center less controversial?

Mention in passing in Wired:
An Alternative-Medicine Believer's Journey Back to Science

Coverage in Science-Based Medicine:
The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM): Your tax dollars hard at work]

Coverage in the

Skeptics Dictionary

:
NCCAM

Articles in Quackwatch:

--Guy Macon (talk) 09:00, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

NCCIH itself is not a MEDRS (though it funds studies which might be - it has spent, to date, something over $3bn trying to validate alternatives to medicine, with, thus far, zero success). Yes, they were founded to promote quackery, by people with a vested interest in quackery, but they have at least stopped even considering studies on homeopathy so they are not a total lost cause and now they are mainly advocates of the whole "integrative" bullshit (the idea that by integrating quackery with medicine you somehow make medicine better, in the same way that integrating horse apples with bramleys obviously improves your apple pie). I don't see a problem with a summary page that carries one of its negative conclusions, but obviously we need to avoid breathless press releases. Guy (help!) 09:27, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
This is NCCAM as was.[6] I would say it was a MEDRS of last resort (like WebMD, Mayo Clinic), okay for backing non-surprising knowledge, but definitely not okay for anything surprising (e.g. treatment efficacy not covered in other good MEDRS). Surprising claims for altmed are
talk
) 13:36, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
NCCIH web site [7] - is a low-quality tertiary source. Our turmeric and curcumin pages are much better. As about the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, yes, it is concerning. 22 million spent to answer the question: "Does prayer treat diseases?". And they get the answer: "no, it does not". Well, but this is wrong answer. Of course the psychology, personal beliefs and the mood of a patient can affect the success of his treatments and his choice of medical treatments. That includes true believers praying and refusing to receive a treatment. 22 million wasted. My very best wishes (talk) 17:42, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
I believe that the consensus so far is: NCCIH itself (and material published when it was called NCCAM or OAM) is a non-MEDRS, low-quality tertiary source and should be avoided. Studies published only by NCCIH should be treated as MEDRS of last resort (much like like WebMD) that can be used for non-surprising knowledge, but not for anything not covered in other good sources. In particular, nothing from NCCIH should be used as a citation to support any claims regarding alternative medicine, pseudoscience, or treatment efficacy. Does anyone disagree with the above summary? --Guy Macon (talk) 13:36, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

I think they can be used to say non-surprising things about treatment efficacy (i.e. that something doesn't work - which as a global default assumption for any treatment is ipso facto unsurprising). Their high-level summaries sometimes contain useful stuff like that, along with other useful knowledge like what people claim, how something is classified with the altmed world and so on. See

talk

) 13:50, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

Good clarification. Better than my version. --Guy Macon (talk) 13:57, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

Agree. It can be used, and it may be helpful. This is not a "link to avoid". My very best wishes (talk) 18:52, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

Hi

Alexbrn, to ensure that all opinions are accounted for before consensus is evaluated, we usually wait until the noticeboard discussion is archived before adding an entry to the list. Unless there is dissent, your summary looks good and we can adapt it for the entry. — Newslinger talk

02:32, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

NCCIH is only reliable for verifying that a particular alternative/complimentary/integrative/wellness regime exists and perhaps for what its advocates claim it does. It is explicitly not tasked with scientific/medical exploration of these subjects, and so should not be considered reliable for scientific or medical information. jps (talk) 20:24, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Realtor.com as RS for edits in articles

This is a question that

WP:DUE

?

My feeling is realtor.com doesn't pass our

wp:RS criteria for a generally reliable site. As a large real estate site it might be acceptable for factual statements about home's purchase history or related details but I don't see how we would consider their information to establish weight absent some other RS raising the issue in context of a BLP or other article. If the article is about a famous home, for example Ben Rose House or Herbert and Katherine Jacobs First House, I can see using realtor.com as a reference for information like last sale date/price. In that case the home is the subject of the article so such transnational information is inherently relevant the way birth date, location and parents are by default part of a BLP. Springee (talk

) 20:02, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Tough one. It's reliable for the listing/sale of a house, in the sense that if Realtor.com says such-and-such a property sold for $1M, that's almost certainly accurate. It's also non-controversial information that is readily verifiable in any number of public sources, so there's probably a better source available for it. For example, a celebrity mansion sale will usually be reported in a newspaper.

A bigger concern is that Realtor.com stories about specific properties are usually advertisements, as is the case here (see disclaimer at the bottom of the article). For obvious reasons we shouldn't cite advertisements, even if they're factually accurate (eg, for price).

Yet another aspect is that Realtor.com is also a trade organization and publishes industry news, for which I think it is reliable (eg, a story about house sales rising in the US, or about broker commissions falling because of Redfin). For industry news I think it's reliable but should be attributed, and it should count as DUE. For individual sales, a better source should be found, and it should not count as DUE, because even if reliable, it's an advertisement. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 20:11, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

- In this particular case Realtor.com has a "news" section. At least in the case of the Blake Bortles article it appears the house is for sale at the time the article was published. That is a problem as it becomes a clear advertisement. If the article was talking about a home that was off the market I would still question DUE. Anyway, I agree the specific, fluffy information is likely accurate but WEIGHT is a serious concern. Springee (talk) 20:26, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

I still don't understand WEIGHT. And I don't understand why realtor.com News isn't considered a 'generally reliable' site. Realtor.com News is a separate section of the site for real estate news. The News section of the site is not bought and paid for by realtors. It does have banner ads and other advertising -- as do most other publishers on the web.

If content is sponsored, it is clearly labeled as paid. See here: https://www.realtor.com/sponsored/newlywed-first-time-home-buyer-journeys/

These articles about noteworthy people buying and selling homes are not advertorials -- the articles are not paid for by anyone -- listing agents, brokerages, or the celebrities covered. They are reported articles. If you're referring to the disclaimer at the bottom of the article, that is for disclosure of affiliate advertising links and is legal practice to disclose.

This question stems from Tucker Carlson article. If his house in Washington DC that was protested outside was deemed worthy enough for inclusion in his article, why isn't the fact that he's selling that very same home a fact that should be included in his article?

realtor.com News was the first to report about this sale. Is it only newsworthy if a newspaper regurgitates a story realtor.com reported on first?Tacohead1000 (talk) 23:19, 21 July 2020 (UTC)Tacohead 1000

Generally unreliable ("News & Insights" section only, excluding "Research" section). Realtor.com's "News & Insights" is a
group blog written solely by freelance writers. It serves as content marketing for its core real estate listing business. Realtor.com does not provide a list of staff members or any evidence of editorial oversight. — Newslinger talk
01:58, 22 July 2020 (UTC)
Painting with such a broad brush? Sure, part of Realtor.com's "News & Insights" is a group blog... but another part is their Research section, which is staffed with economists whose reports are cited by The New York Times. I don't think all of Realtor.com is generally unreliable... there's too much nuance to declare the entire website "reliable" or "unreliable". (For those who can't access the NYT article, the relevant quote is: "Housing supply was already tight in recent years, especially for first-time buyers, because of the sluggish pace of new construction, said Danielle Hale, chief economist for the listing site Realtor.com. Then uncertainty because of the pandemic gave buyers cold feet, leading some sellers to pull their homes from the market. Home sales in April were down about 18 percent from a year earlier. Declines were particularly steep in the West. But Realtor.com reported this week that there were signs of improvement in May, “setting the stage” for continued recovery over the summer.") And here is an example report by Ms. Hale and another Realtor.com economic analyst, about US housing market in June 2020. I think it'd be a perfectly good RS to use to update an article like
Home-ownership in the United States, among others. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss}
] 05:04, 22 July 2020 (UTC)
Thanks, the link to the research team is helpful. I've narrowed my previous opinion to the "News & Insights" section, which does not appear to employ any of the researchers. Articles in the "News & Insights" section have URLs beginning with https://www.realtor.com/news/ or https://www.realtor.com/advice/, while articles in the "Research" section have URLs beginning with https://www.realtor.com/research/. The "Research" section looks usable to me, although some of the insights are
primary. — Newslinger talk
05:16, 22 July 2020 (UTC)
Agreed about primary. But note that if you hover the mouse over "News & Insights", "Research" is one of the entries under "Insights", so it appears Research is a sub-section of "News & Insights". There are a couple dozen other sub-sections, I haven't explored them all. The "Celebrity Real Estate" sub-section is what I was focusing on in my original post. Those articles look like advertorial; they contain the disclaimer at the bottom "The realtor.com® editorial team highlights a curated selection of product recommendations for your consideration; clicking a link to the retailer that sells the product may earn us a commission." (example). Same with the "unique homes" subsection. However, the "Housing Market Predictions" subsection is also in the /research/ folder and seems to be done by the research team, and includes, e.g., this analysis of the impact COVID has had on the housing market, which I think could be usable for, e.g. COVID-19 recession. So it seems "News & Insights" includes both reliable (research, housing market predictions) and unreliable (celebrity real estate, unique homes) subsections. I think you're right it looks like /research/ is the good stuff and /news/ has the rest (/advice/ redirects me to /news/). Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 05:27, 22 July 2020 (UTC)
Since "Research" is under "Insights" on the menu, but not under /advice in the URL, it looks like the URL is the simplest way to identify whether an article is under the purview of Realtor.com's research team. URLs are also less likely to change than the menu layout, since moving the directories could disrupt the site's
SEO. http://www.realtor.com/advice/ does redirect me to https://www.realtor.com/news/, but the "Insight" categories linked from the menu (e.g. https://www.realtor.com/advice/buy/) seem to list articles that remain under the /advice subdirectory. — Newslinger talk
05:59, 22 July 2020 (UTC)
When I posted this I was debating NPOVN or here since often a source raises a question on both. For all the information on the site how would we handle a question of DUE? In general I think if something else in the article is raising the question/issue etc then citing an article at Realtor.com is probably OK, possibly including home listing information. Conversely, I don't think information is DUE in basically any article if WEIGHT is justified because Realtor.com had an article about it. Does that align with the views of others here? Springee (talk) 13:17, 22 July 2020 (UTC)
Your original comment referred to "Life’s a Beach: Jaguars QB Blake Bortles Buys Oceanfront Home in Jacksonville" as an example. Since that article is under /news and also concerns a
undue (as due weight only takes viewpoints from reliable sources into account). If another reliable source reported on the home purchase, that reliable source would be eligible for citation, even if the reliable source referred to Realtor.com in its coverage. — Newslinger talk
21:24, 22 July 2020 (UTC)
I think we are in agreement. I started this after removing a number of edits sourced to articles such as the example I gave. I don't endorse using that link as either reliable or DUE (which are tied together as you suggest). Springee (talk) 21:55, 22 July 2020 (UTC)
I also agree with the above. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 22:41, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Quality sources for tentative haplogroups of historic people

Hey all! Recently I added a section to Haplogroup R1b about historic people who may belong to this haplogroup. I used mostly the page List of haplogroups of historic people to find candidates, but discarded some sources I couldn't find on Google Scholar and/or that did not explicitly state R1b. The list was framed as: "may belong to the R1b haplogroup, as suggested by the testing of descendants or other relatives". Doug Weller then deleted two entries from the list, the first because the article I cited says if "Niall was a real life figure, he may have belonged to this male lineage, but this is not certain" and the second because the article was "not peer reviewed and authors are not geneticists". My question is: what criteria for quality should we use? I think the point of the list, and the section I created, is simply to compile the names of people who may belong to the given haplogroup (namely as a way to get people interested in doing haplogroup high-quality research, such as this https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4943878/, which may emerge from people wanting to disprove a certain hypothesis), and in terms of the haplogroups of historic people list, very little will remain if we use a list of criteria as strict as Doug Weller is suggesting, which seems to be: 1) peer review, 2) geneticists in the team, and 3) a well documented genealogy from the historic person to tested relatives. After reflecting on Doug's arguments, I think that, because this is an easily polemic issue, I would require criterion 1, but would not require 2 and 3. Thanks everyone!, CriMen1 (talk) 14:16, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

You have to use quality RS or some genetics magazine or some newspaper. It would be best to use scientific paper but there are probably few such sources for now. Everything else is probable

WP:OR. Mikola22 (talk

) 14:36, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

@CriMen1: great discussion! I have been thinking of the same issue in the past weeks. The debate is more conceptual than wikipedia's policy framework. The real question here is at which point are commercial testing and citizen science groups (whose work is fueled by volunteers who may or may not part of the interdisciplinary approach that would be required in a peer-reviewed environment) equally reliable to a peer-reviewed article. It's a fundamental question that arises from the fact that in population genetics the volume of research in volunteer groups which are usually supported by a commercial company (for example, FTDNA's DNA projects) is much larger than peer-reviewed studies. The exponential increase in volume in such groups means that ultimately their results are actually more reliable than a study published in a journal because sampling is much larger. In terms of testing enviroment, there is little actual divergence between the two because the labs that do the technical work follow the same standards. I think that we should be using these results in wikipedia with some attribution except for the case in which the descendants of these figures post the results themselves. Attribution is unnecessary in this case.--Maleschreiber (talk) 15:36, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

If you want to treat commercial organisations and amateur groups as equal to peer reviewed literature, this isn't the place to seek consensus, that would be Wikipedia talk:Verifiability. Doug Weller talk 17:10, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

I'm not making a broad generalization, but I am highlighting that the line between reliable/peer-reviewed and "amateur"/non-peer-reviewed studies is getting increasingly blurrier in Y-DNA/mtDNA research, so we should assess this new reality in terms of policy.--Maleschreiber (talk) 18:15, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

There definitely is a big difference between (good) peer review and amateur/non-peer-reviewed (A/NPR) studies (see [9] for an example of peer-review's limitations) and most of it is actually post-peer-review (the fact most people consider peer review to be high quality means there is more scrutiny even after peer review, which is why Bem's study led to a crisis in Psychology and multiple rebuttals while most parapsychology studies outside canon journals have zero impact and reaction). But I think a resource Doug shared in our initial discussion in his talk page [10] does show that even non-peer-reviewed studies of enough notoriety can be reviewed by credible sources after they are published. Thus, I would lean towards including A/NPR sources if they are mentioned by newspapers, as TDF suggests below. Thanks! CriMen1 (talk) 22:47, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

If the source doesn't say that Niall of the Nine Hostages might have belonged to the haplogroup then we cannot say that either, since it violates synthesis. I believe though that Nature is a reliable source. I don't see why we are discussing types of sources: the source used was an article in a peer-reviewed paper in a genetics journal. However there is no reason why otherwise reliable sources such as newspaper articles cannot be used as sources for the list. While some of these sources may rely on amateur research, we rely on writers of reliable sources to distinguish between what is accurate and what is not, something that policy prohibits us from doing ourselves. TFD (talk) 20:12, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

I did not violate synthesis, but I think Doug's point was that that if the authors explicitly stated that they were unsure about such conclusion, then the quality of the statement was not sufficient for a Wikipedia page. But I think you're right and the best thing to do may just be to add all newspaper and journal sources, including any rebuttals when they exist (and people then can see which genetic haplogroup assignments have been polemic in the past). Thanks! CriMen1 (talk) 22:47, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

bioRxiv (discussion on RS for haplogroups)

This discussion is relevant and related to another

WP:USINGSPS the "Self-published expert sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established expert on the subject matter, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications". It seems that per editing policy advantage has expert sources who are published in a peer-review journal or self-published preprints but the authors are experts from the relevant field whose sources previously were published in peer-review journals. Hopefully, this discussion will bring to a new explanatory supplement for the editing community regarding the use of self-published expert sources in preprint at bioRxiv. --Miki Filigranski (talk

) 02:36, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

Who owns the server hosting the material is irrelevant. Screening for Plagiarism is not editorial review. And it is entirely unworkable to claim that anyone who has ever published a science paper is then a reliable source for anything they put online anywhere. A scientific result that has not passed peer review is not reliable. Agricolae (talk) 03:42, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

That's against what's written in the editing policy and guideline, and those 85 experts are not "anyone" like you.--Miki Filigranski (talk) 04:34, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

That is right, they are not 'anyone, like me', because my CV is better than many of theirs. Shouldn't that make me even more of an expert? And since everything such an expert says is inherently reliable, why are we having this discussion? Agricolae (talk) 19:45, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

In comparison to Joe Roe, or even me, I don't see where's written you have a degree, better CV or are an expert in anything. You made an exceptional claim about yourself, but there's no substance to trust you on the word. Anyway, nobody cares much if you're an expert or not, Wikipedia is edited according to RS which are independent from ourselves.--Miki Filigranski (talk) 23:48, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

You are absolutely right, Wikipedia is not about the qualifications of editors, but I wasn't talking about that - I was talking about "anyone who has ever published a science paper [being] a reliable source for anything they put online." It was you who here decided to make it about me, saying "those 85 experts are not 'anyone' like you" (emphasis added). That would tend to suggest not only that you thought my qualifications were relevant, but also that you knew enough about them to compare them to those of 85 other people, yet now you instead insist that those same qualifications that you raised are irrelevant, and that you somehow managed to do that comparison without the slightest knowledge of what my qualifications are. Do, please, get your story straight. Or better yet, don't bother: it is unlikely to be productive to this discussion either way. Agricolae (talk) 00:37, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

You started to talk about it, don't lie. I am only replying to what you were already saying. You are the one who treated and compared the experts in the talk pages to "somebody", "anyone", and yourself, downplaying the expertise and reliability of the experts.--Miki Filigranski (talk) 23:09, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Even if this paper had been peer-reviewed already, it would still be PRIMARY. It's not a review or meta-analysis that would reflect scientific consensus, which is especially important for contentious claims. Just because lay media are reporting on it (because it's going to get clicks, as would any papers relating to race) doesn't mean the results are reproducible or that the authors' conclusions are accurate. Policy aside, in my opinion even though a bioRxiv preprint is more likely to end up being reliable, it's actually worse to cite than something self-published on an expert's website, since the "journal" ref template automatically lends legitimacy to the results (and a lot of readers aren't familiar with aRxiv and so don't know it's not peer-reviewed). Why not just wait for the article to at least come out? I think Agricolae is correct here. JoelleJay (talk) 03:59, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

I expressed something similar to JoelleJay's point elsewhere - this novel result you have dropped into four articles and edit warred to retain is not just another incremental scientific study. Its conclusions fly in the face of the centuries-long historical consensus - it has the potential to be paradigm shifting. It would be best to wait and see how it is received by the field, rather than to report that the established consensus is wrong (either directly or by implication) using a single PRIMARY source - and that is the case after it has been formally published, let alone before it has been deemed worthy of publication. Agricolae (talk) 04:16, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

The study doesn't have a single word about the consensus. It doesn't claim or point out that it is wrong. That's your OR interpretation. If bothers you the fact the two mentioned haplogroups are mainly related and present among the Slavic-speaking populations then that information can be removed from the article.--Miki Filigranski (talk) 04:34, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

You want it both ways - you are putting it in two broader-concept articles, but claiming that any consideration of its implications for the broader concept is original research. Agricolae (talk) 04:50, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

No, I don't. Why are you lying?--Miki Filigranski (talk) 05:03, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

I'm not. Agricolae (talk) 19:45, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

PRIMARY has nothing to do with the issue. We are dealing with the genetic fact of the skeletal remains, not an interpretation, and no other studies can find another haplogroup from these which were found, they can only bring further the current results to more downward subclades of the same haplogroups on the phylogenetic tree. Per PRIMARY, it "may be used on Wikipedia only to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts that can be verified by any educated person with access to the primary source but without further, specialized knowledge", without any interpretation, as such the mention of the distribution of the same haplogroups and their subclades can be removed. However, the factual information about the Y-DNA haplogroups and atDNA should stay. --Miki Filigranski (talk) 04:34, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

No, we are not dealing with a genetic fact. We are dealing with a genetic claim that hasn't yet passed peer review, and only time will tell how it comes to be viewed by the field. Agricolae (talk) 04:50, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

Why did you start playing with words? Why you ignore and don't follow what's written in the policy guideline? How the information will be be viewed i.e. interpreted by SECONDARY in the future doesn't have anything to do with information's reliability and verifiability. That's not of our concern.--Miki Filigranski (talk) 05:03, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

@Agricolae A scientific result that has not passed peer review is not reliable. You have example of Youtube and 170,000 informations on Wikipedia which have Youtube as a source. Where are these information "peer reviewed"? I agree with editor Miki Filigranski that in this case biorxiv is RS, experts are listed there and they control it. It is not a personal research of personal origin, personal ancestors, surname ancestors, relatives, etc on some private portal. I don't believe experts which exist on biorxiv support fairy tales by presenting something falsely through this portal. Mikola22 (talk) 06:28, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

That's...a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of both what Agricolae said and what scientific RS means. YouTube is not and should not be used as a source for scientific statements, obviously. bioRxiv is not appropriate for those either, per

WP:NOTNEWS and the various guidelines surrounding MEDRS. The expert SPS considerations (which I believe are discouraged for scientific claims anyway) are generally for secondary or tertiary analysis of other people's work. Papers reporting experimental results are decidedly PRIMARY, even when they're published in reputable journals; in this case, the study hasn't even been published yet. Inserting uncontested, unattributed statements like "According to DNA from skeletal remains was of 71% Slavic and 24% Southern European ancestry estimate, belonged to Y-haplogroup I2 subclade I2a1a2b1a1a-Y3120 and mtDNA-haplogroup H5a2a" in wikivoice is entirely inappropriate when it's only based on a preprint that has been languishing in the review process for a year. I would also argue the sentence as phrased (and ignoring the grammar errors) is overly-technical and out of place in the article. JoelleJay (talk

) 06:59, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

Can you cite for everyone where it is stated at NOTNEWS scientific repository like bioRxiv is not appropriate? MEDRS is more strict to primary sources as generally should not be used for medical content but per MEDPRI "Primary sources should not be cited with intent of "debunking", contradicting, or countering any conclusions made by secondary sources. Synthesis of published material advancing a position is original research, and Wikipedia is not a venue for open research. Controversies or uncertainties in medicine should be supported by reliable secondary sources describing the varying viewpoints. Primary sources should not be aggregated or presented without context in order to undermine proportionate representation of opinion in a field. If material can be supported by either primary or secondary sources – the secondary sources should be used. Primary sources may be presented together with secondary sources". The editor Agricolae brought out the issue of context and that primary sources should be used for statements of facts without further interpretation, but it is seemingly contrary to the MEDPRI advise the primary source should be presented with a context and together with secondary sources, possibly like in my edit at Rurik dynasty / Rus' people. As for the sentence you brought up, it is difficult to argue against or pro for the arguments you said, and nevertheless better phrasing, remind that Wikipedia:Why MEDRS? and Wikipedia:Biomedical information show that the MEDPRI was made with biomedical & health information in mind, and not (population) genetics, which makes the reliability issue more complex because these fields information don't have the same approach.--Miki Filigranski (talk) 08:21, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

Nice finding by Mikola22 by the way, the study has been cited in two peer-review published studies The spatiotemporal spread of human migrations during the European Holocene by

PNAS and Beyond broad strokes: sociocultural insights from the study of ancient genomes by Nature. It gives the study, besides the expertise and peer review publishing of previous studies of the experts, additional reliability. --Miki Filigranski (talk

) 16:35, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

@

WP:MEDRS on Wikipedian articles. The scope of this discussion is reaching a clear consensus on the matter because some editors contest the reliability and verifiability nevertheless the expertise of the authors or institutions to which the authors are related.--Miki Filigranski (talk

) 17:40, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

arXiv and bioRxiv are not peer reviewed. These are generally fine for routine claims like "X is a protein" or "Research have studied X" but not for "Research has shown that X".

b

} 20:23, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

Those two citations to the study are by the study's authors, citing themselves. Note the presence of Racimo and Sikora on all three.

talk

) 01:43, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

aRxiv is classified as "generally unreliable" here There is consensus that arXiv is a self-published source, and is generally unreliable with the exception of papers authored by established subject-matter experts. The part about subject-matter experts is interpretable, but consider the apparent consensus here on using an arXiv preprint of another population genetics study. The circumstances that led to established SMEs sometimes being considered RS seem to have arisen from Grigori Perelman's Poincaré conjecture papers being published exclusively on the arXiv: if it was debatable for WP to use an SPS from someone with that level of expertise and notability, whose exceptionally groundbreaking work was covered extensively by secondary sources, I don't think this paper qualifies. JoelleJay (talk) 17:53, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

Good argumentation. However, the mentioned population genetics study had only a single expert with an h-index of 21 when we are dealing here with 85 experts with similar or higher h-index and from different institutions. Also, that source was controversial in its context and statements, while the source on Vikings has nothing controversial in its context and statements. Grigori Perelman doesn't seem to be a good example for exception and argument because per SPS its specifically stated that the expert(s) in the field need to have produced papers published in peer review journals, without any variation on the condition, yet Perelman did not publish a single peer-review paper and as such his self-published primary sources shouldn't be cited at all. Due to this reason, Perelman does not even have an h-index value to analyze and compare the reliability and notability of individual experts. In other words, its exactly the opposite of what you're saying, this preprinted paper with 85 experts who had papers published in peer-review journals qualifies more than any self-published paper by a single expert Perelman.--Miki Filigranski (talk) 19:24, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

True, although I think (declining) the Fields Medal supersedes the (self-imposed) publication requirements, especially since Science ended up honoring his work as "Breakthrough of the Year" (based on the input of open peer-reviewers--essentially qualifying as peer review) and independent mathematicians have since verified his results and built upon them using the frameworks he introduced. Regarding the 85 contributors to the Viking paper: it is hard to say what the definition of established subject-matter expert is, but my interpretation is the person should be well-known as an authority within their field. For example, generally when journalists seek expert opinion on scientific topics, or when high-impact biomedical journals need reviewers, they approach PIs, not post-docs or research associates (who almost by definition of their positions do not have an established track record). I think WP would do well to take this into account for SPS exceptions. On the other hand, there is the interesting question of whether having dozens of authors on a preprint increases the weighting towards being treated as RS, or if authorship position is more important and only first two and last two authors should be assessed. I don't know the answer to that. JoelleJay (talk) 23:53, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

If is not stated in policy & guidelines and explanatory supplement that individual recognition supersedes the publication requirements i.e. the experts or published in peer review journals or received academic recognition, then its wrong interpretation and including the self-published source is against the editing policy. There could be made a good argument that the quantity of experts gives additional weight to the reliability. Their individual definition of expertise probably should be based on h-index because it is based on journal publishing and citation which is directly related to SPS condition on the experts. I wouldn't place any limit to which authors should be assessed because is prohibiting of correctly defining the expertise value of the quantity.--Miki Filigranski (talk) 20:08, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Comment @

WP:AGE MATTERS, ie with something quality and new that we have, and this is and bioRxiv, or some similar media, genetic magazine, a newspaper article etc. Y-DNA R-M17 is from European Mesolithic time and the article speaks about spread of Indo-European languages? R1a has connections but younger mutations of the same not R-M17. Mikola22 (talk

) 09:21, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

Most of the haplogroup articles are poor quality in terms of how they use scientific sources. Citing them to justify source use elsewhere is like pointing to someone traveling in excess of the posted limit as an example to be emulated for road safety.Agricolae (talk) 16:50, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

I think Wikipedia should use more recent informations as far as genetics is concerned, that’s the point of my answer, so I won't talk about it anymore. As for bioRxiv is concerns, I found two genetic scientific papers(2020) which use information from that work. It's your right to dispute that source (all options are open to you) but I don't think there should be a problem. For me it is a very quality source especially when we see which institutions participated in it. Mikola22 (talk) 17:28, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

And I think the 'bleeding edge' of genetic research, or any science, is emphatically not where Wikipedia should be. I think we should wait on all scientific results to see how the field incorporates them into their broader understanding, rather than just chasing one overhyped, hot-off-the-presses publication (or in this case, pre-publication) after another, when a lot of them land in the broader research community with a dull thud and then are ignored, or worse, brushed aside as an unlikely alternative to the accepted narrative. It is far better to wait and be sure a result is seen as correct and noteworthy than to repeatedly incorporate and distribute, only to then have to remove, information that almost immediately ends up being viewed as insignificant or outright wrong. Agricolae (talk) 19:28, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

The bioRxiv, like the arXiv before it, is not peer-reviewed and should be regarded as generally unreliable. Their own About page says, No endorsement of an article’s methods, assumptions, conclusions, or scientific quality by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is implied by its appearance in bioRxiv. Even statements that look like bare statements of fact ("the percentage of X was Y") can fall apart during the review process, if a reviewer finds a methdological error. There are occasions where pointing to the bioRxiv would be legitimate, just as there are times when we can cite an arXiv preprint, but those exceptions are rare — even more rare for bioRxiv than for arXiv. Pointing to some professor's lecture notes to provide a free-to-read explanation of a decades-old mathematical theorem, for example, is far less troublesome than promoting unreviewed work about human genetics.

talk

) 18:16, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia is explicitly original research demand that we present prevailing medical or scientific consensus, which can be found in recent, authoritative review articles.... This
Wikipedia essay specifically states However, primary sources describing genetic or genomic research into human ancestry, ancient populations, ethnicity, race, and the like, should not be used to generate content about those subjects, which are controversial. High quality secondary sources as described above should be used instead.

Population genetics studies, like in every other science, can have methodological flaws (as well as interpretation/presentation issues (see the retracted article The origin of Palestinians and their genetic relatedness with other Mediterranean populations)). Phase and SNP errors can cloud IBD analyses used for population structure imputation, as false positives increase substantially when you have a lot of unrelated individuals. Haplotype inference, particularly when phasing unrelated individuals and when sample size is low, is prone to switch errors (haplotype is misassigned), with the Beagle software and reference panel (1000GP) used in the study having the highest switch error rate out of 11 approaches assessed in this review (Beagle 4-something is very good for much larger datasets, though). See also the review "Seven common mistakes in population genetics and how to avoid them", this general review on depth and coverage, how small datasets can introduce extreme biases during haplotype reconstruction, and how imputation errors bias genomic predictions. I'm not familiar enough with population paleogenetics to comment on whether their 0.1–11X coverage depth, in conjunction with their sample size of 442 ancient individuals, is considered robust in this field (which I imagine has lower quality thresholds due to aDNA degradation). 30X coverage is the minimum in a lot of medical applications, though. All of this is to demonstrate how important it is for such a sprawling article to be thoroughly reviewed by other experts who can point out inference issues or software limitations etc. JoelleJay (talk) 23:04, 19 July 2020 (UTC)
Agree on recentism, partly on methodological review due to complexity of the research and interpretation of the data (aDNA), but not with stating a simple fact like Y-DNA haplogroup which data cannot be interpreted in different way.--Miki Filigranski (talk) 23:37, 19 July 2020 (UTC)
JoelleJay just explained how in certain circumstances 'Haplotype inference . . . can be prone to switch errors' where the haplotype is misassigned, so haplotype data can indeed be interpreted in different (or at least wrong) ways, and thus the haplotype is no more a 'simple fact' than anything else in such a paper. Agricolae (talk) 00:45, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Y haplogroup assignment is determined mainly via SNP-calling algorithms (in this paper, Yleaf), with increasing assumptions when phasing with unrelated individuals and when coverage is low (as in this study). Misassignment rate is a common parameter algorithms try to reduce (some of the more widely-used ones have an error rate of ~5%). This also already assumes that wet lab prep was satisfactory, that the Yleaf assumptions/constraints used were appropriate, and that any discordant marker results were correctly accounted for. JoelleJay (talk) 01:44, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

One can simply follow WP:RS. For example, the review article in Nature (at the top of this thread) is a good RS, and it can be used. Obviously, all methods have limitations and can produce wrong results, but that's beyond the point. Such info can and should be used as something reliably published.
WP:MEDRS does not apply to history pages, but that source even passes WP:MEDRS. As about bioRxiv, please remember that RS is not only a place of publication, but reputation of authors. If authors are reputable scientists, I think there is nothing wrong with using bioRxiv. This is not politics or pseudosciaence; there is no incentive to lie; quite the opposite. Changes during the review process are usually not significant if authors have a good reputation. As about specific edits, like that one, the participant removes references not only to bioRxiv, but to a number of other sources, such as "European Journal of Human Genetics", which id definitely a valid RS. My very best wishes (talk
) 02:42, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

User:My very best wishes, you are severely misinterpreting why the EJHG reference was removed there. The EJGH article never mentions the Rurikids, and once the BioRxiv material was removed, we would no longer have any other mention of the haplogroup that the EJHG material is there to explain. So it has to go if the BioRxiv material goes, for reasons having nothing to do with reliability of EJHG. As to the BioRxiv material not being politics or pseudoscience, or the authors telling lies, those are not the biggest concerns, although ti all does happen. What is a concern is the possibility of either flawed technique or interpretation, both of which can affect people at all levels of science, and this is best addressed through peer-review. Without that, all science is simply preliminary. (For that matter, even individual primary papers are preliminary, but at least there has been some level of evaluation.) Particularly with a big-science paper with 85 authors, it is simply not reflective of how the actual process of data collection, interpretation and paper writing works in the real world to suggest that the expertise of the most-published authors imbues the entire work with inherent reliability (which in the more seedy side of science can be the sole reason a well-known researcher might be added to a paper, trading a little resume padding for some second-hand credibility). In this case, the paper doesn't even mention the Rurik dynasty nor name any of its individual members, and it only mentions the Rus' in one sentence. Surely all 85 co-authors didn't add their expertise to that one sentence. 15:22, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
Agricolae, I did not read these sources. This is just a general comment. Please see Definition of the source in WP:RS. I think you and some others overemphasize the significance of peer review. In science and possibly other fields, the qualification of authors and the quality of their work (2nd component of RS) means a lot more than peer review. The peer review is important, but it does not guarantee anything, including possible retraction of an article after publication, the significance of the work or whatever. "Surely all 85 co-authors didn't add their expertise...". Perhaps they did not, but they must read the paper and be responsible for whole content. Someone arguing that such source is better has valid point. But yes, one could say that "all science is simply preliminary". My very best wishes (talk) 17:15, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
Of course peer review doesn't guarantee anything, but it at least provides a basic independent evaluation, which is totally lacking in a BioRxiv upload. When science itself considers such non-reviewed works not to be reliable, Wikipedia shouldn't be deciding it knows better because of the ambiguous interpretation of some one-size-fits-all policy. And because all science is preliminary, waiting for SECONDARY sources is even better than chasing every unconfirmed upload of anyone who has ever published a paper. Depending on where this was submitted, a review process going on 9 months is starting to look like there could be real problems with this work, and the thing is, if such problems are identified, that would prevent publication (it happens) the authors are never going to tell us that of BioRxiv, and are unlikely to remove that paper from the Rxiv, so we will be basing a Wikipedia article on material that has demonstrably been rejected, with no way of even knowing it. Yes, one can read that 'expert' provision in a way that says there is nothing wrong with this, but in the context of the way science and its publication process actually works and how unpublished science is actually viewed by scientists, we shouldn't be touching novel claims in non-peer-reviewed material with a ten foot pole, let alone picking one datapoint out of it to make a different point. As to [all 85 authors] 'must read the paper and be responsible for the whole content', let's just say that in actual practice with a big-science paper like this, the collective responsibility can be pretty nominal, and that is when everything is done properly: I have personally seen a high-profile person demand their name be added to a paper when they did nothing but have their post-doc FedEx a reagent, and they felt no need whatsoever to read the actual paper, while I learned I had been a coauthor on one paper two years after it came out. We are reading way to much into the fact that this paper has a small number of experts among its herd of authors. Agricolae (talk) 19:07, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
I realize that was a bit of a wall of text and I didn't want this to get lost: The very first line of WP:RS (emphasis added) ways: "Articles should be based on reliable, independent, published sources . . .". When you combine a sub-sub-rule permitting SPS from 'experts' with this explicit top-level requirement for independence, I have to conclude this leeway given an expert for SPS is not intended to absolve their own work from the need for independence that applies to reliability in all other cases. Instead it is allowing a recognized expert to provide the independent evaluation of the work of others in place of the typical editorial or peer review process. There is no independence to a BioRxiv upload. Agricolae (talk) 19:34, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
@My very best wishes: For now this paper is used in four genetic scientific papers[11], I think it shows quality of the source. If this source is used in scientific papers, I see no reason why it shouldn’t be used on Wikipedia as well. Mikola22 (talk) 19:43, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
Yes, it is exactly what I am talking about. Consider this article [12] (from bioroxiv and your discussion on talk page). Is it an RS? Just looking at the names of the large group of authors and their scientific affiliations, the answer is obviously "yes". But the argument here is not something being cited in other RS (Kavkaz Center was widely cited, but not an RS), but the fact that a number of highly reputable scientists signed their names under the publication, and they are already fully responsible for it, regardless to any peer review. This is not a questionable personal opinion by a pundit somewhere, but a result of mainstream research. It is another matter that such info might be regarded as "undue" on the page, and again, I am only commenting on the source. My very best wishes (talk) 22:46, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Just to rephrase, in the spirit of WP:RS, are these numerous people (who put their names) are known for "fact checking and accuracy"? Yes, they certainly are. My very best wishes (talk) 23:00, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
Thank you for the explanation. I think the same. Mikola22 (talk) 07:40, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

See, I disagree with automatically elevating the reliability of a paper based on its author number. More authors should imply more eyes on the paper, but in practice this does not happen. Even when all the authors read the entirety of the manuscript, the majority are decidedly not at the experience level of journal reviewers--is a paper really more reliable because four undergrads and a lab tech were added? Author number per paper is rising, but some academics argue this actually corresponds to a negative trend for credibility.

Many fields (like population genetics) have dozens of authors due to the demand for many different types of specialists, most of whom will have zero background in the other areas covered by the paper. A bioinformatician or osteo archaeologist or cultural conservationist or historian is not going to have the relevant expertise to comment on the quality of wetlab genetics (e.g. DNA extraction, sequencing, phasing, etc.) performed by their coauthors, nor are the wetlab geneticists going to be proficient in the anthropological and sociocultural perspectives of the paper. Even the population geneticists will have experts on modern humans who don't necessarily have any background in how to impute bronze age haplogroups. The numerous subspecialist collaborators actually makes it more important that this paper is thoroughly peer-reviewed by independent experts in each field. JoelleJay (talk) 16:36, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

Agricolae, you're giving yourself too much freedom of interpretation of what could have or could not have happened in the review process of the paper, making conclusions which go beyond the direct context and conditions explained by the editing policy and scope of this discussion. For such big studies, for e.g. The genomic history of southeastern Europe with over 200 samples it is normal that between received and published date passes almost a year. If we give ourselves the freedom of interpretation of why it is such the case with this study is due to having over 400 samples and review process coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic which influenced everything to be even slightly postponed. Saying that science itself doesn't consider this preprinted paper as reliable is simply not true, you're ignoring and neglecting the fact more than two peer-reviewed papers, two of which were published in highly reputable Nature and PNAS, cited the study implying the study passes scientific reliability for citation. Full stop. Also in another comment, you claimed that the study never mentions Rurikids nor the name of any its individual members. False. Perhaps you're not familiar with the study nor with how are written other big studies - alongside article body in which the samples are mainly named per sample code, there's an extensive supplementary material which is dedicated to the details of the samples, method process, figures, and so on. It has three supplementary files; Supplementary Note 1. Ancient samples and archaeological background mentions the names of the two individuals (Gleb Svyatoslavich, Izjaslav Ingvarevych), their history, anthropological-archaeological information, their DNA sample codes (VK541, VK542), and with a note saying they have this "Relevance for the Vikings: Rurik dynasty". There's Supplementary Note 2. Ancient DNA laboratory procedures and sample selection which is self-explanatory and has basic information on Y-DNA haplogroups which were cited, while Supplementary Table 1: Newly reported ancient individuals has tables in which genetic results, including the cited Y-DNA haplogroups and autosomal DNA ancestry estimates.--Miki Filigranski (talk) 19:45, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
Think about what you are saying - it is common for a paper like this too need a very long review to ensure it is up to snuff, you say. What does that say for the reliability of the paper when it has not been reviewed? Nothing good. And me giving a hypothetical example of how using BioRxiv could go dramatically wrong and we wouldn't even know it does not somehow represent 'freedom of interpretation'. As to digging into Supplemental information, there is a reason it is only in the Supplemental information - it was not deemed sufficiently noteworthy to be in the paper. Again, that should tell Wikipedia editors something about it. And that makes it even a step fartehr removed from being something we want to be citing, a throwaway line in a supplement in a non-reviewed non-independent self-published source - can we get any farther away from legitimacy? Agricolae (talk) 22:24, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
Please, stop with this walls of extrapolations and interpretations which are getting more and more convoluted. You are making up every impossible argument on the way against the reliability of the scientific paper and its experts. If information is in the supplementary material of the paper it doesn't make it less worthy, it's still part of the scientific paper. The only reason it is in the supplementary material it is because specific individual samples and details, nevertheless how much are noteworthy, are not in the immediate scope of the paper thesis and that is population genomics of the Vikings in the general sense. Actually, it does indirectly mention aDNA results of WK541 sample, "Some individuals have strong affinity with Eastern Europeans, particularly those from the island of Gotland in eastern Sweden. The latter likely reflects individuals with Baltic ancestry".--Miki Filigranski (talk) 23:27, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
Sigh - they could have mentioned the Rurikonid Gleb in the text of the paper. They did not. Everything else is just your convoluted spin to try to justify an inappropriate citation. Agricolae (talk) 06:22, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

Consider this article [13] (from bioroxiv and your discussion on talk page). Is it an RS? Just looking at the names of the large group of authors and their scientific affiliations, the answer is obviously "yes". Just looking at the disclaimer that is easily accessible from the abstract of that article, the answer is obviously "no".

Readers should therefore be aware that articles on bioRxiv have not been finalized by authors, might contain errors, and report information that has not yet been accepted or endorsed in any way by the scientific or medical community.

We shouldn't take the bioRxiv as more reliable than the owners and operators of the bioRxiv do.
talk
) 01:50, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

Sure, this is a reasonable disclaimer, but it tells the obvious and does not disprove anything I said above. It tells:

"Typically a journal will only publish an article once the editors are satisfied that the authors have addressed referees’ concerns.". Sure, everyone knows that. Everyone also knows that such review and the consent to accept does not guarantee the quality of the study. Only the hard work/research by authors of the publication can guarantee it.

"Because this process can be lengthy, authors use the bioRxiv service to make their manuscripts available as “preprints” before completing peer review and consequent certification by a journal. This allows other scientists to see, discuss, and comment on the findings immediately. " Oh yes, this is actually a very good thing.

"Readers should therefore be aware that articles on bioRxiv have not been finalized by authors, might contain errors, and report information that has not yet been accepted or endorsed in any way by the scientific or medical community." Well, authors certainly did their best to finalize their findings and fix errors prior to posting their work online in bioRoxiv. But it is true that their work "has not yet been accepted or endorsed in any way by the scientific or medical community". So it will not be necessarily endorsed even after the publication. The publication does not mean the endorsement by the scientific or medical community. Actually, in most cases their work is going to be corrected or refined by colleagues.

Yes, sure, one must exercise caution, i.e. to look at the authors and their previous studies and affiliations. If they are reputable scientists known for "fact checking and accuracy", it is they rather than reviewers will guarantee the quality of their work. My very best wishes (talk) 04:37, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

I can say it differently. WP:RS discourage using the self-published sources, and rightly so. Why? Because it is implicitly assumed that an author has already tried but was unable to publish his work in any good place and therefore resorted to self-publishing. This is especially the case for publications by a single person or by someone who is not an expert. However, the situation with bioRoxiv is completely different: this is not "a cemetery of rejected", but simply an intermediate step prior to a publication in a scientific journal. Having a very strong team of authors who are all experts makes this an RS immediately. My very best wishes (talk) 05:41, 21 July 2020 (UTC)
I think that confirmation of your claims is and fact that some scientific papers, (I have seen one) have bioRxiv papers as a source. In this genetic scientific paper I seen three sources from bioRxiv. Mikola22 (talk) 07:55, 21 July 2020 (UTC)
If they are reputable scientists known for "fact checking and accuracy", it is they rather than reviewers will guarantee the quality of their work. No, it isn't. It really isn't. This is a dangerous distortion of the scientific process. Nobody should be trusted on their reputation alone.

Yes, preprints can be cited. All that shows is that they are sometimes of interest. It's not a stamp of complete approval for their contents.
talk
) 16:24, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

A preprint on bioRxiv etc. by reputable scientists is likely to be a reliable self-published source and before too long a reliable published source. But we should still avoid using them because, even after they're peer reviewed and published, they're
WP:ATTRIBUTEPOV
, or better yet omitted entirely until it's ingested and summarised by reliable secondary sources.

There seems to be a rush to update aDNA-related articles with highly-detailed summaries of the latest findings. But that isn't what encyclopaedias do. We shouldn't be chasing the cutting-edge of science, we shouldn't be swamping articles on ancient cultures and people with walls of text on technical descriptions of ancestry, and we shouldn't be repeating the interpretations of geneticists in Wikipedia's voice without acknowledging the controversy surrounding them – because by doing so we skew Wikipedia's coverage of the human past towards a minority
WP:SCIRS and I think we should make a push to get that to guideline status and apply it to our archaeogenetics coverage. – Joe (talk
) 07:18, 21 July 2020 (UTC)
Yes, this is all reasonable, I agree, except that a typical research publication is hardly a primary source. Yes, the "Results" section of such articles should be regarded as primary "materials". However, the Introduction and Discussion sections always provide "an author's analysis, evaluation, interpretation, or synthesis of the facts, evidence, concepts, and ideas taken from primary sources." This is a secondary analysis - per WP:RS, quite obviously. There is nothing wrong with using it. My very best wishes (talk) 14:33, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

As about the genetic studies versus history/archeology, I agree 100%. For example, in this dispute, the actual issue is not bioRxiv, but the use of such genetic studies in pages on history. If this is a serious claim, I think we need sbome really good secondary sources (reviews or books) which place these genetic findings to proper historical perspective. My very best wishes (talk) 20:35, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

I agree that the other sections can be useful resources for the authors' interpretation and contextualization of other primary papers, especially since frequently this secondary analysis is not yet curated in review articles. I think this is a reasonable exception to PRIMARY that ought to be clarified better in the guidelines (right now the wording on exceptions suggests primary sources can be used for statements of general facts, which I feel is incorrect since such "facts" should easily be found in and cited to reviews/textbooks instead). Even in this case it should be attributed in-text, however, since reviewers of experimental research are largely (basically 100%...) concerned with the methodology and conclusions of the paper on hand and aren't going to go about confirming every citation's summary is accurate. Review article referees do examine these claims.

Regardless, none of this impacts the issue at hand, which involves stating primary research results as wikivoice facts. I absolutely support what
WP:SCIRS. JoelleJay (talk
) 15:48, 21 July 2020 (UTC)
Yes,
talk
) 17:06, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia should not be citing pre-prints, period. I remember earlier in the pandemic we were having issues on the coronavirus related pages with people citing pre-prints for all sorts of claims, which is unacceptable considering
WP:MEDRS, which is much more stringent than the usual RS guidelines. With the rushed peer review even published papers in prestigious journals have been found to have significant errors, like the Didier Raoult hydroxychloroquinine study. When academics complain about peer review I don't think that it is a rejection of review entirely, it is simply that having a public review of a paper where many people can contribute like PubPeer is better, rather than only a few reviewers. Hemiauchenia (talk
) 20:56, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

Per XOReaster BioRXiv itself would not endorse this.... i.e. their policy is "They should not be regarded as conclusive, guide clinical practice/health-related behavior, or be reported in news media as established information". Until a paper is published, don't cite it. It takes a lot of scientific experience to evaluate the reliability of a preprint, including advanced degrees and significant relevant experience in the field of interest. Until scientific information has been thoroughly vetted it shouldn't be presented, if there are statement in other parts of the paper that you need you should easily be able to find verifiable information either in the original citation or in publications that cite that article. As a note, attempts by the paper's authors to include BioRXiv articles may fall foul of publication and ethical standards intended to stop promotion prior to peer review, and make the paper ineligible for publication in certain journals. I would even recommend a filter to stop citations. When preprints are cited in academic publications, responsible authors vet the preprint themselves, and carefully note the fact it is a preprint when describing it. 14:36, 22 July 2020 (UTC)
Until a paper is published, don't cite it.? No, there is nothing wrong with that. I have seen citations of BioRxiv papers in newspapers. That's why people are doing their best to put only finalized and corrected version to BioRxiv. Placing your paper in open access online in BioRxiv is already a publication, with all consequences. I never saw anyone "complaining" about peer review. This is very good thing. But this is not "vetting" or approval by the entire scientific community. This is just a review by 2-3 experts which does not guarantee the quality of the publication. This is just better than nothing. My very best wishes (talk) 03:20, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

Considering the arguments and proponents' opinion, it seems the outcome of the discussion is reaching a consensus that preprint scientific primary sources nevertheless the expertise of the authors should be avoided. In the end, this is an encyclopedia and as such, it should be based on primary + secondary reliable sources which reliability can be easily verified. If everyone agrees, as proposed editor XOR'easter, it would be great if SCIRS is elevated to guideline status, with the addition of better definitions and mention of bioRxiv based on conclusions above. --Miki Filigranski (talk) 02:18, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

Miraheze and Their Wikis

Back in March, I was googling one of Wolf Tracer’s one of only two known productions when I came across this site under Awful Movies which as its name suggests is about movies considered the worst of all time. Said special has an entry because of its atrocious blocky PS1 cutscene-like animation.
This wiki farm even this one runs on the software engine Media-Wiki. They resemble wiki except for comments in the bottom of almost every article and blog posts from numerous users. Unlike here, anonymous editing is turned off by default. Here there or even Jimmy Neutron's Canadian impostor is what a random article from one of these look like at a quick glance.
Last but not least, should they be discouraged from being external links slash references?
Lights out,
67.81.163.178 (talk) 02:43, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

Per miraheze.org they are only cited 24 and EL to around 30 times. I agree it's a bad source, but you could probably easily make the effort to excise them yourself. Hemiauchenia (talk) 03:14, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

All mentions of this wiki farm have been removed in a few select articles. Thank you for your input. 67.81.163.178 (talk) 11:43, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

Odd publisher: Ed-Tech Press

Someone recently added "Ethics for Governance"
ISBN 978-1-83947-390-6
by Kai Cabrera. The Introduction is word-for-word copied from the 2018 iteration of our page on ethics. So is most of that section. The material prexisted the publication of the book. The meta-ethics section right after is word-for-word from our 2018 version at meta-ethics. Same for normative ethics as so on. Every single sentence I checked was copied from here. I don't see any attribution in the text. It's possible there's something at the end of the "book" - the google book preview is limited. Clearly not a
WP:RS and appears to be a simple published mirror, like PediaPress
.
The publisher seems a little odd; address is an accountancy, presumably used for forming the company. Tons of these kinds of books with authors that don't seem to exist. For example, this one was complied by ""Keywon Frazier." Odd that an author of "Animal Transgenesis and Cloning" has no other presence on the internet other than booksellers of this particular work. Parts of that book are again copied from here as well as other papers. Every book I checked had copied material.
There are about 27 citations to this publisher. Would like a second opinion before I take action.Kuru (talk) 02:19, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

Remove them all, I'd say.
talk
) 02:33, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

Whether predatory publishing, or otherwise; it's clear this publisher and their works cannot be considered reliable sources. Entirely agree with removing the lot. Jack Frost (talk) 06:56, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

Yep, I’d say you are cleared to nuke that publisher. Happy hunting.
Horse Eye Jack (talk
) 16:31, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

ping
|Chess}} on reply) 06:10, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Thanks to
Biogeographist (talk
) 14:36, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

Landas

Landas is a peer reviewed journal published by the Loyola School of Theology at Ateneo de Manila University. Roscelese has objected to using it as a source on Catholic moral theology. Is it a reliable source for that topic? (Full ref: Uy, Alberto S. (2003). "The Homosexual Orientation as an "Objective Disorder" and its Limited Meaning". Landas. 17 (2). Ateneo de Manila University.) --Slugger O'Toole (talk) 14:14, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

There is nothing to debate here. We had a near-identical discussion two months ago about a source that was, similarly, an official arm of the Catholic Church and that, similarly, had an overtly POV aim. It is inappropriate to spam the article with this content. –Roscelese (talk ⋅ contribs) 15:24, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

They are not even close to identical. The previous discussion was about a manual published by a seminary. This is about a peer reviewed academic journal published by a university. Not everything with a Catholic affiliation is an official arm of the church. —Slugger O'Toole (talk) 16:17, 19 July 2020 (UTC)
@Slugger O'Toole and Roscelese: I don't know if the journal is arm of the Catholic church. But I would think that an official arm of the Catholic church should be a reliable source on Catholic moral teachings, when properly attributed. Am I missing something? VR _talk 08:39, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
@
fan-wikis out there that would appreciate his time. –Roscelese (talk ⋅ contribs
) 01:00, 24 July 2020 (UTC)
@Roscelese: Ok, just so I understand what you're saying is that the journal accurately reflects the views of the Catholic church but not everything the Catholic church believes should be on wikipedia, and only the views of the Catholic church that have been covered by reliable secondary sources should be on wikipedia. Is that right, or am I still missing something?VR _talk 01:44, 24 July 2020 (UTC)
I'm not judging whether or not I think it accurately reflects the views because I don't think it matters. It's a non-independent source whose explicit goal is pushing a POV. –Roscelese (talk ⋅ contribs) 02:03, 24 July 2020 (UTC)
I don't like POV-pushing sources either, but apparently we allow
Catholic teaching on homosexuality.VR _talk
02:26, 24 July 2020 (UTC)
We could and we do. But there are limits to that, as the page you're linking makes very clear (one of those limits is "not unduly self-serving" and another is "the article is not primarily based on such sources"). This is an encyclopedia, not a personal blog. –Roscelese (talk ⋅ contribs) 03:50, 24 July 2020 (UTC)
@Roscelese: Right, so could we not use Landas with those same limits? VR _talk 05:00, 24 July 2020 (UTC)
In theory, possibly. In practice, AlmostFrancis and I have been working hard to remove fancruft garbage from the article, so attempts to add more feel very
WP:POINTy. In practice, are there any statements sourced to this article that you feel should be included, and why, if they cannot be sourced to any reliable source? Since the entire purpose of adding it was, seemingly, apologia, I can't see it not violating the "not unduly self-serving" provision. –Roscelese (talk ⋅ contribs
) 05:14, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

Do you know what the impact factor of the Journal is? I couldn't find anything definitive and the vague one I found was incredibly low. Do you know the process for peer review at the journal? On the webcite all there are just check marks in a grid, and I can't find any thirdparty sourcing that they do legitimate peer review. As far as I can tell father Uy doesn't have any academic degrees just Sacred Theology degrees from various seminaries and Ecclesiastical programs, and does not have a terminal degree. He may though as it is hard to find information on him. Has anyone ever cited this journal article? Its 17 years old at this point so should be cited at least a couple times if it was seen as of value in the field. You are correct that not everything Catholic affiliated is church run, however, as far as I can tell this school and journal is admittedly church owned and run by the society of jesus. Did they gain independence at some point.AlmostFrancis (talk) 20:43, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

RfC on whether certain sources are considered to have a conflict of interest

There is a request for comment on whether certain sources ("articles by any media group that [...] discredits its competitors") are considered to have a conflict of interest. If you are interested, please participate at Wikipedia talk:Verifiability § Does Footnote 9 still have consensus? — Newslinger talk 06:41, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

datarabia.com

Datarabia.com is being used as a source in many articles regarding middle east, especially when it comes to biographical informations. I can't find anything information regarding this website, regardless the total lack of information about Datarabia.com's owner or owners, on Google and other tools. It looks like a blog and, although I'm not a specialist or a scholar working on issues linked to middle east, I've found a lot of misleading informations especially when it comes to biographies. So, for now, I suggest to undo all sections or sentences that rely only on Datarabia.com, until a consensus is find regarding their reliability. Thanks. --JamesK78 (talk) 09:16, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

It was good enough for Sherifa Zuhur, when she used it in her book.[14] --Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 10:58, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

UBO is not the only critera we use to decide reliability... (t · c) buidhe 17:01, 19 July 2020 (UTC)
If UBO could not be the only critera (and btw datarabia.com's UBO is not quite impressive) can I consider this source as non reliable especially when an entire section relies only on it. In many cases, I think it could be quit problematic, and sometimes misleading. This website gives us very few details regarding the people who owns it, in terms of transparency it raises concerns. If I agree that datarabia.com is not merely a blog, I think, regarding all this elements, that it can't be considered as an encyclopedic one. Of course, I'll glad if others contributors could add their analysis regarding this issue. Thx --JamesK78 (talk) 08:20, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

Indian Journal of History of Science

Publications in the Indian Journal of History of Science are being used for early dates for advances in (very) ancient Indian astronomy. These are both from a person called Anil Narayanan who has no appreciable background in astronomy, or the history thereof, that I can discover. The papers are "The Pulsating Indian Epicycle of the Sun" and "Dating the Surya Siddhanta Using Computational Simulation of Proper Motions and Ecliptic Variations". I don't know how to assess the reliability of edits to Surya Siddhanta.
A Google Search for the terms "indian journal of history of science" "reliable source" wikipedia reveals numerous examples of papers in this publication making quite grand claims about the extreme antiquity of various India-related topics, including
Talk:Indigenous Aryans/Archive 2, Talk:Speed of light/Archive 16, Talk:7th millennium BC, Talk:Indian astronomy/Archive 1. This suggests the journal publishes in contested areas, if nothing else. It is apparently published by a Indian National Science Academy
.
GPinkerton (talk) 06:10, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Maybe a case of nationalism getting in the way of fact checking? (t · c) buidhe 15:44, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
@Buidhe: That is my thought --Guerillero | Parlez Moi 18:03, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
@Buidhe: & @Guerillero: If this is a systematic issue something needs to be done about this as a potentially perennial set of sources ... GPinkerton (talk) 01:12, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

The Indian Journal of History of Science is published by the
Indian Space Research Organization
and a consultant in D.C. It doesn't matter what the background of the author of a peer-reviewed paper is, because it has been reviewed. But it's never a good idea to use original findings in primary sources as sources for articles. We want to first see if other writers accept, reject or ignore the findings and there's also weight.

Having said that, many ancient cultures made accurate projections of the movements of heavenly bodies.

TFD (talk) 03:19, 21 July 2020 (UTC)
@
Indus Valley script, which is in any case a proto-writing not capable of writing an astronomical treatise with, and 3,400 years older than the other RS's say the Surya Siddhanta is. His claims to be a "former scientist" are self-sourced. His Academia.edu (if it's the right person) claims he's a specialist in Sanskritology, not any kind of astronomy. GPinkerton (talk
) 04:01, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

He says in the second article that the current version of the Surya-Siddhanta dates to 580 AD, then provides evidence that the calculations had been done and written down earlier. In the second article he says, "Some scholars believe the original Surya-Siddhanta to have been composed between 3000 BC and 8000 BC, though most modern scholars place the available version of the text at about 1000 AD." He doesn't say that the modern book was transmitted in whole from thousands of years ago to the present day.
So while he presents an alternative and unlikely theory, he doesn't state it as a fact. Academic journals sometimes publish theories that are in sharp conflict with orthodoxy, provided they are factually correct. But since he doesn't state any facts that are not stated elsewhere and his theory has drawn no support, your question it moot. Maybe the observations suggest an earlier date of writing, although what we know about the civilization precludes it.
His background is irrelevant. Journals fact check and peer review submissions.
TFD (talk) 05:57, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

@The Four Deuces: Yes he is saying that. He claims the calculations in the text are not accurate because of changes in the axis of the earth and that, arguing from a position of scriptural inerrancy, the text must have been composed at a time when the axis of the earth actually was different, rather than say the text was simply not perfectly accurate. GPinkerton (talk) 13:15, 21 July 2020 (UTC)
He argues that since the calculations in the thousand year old version are inaccurate, they may have been written at a time when they were accurate, that is at the beginning of the Indus Valley Civilisation or earlier. Where does he say that he bases his conclusions on scriptural inerrancy? TFD (talk) 13:29, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

I read through the talk page discussion. Rather than challenge the publication, it makes more sense to question whether the theory has any weight. Per Wikipedia:Fringe theories, "reliable sources must be cited that affirm the relationship of the marginal idea to the mainstream idea in a serious and substantial manner." Isolated papers that have received no attention in the literature on the subject don't belong in articles. TFD (talk) 14:14, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

Journals fact check and peer review submissions. They're supposed to. Not all do. I suspect this one doesn't, at least not thoroughly and from a non-biased perspective. (t · c) buidhe 14:23, 21 July 2020 (UTC)
@The Four Deuces: "they may have been written" and "at the beginning of the Indus Valley Civilisation or earlier" is a wild, wild claim which would make the Surya Siddhanta, by far, the oldest written text ever. Ever. It would also pre-date all known forms of writing, and, in order for the calculations to be accurate, the text must have been passed down, unchanged, for fully 5,000 years. The entire argument is based on scriptural inerrancy - i.e., the text's calculations are accurate, so they therefore must have been written 5,000 years ago in order for the calculations not to be inaccurate. The assumption of scriptural accuracy is explicit in the argumentation. GPinkerton (talk) 15:33, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

@Buidhe: Yes, I suspect that the basic grammatical error in the very name of the journal itself is a clue to its less-than-reliable nature. GPinkerton (talk) 15:33, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

Yes the carefully phrased implications in both papers that the calculations were first made at some date between 3000 and 8000 BC, is very fringey indeed, and typical of Hindutva reassertions of traditional Hindu chronology - modern historians think the basis for the events recounted in the Mahabharata might relate to wars around the 9th or 10th century BC, but traditional Hindu thinking places them around 3102 BC or earlier. Individual temples are often claimed to be 5,000 years old. Johnbod (talk) 15:50, 21 July 2020 (UTC)
Humans began recording numeric values at least 40,000 years ago, according to History of ancient numeral systems. It doesn't seem paricularly outlandish to try to determine whether the calculations were accurate at some point before the book was published but humans were able to record them. It's not outlandish either that the Indus civilization would have paid attention to the motion of heavenly objects. In any case, the journal is peer-reviewed[16] and published by the Indian National Science Academy.

Reliability refers to facts. We expect that the facts in peer-reviewed journals are accurate. We do not expect that every article published merely summarizes generally accepted views and never provides any new theories. Journals exist in order to publicize new research and theories. Ultimately some of these theories will be questionable and most of those will receive no attention from other writers. It's a problem in Wikipedia that determined editors can find papers representing all kinds of unorthodox views. The American Psychological Association's journal, Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, published the article "Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability" as late as 2005. That doesn't mean the journal fails rs or that we have to accept the findings in the paper.

It doesn't matter either what an author's motivation is for their beliefs, provided they do not base the conclusions in their papers on those beliefs. So for example someone may write a paper for an historical journal arguing for or against the historical existence of Jesus. While their opinions may be influenced by their views on religion, the paper would be assessed on the strength of its arguments from facts not beliefs.

TFD (talk) 17:35, 21 July 2020 (UTC)
@
hyperdiffusionist who alleged the Taj Mahal was a Hindu temple, among other absurdities.) As for It's not outlandish either that the Indus civilization would have paid attention to the motion of heavenly objects that's correct, but is then much more outlandish to claim 1.) the Indus Valley civilization had writing (they didn't) 2.) the Indus Valley civilization could have written in Sanskrit (they couldn't) and 3.) the Surya Siddhanta was, or even could have been, written millennia before the IVC got off the ground (it wasn't). You said that It doesn't matter either what an author's motivation is for their beliefs, provided they do not base the conclusions in their papers on those beliefs. but this is exactly what is happening here. Johnbod is right to link this with the neo-nationalist movement in favour of the historical reality of the Mahabharata; see for instance: the Indian Science Congress and the Eastern India Science and Engineering Fair and the National Informatics Centre. Basically, if it exists, it existed in, and was invented in, (really very) ancient India, or so the claim runs. Where is the evidence the Indian National Science Academy is a reliable institution in the 21st century? Its own article is all self-sourced and full of that which puffeth up. We say distinctly that it is "not to be confused with the Indian Academy of Sciences or the National Academy of Sciences, India". Where is the independent witness to its credibility and that of its organs? GPinkerton (talk
) 18:38, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

If they publish nonsense like this masqueraded as a scholarly paper, there is not even a little hope for reliability. This is even worse than Daily Mail. Accepting date between 3000 BC and 8000 BC as a minority view of some scholars is the same as writting "Some scholars believe the Earth is flat, though most modern scholars...". If there are other examples like this, "depreciating" this source may be the best course of action. Pavlor (talk) 05:17, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

In History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization: pt. 1, (
Pearson Longman
, 2011), Chapter 5, the Indian National Science Academy is referred to as the premier science academy in India, financed by the government.
Sumerians used sexagesimal fractions and trigonometry possibly as early as 3000 BC. Obviously the Indus civilization probably had no written language and did not speak Sanskrit, but they used symbols to record information. But I don't think the papers claim otherwise. I notice you haven't addressed whether the calculations would have been more accurate in 3000 BC than in 800 AD. Of course if they were, it doesn't prove anything but if they weren't then it would be an obvious failure of peer review.
As I mentioned above, there is no reason to use the papers in any articles since they lack weight for inclusion. But i don't think the fact they were published means that we should blacklist anything from the Indian National Science Academy.
TFD (talk) 16:54, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Unfortunately in recent years Hindu Nationalists have penetrated deep into Indian academia (with government support). This is a major problem at *all* levels of Academia in India as the government their has been appointing ideologues with little in the way of academic credentials or competence. This seems to fit well within the bullshit these nationalists and charlatans spread. I’m not saying that today we have to blacklist India’s august academic institutions but in five years we might have to, its going downhill fast.
Horse Eye Jack (talk
) 00:47, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

@The Four Deuces: "Sumerians used sexagesimal fractions and trigonometry possibly as early as 3000 BC".^{[citation needed]} Please also update Babylonian mathematics with this reliable information, if extant... GPinkerton (talk) 00:48, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

GPinkerton, see "An Exhibition That Gets to the (Square) Root of Sumerian Math" (Wade, Nicholas. New York Times
, Nov. 22, 2010.) "Sumerian math was a sexagesimal system, meaning it was based on the number 60....The idea seems to have developed from an earlier, more complex system known from 3200 B.C." And later: two tablets "bear[] on the issue of whether the Babylonians had discovered Pythagoras’s theorem some 1,300 years before Pythagoras did." (i.e., approx. 1800 BC) It's not like claiming they had invented calculus, measured the speed of light or discovered Pluto.

Horse Eye Jack, there are a lot of questionable theories published in historical and social sciences journals. In those cases I think the best first objection is
"Exceptional claims require exceptional sources"
. We shouldn't use claims that are not covered by multiple mainstream sources and go significantly against mainstream assumptions. Even when claims are not exceptional, weight deems then insignificant for inclusion. But if historical journals in India depart significantly from journals from major academic publishers, then we should revisit the issue. But right now the author of the sources presented concedes that his views are not mainstream.

TFD (talk) 01:38, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
@The Four Deuces: Sorry, where does the NYT mention trigonometry? GPinkerton (talk) 02:35, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

Sorry, I thought it was clear from the article that they were talking about trigonometry. If you are interested in learning more, it's covered in an article, "Plimpton 322 is Babylonian exact sexagesimal trigonometry" (Historia Mathematica, Nov 2017). The abstract says, "We trace the origins of trigonometry to the Old Babylonian era, between the 19th and 16th centuries B.C.E." Their findings were written up the New York Times in "Hints of Trigonometry on a 3,700-Year-Old Babylonian Tablet" (Aug 29 2017). I don't know whether any of it is true and do not suggest it be added to any articles. TFD (talk) 21:15, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
@The Four Deuces: It's clear they're talking about trigonometry for the Plimpton 322 tablet. What's not clear is how that artefact, dated 1900-1600 BCE supports your claim "Sumerians used sexagesimal fractions and trigonometry possibly as early as 3000 BC".

The NYTs "3,700-Year-Old" ≠ 3000 BC.

3,700 years ago is 1,700 BC.

That kind of error is rather like dating the invention of the diesel engine to the reign of Maximinus Thrax. GPinkerton (talk) 02:07, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

We don't know at what point they discovered trigonometry if in fact they actually did. Since Sumerian civilization flourished from c. 4500 – c. 1900 BC., the artefact could have been based on an earlier model.
We know the diesel engine was invented in 1893 because we have documentary evidence. We also know that ancient civilizations lacked the technology to produce them. Also, it presupposes a great deal of knowledge of mathematics and physics for which evidence would exist. We would not for example see them building ziggurats if they understood Newtonian physics. We'd see Eiffel Towers and skyscrapers. But we can't say with certainty they were unable to calculate the length of a hypotenuse. All we can say is that it is unlikely. While looking for diesel engines in Sumeria would be irrational, looking for traces of basic mathematical abilities is not.
TFD (talk) 02:54, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

@The Four Deuces: But traces of basic mathematical abilities is not what the author of the papers proposes. The idea is that advanced mathematical abilities existed c. 3,000-8,000 BC, were used to compose a text in a language that did not exist, were written down in a script that did not exist, and was then preserved by manuscript copying, together with its increasingly erroneous calculations, until the present day, uncorrupt. Meanwhile those abilities were mysteriously lost and had to wait thousands of years before their rediscovery in the Enlightenment and thereafter. Elsewhere, the fringe theorists (author included) claim the Surya Siddhanta used a heliocentric model and accurately predicted the orbits of trans-Saturnian planets quite invisible to the human eye without magnification or radio telescopes, presumably using the same lost technology with which they built the pyramids (doubtless a Vedic temple). How is this any different from ancient civilizations lacked the technology to produce diesel engines? Supposing Sumerian civilization invented trigonometry millennia before there is any evidence for it is almost as bad. The Romans build roads everywhere they, went: are you sure they might not possibly have done so the purpose of driving their automobiles across the empire? GPinkerton (talk) 03:12, 24 July 2020 (UTC)
I don't think he is saying that, merely speculating that the calculations in the text were made long before when they were accurate. Of course this type of finding may give succor to people who believe what you are saying and even ancient astronaut theorists for that matter.

Bear in mind that the actual text is from the 1400s AD and is generally accepted as being based on a text written around 800 AD, probably based on calculations from the 300s to 400s. If you think that text could only have been written if they had access to radio telescopes and knew about planets beyond Saturn, wouldn't the theory that the text was written even as late as the 1400s be fantastic? Do you think it's a forgery? That seems doubtful because radio telescopes were invented in the 1930s, while the text was written about in the 19th century. (You might want to add that to the article.)

TFD (talk) 03:58, 24 July 2020 (UTC)
The interpretation that it 1.) discusses trans-Saturnian planets, including Pluto, and 2.) offers a a heliocentric model are both claimed by devotees and repudiated by mainstream scholarship on the text. It's not me this needs to be explained to! I actually have already added the point about Pluto to article, some days ago. At some point the article claimed the Surya Siddhanta dealt with bodies not discovered until recent centuries. GPinkerton (talk) 04:16, 24 July 2020 (UTC)
The article says, the Surya Siddhanta "makes no mention of Uranus, Neptune or Pluto, since these planets are not visible without telescopes." I don't see anything wrong with that. We can mention what the book doesn't include. I don't remember where the texts were discussing Pluto either. Maybe you could provide a quote. You might be confusing the articles in this discussion thread with sources that have made these claims. TFD (talk) 04:48, 24 July 2020 (UTC)
No, I'm not confused. I wrote that text. GPinkerton (talk) 04:59, 24 July 2020 (UTC)
I don't remember Anil Narayanan mentioning Pluto. TFD (talk) 05:05, 24 July 2020 (UTC)
See here. GPinkerton (talk) 05:16, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

First, that's not one of the two papers we were discussing and was not published by the Indian Journal. Secondly while he mentions Pluto, he does not claim that the Indus civilization knew about it. As you correctly point out, without modern technology they would have had no way of detecting it. TFD (talk) 13:20, 24 July 2020 (UTC)
Can Photos/Images be used as reliable source?

This question was bothering me for long but since I have a current case in front of me. A new user started adding statements about whose photos and statues are installed in Parliament of India. Whether we can have such statements is issue of separate debate but they added links to photos of those portraits/statues as citations. You can see those contributions of above mentioned user here. Can we really use images hosted somewhere else as a reliable source? QueerEcofeminist^{"cite! even if you fight"!!!} [they/them/their] 07:54, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

QueerEcofeminist, we just had that discussion and the answer is "no". (t · c) buidhe 15:49, 24 July 2020 (UTC)
Buidhe, Hey thanks for the link, I will read it and share with the concerned users too. QueerEcofeminist^{"cite! even if you fight"!!!} [they/them/their] 15:54, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

Buidhe, Can government/parliament sources (Lok Sabha & Rajya Sabha: two houses of the Indian Parliament) be used as reliable source?' I haven't used photos/images as sources. I had added the Indian parliament's sources with their text but it all reverted. I didn't add photos/portraits without sources. Are government/parliament sources not reliable source? Are portraits or statues in the Indian Parliament not useful to add in the articles? eg भारतभूषण प्रकाश नरंदेकर (talk) 17:09, 24 July 2020 (UTC)
They might well fall foul of
wp:undue.Slatersteven (talk
) 17:16, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

@Slatersteven and Buidhe:, Please see my deleted edits ( 1 2 3 ). Are these edits really related to portraits/images/photos or statues? Is this correct act by User:QueerEcofemist?

Check out these edits ( 1, 2, 3, 4 (source already added), 5 ). Images of portraits / statues as well as their references are omitted by QueerEcofeminist. The images were not used as the sources, but these edits were deleted for the same reason. please Comment on this.

Portraits and statues of some of the country's most important figures have been erected in the Indian Parliament. In my opinion, the people whose portraits or statues are in this important place should also be briefly mentioned in the Wikipedia article of those people. To that end, I made brief changes to the articles of those persons, with sources of the Indian Parliament (the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha), and added to the article their portraits and statues available on the Commons. The changes I have made are simple. User:QueerEcofemist has deleted my edits from the article for the wrong reason. Please let me know if it is wrong to include information about Parliamentary portraits and statues in those persons articles, including sources from the Indian Parliament. Because I'm in confuse right now.

This article [17] contains information about the statues in Parliament Square in the United Kingdom. There are also separate articles for all the statues here. Then why does User:QueerEcofemist insist that even a brief mention of statues in the Indian Parliament should not be on the Wikipedia article of the person concerned? I have honestly expressed my opinion. Please let me know what you think. Thank you. भारतभूषण प्रकाश नरंदेकर (talk) 07:01, 25 July 2020 (UTC)
That looks like the caption is being cited, not the picture itself. Citing the caption is acceptable presuming that the source is
WP:DUE. (t · c) buidhe
07:14, 25 July 2020 (UTC)
Hence my reference to undue.Slatersteven (talk) 09:04, 25 July 2020 (UTC)

Bild

deprecation imo. Can our German speaking editors enlighten us about Bild's reputation in Germany and whether they think it is worth of a deprecation discussion? Hemiauchenia (talk
) 16:15, 18 July 2020 (UTC)
English language sources about Bild:

Germany's Bild: Political powerhouse or treacherous tabloid? Deutsche Welle, 2012

Fake News Meets German Racism The New York Times, 2017

Bild, Merkel and the culture wars: the inside story of Germany’s biggest tabloid The Guardian, 2020Am

Why Germany's coronavirus 'guru' is being targeted by lockdown critics thelocal.de, 2020

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Hemiauchenia (talk • contribs) 16:15, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

I am for blocking Bild's usage in the Encyclopedia and expunging citations of it. –Vami♜_IV♠ 19:20, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

I wouldn't oppose deprecation, but the newspaper does occasionally print valuable material, such as an essay by German historian Anna Hájková; I think the paper (unlike Daily Fail) is reliable enough not to misprint such an essay. (t · c) buidhe 20:57, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Such a strange name for a German historian... As of the source in question, there are certainly much better sources in Germany, but this one is not yet on the level of Daily Mail (eg. they posted an apology for one of the incidents mentioned by the OP: [18]). Pavlor (talk) 08:36, 19 July 2020 (UTC)
According to German Wikipedia she’s Czech, not German. The Bild is extremely unreliable and has a right wing bias. I would support blacklisting. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ermenrich (talk • contribs)
Being right-wing or not is not whether sources are reliable or not. We are a neutral encyclopedia but follow the reliable sources, biased or not. Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 20:31, 19 July 2020 (UTC)
Which is why the first thing I mentioned was that they are extremely unreliable. That is their reputation in Germany. They are a tabloid.—Ermenrich (talk) 18:01, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

At best Bild is a tabloid which occasionally publishes sloppy articles. There have been quite recent allegations about them intentionally misquoting people [19] [20]. 80.187.98.31 (talk) 21:02, 25 July 2020 (UTC)

Novak Djokovic - Happy TV

TV show is source for this information "paternal Serbian descent".[21] This TV show is Ćirilica and from Happy TV.[22] I don't know where it is spoken about "Serbian descent". Is this source RS? Mikola22 (talk) 17:10, 25 July 2020 (UTC)

Hard to say is it an interview with Novak Đoković?Slatersteven (talk) 17:18, 25 July 2020 (UTC)
No, Nikola Pilić and father of Novak Đoković. Mikola22 (talk) 17:41, 25 July 2020 (UTC)
So its an interview with someones father? The source would thus be a primary source for information about his family. But yes would be an RS for his claims (assuming its there).Slatersteven (talk) 17:45, 25 July 2020 (UTC)
Thank you, I will not watch the video now, but which information we must find? I guess information in which he states that he is a Serb or Serbian origin? Mikola22 (talk) 17:54, 25 July 2020 (UTC)
No, to claim "Serbian decent" it must say that. If he says he is Serbian is he referring to his ethnic background his nationality, or (like Kennedy) making a statement of some kind.Slatersteven (talk) 17:58, 25 July 2020 (UTC)
Ok, can I enter information that he is ethnic Serb in the article if he says that he is Serbian or I can only enter that he is Serbian. Mikola22 (talk) 18:44, 25 July 2020 (UTC)
I would need to see the context, Kennedy said he was a Berliner, he neither came from Berlin nor was he a doughnut.Slatersteven (talk) 18:48, 25 July 2020 (UTC)
I have this for now, "Ali Novak je Srbin, rođen je ovde".(But Novak is a Serb, he was born here) and "Mi smo Srbi i ostali smo Srbi do kraja"(We are Serbs and we have remained Serbs until the end). It is said in the context that Novak almost became an English because of England's offer to play tennis for England. Mikola22 (talk) 19:08, 25 July 2020 (UTC)
Enough to say he is a Serbian national, just.Slatersteven (talk) 09:19, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

Novak Djokovic - Nova S

TV show Balkanskom Ulicom from Nova S.[23] The mother and father of Novak Djokovic were guests on that show. This is TV show on YouTube.[24] The presenter says that it is important to know from which family we are, who our grandparents. In that sense, the mother of Novak Djokovic talks about an anecdote when she become a "singer". Conversation: mother of Novak Djoković speaks: "where is the bride from?(someone from the relatives asks), she is Croat, (relatives answer) a "singer"? because she did not hear well and the words are similar. (min 9:22-9:23).

Dijana Djoković was born in Belgrade and does not say that she is from Croatia, she say just a "Croat". In this context she said minute earlier that "at that time we did not hide who we are and what we are." (this is usually said in the context of mixed marriages), (min 8:54-8:59). I am interested whether this is RS and whether its mention of Croat, can be used in the article as her nationality? Mikola22 (talk) 16:02, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

Just so I understand what's going on: the point is that you're trying very hard to find some sources in order to support adding content to the article
talk
) 16:35, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
I am not looking for sources I am looking reliable sources. Novak Djokovic had an Croatian interview where he said that his mother was a Croat from Vinkovci, then we had Serbian sources in which the father says that his mother is Croatian, then we have this source, then we have the latest interview from grandfather Novak Djoković in which grandfather says that he is of Croatian nationality (origin). Someone constantly denies these sources that they are not RS, I want to know which source is reliable. Therefore Wikipedia offers this possibility and I ask that it be discussed. Which WP:BALASP etc,etc. Is it forbidden to put information about the origin of his mother if RS exist? If that source does not exist, this information will not be in the article. Mikola22 (talk) 16:56, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
I am glad we agree: you are going to great lengths to argue that a few minor mentions constitute something meaningful. But this kind of stretching is exactly what policy warns against; the quote from Jimbo in just above
talk
) 18:01, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
All an up:undue rather than RS issue.Slatersteven (talk) 18:04, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
@
Joel B. Lewis:I'm interested in whether this source is RS and whether this information is usable, if is not, then say so. We go to other sources. If other sources are not usable they will not be in the article. If some source is usable(information) and RS then I will put that information in the article. If there is any problem with this information or my edit(undue,WP:BALASP) then you will come and state the reason why you are removing that information from the article. I came here to seek advice for RS. The sources in Novak Djokovic article are same and for Novak Djokovic's father, so I don't see anyone removing them from the article (undue,WP:BALASP). You can edit this article right away because it’s the same thing, and to see what the problem is. Mikola22 (talk
) 18:32, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
Its not that black and white,
wp:primary come into it, so it would be an RS for a stated opinion by the person being interviewed. But it would not be an RS for it being true, nor would it trump other sources that contradict it.Slatersteven (talk
) 18:42, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
So it is not a quality RS, ok. Mikola22 (talk) 19:00, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

Novak Djokovic Jutarnji List

The president of the Croatian Tennis Association states in the Jutarnji List newspaper "S obzirom na majku Hrvaticu, vjerujem da ima uvjete za hrvatsko državljanstvo".."Considering his Croat mother, I believe that he has conditions for Croatian citizenship". Jutarnji List. [25] and information from this newspaper (2006)[26] Is this RS and is this information useful for information about mother nationality. Mikola22 (talk) 19:17, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

Did it exist as a country when she was born?Slatersteven (talk) 19:19, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
She was born in Yugoslavia, Serbia ie Belgrade. Mikola22 (talk) 19:22, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
Then we have Problem, we can say "president of the Croatian Tennis Association has said she was Croatian".Slatersteven (talk) 19:26, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
Ok, in the article about
Drazen Petrovic, in the newspaper, some private person say that Drazen Petrovic is a Serb. In this article is also said that he is ethnic Serb although ethnic is not mentioned in source(newspaper) and in article there is no information that this person says that Drazen is a Serb. If your explanation is correct it means I have to edit that article according to your advice. Mikola22 (talk
) 19:37, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

Is this PRIMARY or unreliable?

Regarding a recent discussion at
WP:APL#Article sourcing expectations. I disagree, as I think the source is reliable, both in terms of the publisher and the historians involved, and the historian quoted (Bartoszewski) is not even being quoted to talk about his personal experiences, but about the wider war-related topic, on which he is an expert in his professional capacity (all three historians are experts on WWII). Can we get feedback on whether this source is indeed PRIMARY and whether an attributed quote to Bartoszewski can be present in the article, or not, in light of the applicable policies and guidelines? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here}
08:52, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Well, why not use some of his scholarly work for such an attributed claim? This source is reliable for Bartoszewki´s opinion, but its usability is limited outside of that (like with any interview). Pavlor (talk) 09:11, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Interviews are indeed
primary sources, it doesn't matter if they've been selected for publication in a particular primary source collection. Citing a primary source lends itself to cherry-picking (although I doubt that is happening in this particular case), which is why we have the article sourcing expectation to begin with. We don't want to set a precedent that inclusion in scholarly collections indicates reliability because it may indicate the opposite (sources might also be chosen, in some cases, because they are inaccurate in some interesting and useful way). Now, I personally believe that this source is probably accurate, but agree with Pavlor that it would be better to cite the information to a secondary source. (t · c) buidhe
13:00, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

The interview was published in a "collection of documents" (wybor dokumentow), and Bartoszewski is interviewed as a founder of Żegota on subjects that pertain to his activity at the time.[28] That's
WP:PRIMARY by every measure. If Piotrus can source the claim to a secondary or tertiary source, then Bartoszewski can be used to elucidate. François Robere (talk
) 13:14, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Not to comment on this case specifically since I know nothing about the people involved, but where did you all get the idea that primary sources are not allowed and that sources can be removed on account of being primary? This is one of the most persistent false myths about policy. You all need to visit
WP:PRIMARY and read what the policy actually says. The three "Do not"s you can read there are a fine summary of what is not allowed. You can't eliminate an interview merely on the grounds of being primary, you just aren't allowed to "analyze, evaluate, interpret, or synthesize" it. Zero^talk
13:43, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

The inference being used is that when there are no secondary sources supporting the same information, it can be excluded on grounds of undue weight. (It could also be that this is a case where the current practice is changing or has changed, and policy just hasn't caught up yet. Certainly the more controversial the topic, the more useful it can be to focus on secondary sources only.) Sunrise (talk) 00:45, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

But we will inevitably be forced to synthesize, since there's such a variety of
WP:PRIMARY sources in this field, and on certain questions - like the extent of help given to Jews by the underground state - they're often contradictory. François Robere (talk
) 09:48, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
(Answering both) We often use interviews with experts reported by newspapers. The weight of something does not depend on whether it is primary of secondary. Next, if we can't use a source without "analyzing, evaluating, interpreting, or synthesizing" it, we shouldn't use it. That also is true for both primary and secondary sources. Contradictory sources are not a problem: we either agree that one is more reliable than the other, or we present both. It is just NPOV policy, which also doesn't depend on primary vs secondary. Zero^talk 12:44, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

Primary sources only contribute minimally to weight in most circumstances, because they don't tell us about the prominence of each viewpoint in the published, reliable sources. That's an issue of analysis, evaluation, interpretation, or synthesis, and an editor using only primary sources to address it would be engaging in original research. If something is only discussed in primary sources, the implication (except in cases like breaking news) is that no author of an analytic (etc) source has thought that it's important enough to deserve mention. An expert's viewpoint reported in a newspaper has been subject to the newspaper's (analytic) editorial judgement on how the viewpoint is presented, which quotations to use, and even which expert to interview in the first place, which grants the viewpoint more weight than viewpoints that are not reported in such a manner. One way to frame part of the issue here is whether the reprinting of the interview involves sufficient analysis (etc) to grant enough weight to support inclusion. Sunrise (talk) 23:12, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

As best I can tell from the article sourcing expectations, primary sources aren't specifically excluded, as long as they appear in one of the accepted publications. So I don't think the key question is whether the interview is PRIMARY, but whether this book satisfies the requirement for "academically focused books by reputable publishers." I have no expertise in this area, but looking at the WorldCat info (both the description and the list of U.S. libraries that have copies of this book) and having looked up more info about the publisher, my sense is that the book does meet that requirement; that is, the book appears to be both academically focused and published by a reputable publisher. Although an interview is normally a primary source, in this case, the primary sources in the book are the 1942-1945 documents that appear in the pages after the interview (the interview is more recent, and the two people involved in the interview could instead have co-authored a non-interview introduction to the book, but they chose to use a contemporary interview instead; I don't read Polish, and one question is whether the interview constitutes a secondary source discussion of the primary sources in the rest of the book). -- FactOrOpinion (talk) 13:46, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

If I understand correctly, this is about removing citation "Every Pole who cooperated..." (diff). Yes, I agree with Piotrus that such citation of a primary source is good and appropriate. However, I also agree there is a problem with the "bare citation". It must be placed to proper context, based on another secondary RS, for example "Officials of Żegota repeatedly appealed to the Polish Underground State to act against blackmailers [ref]", or something else. But this may indeed be covered by this discretionary sacntion. Too bad. This poorly conceived sourcing restriction prevents participants from development of content. My very best wishes (talk) 01:13, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

From looking at the artice it seems that Władysław Bartoszewski is not really a historian but a politician. He only has honorary degrees and was stripped of the professor title by request of the German and Pollish academic societies. The publisher is governmental not academic and reportable to the Polish prime minister therefore also political. Morover, when this was published Bartoszewski was the cheif officer of the publisher and took credit as an author of the book so
WP:PRIMARY and bordering on self-published. I think this is the exact kind of source that should be not be used due to the exteneded sourcing expectations.AlmostFrancis (talk
) 01:26, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
Actually it is a bit worse than I thought, Kunert was more than likely a doctoral student when he performed the interview. Also he later became the sectretary general of the publisher, hired by none other than Bartoszewski. Friszkel was working for the IPN at the time which has a rather dubious repuation for this kind of content. The is an incredibly well researched field and there is no excuse for using such limited sources.AlmostFrancis (talk) 01:58, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
Bartoszewski was never “stripped of the professor title” and there’s no source that says that. The title “professor” was simply removed from a website because his title is honorary. As the source itself says, other officials and websites have chosen to continue to use the title. His title was honorary (given to him in Germany first as he taught some courses there) and many still use it today ([29], [30], [31]). From The Economist's obituary: "The war, stints in jail and persecution meant he had no formal higher education. Though he was a sought-after lecturer on history, and author of dozens of books, in status-conscious Poland some begrudged him the self-awarded title of “Professor”. But most thought he had earned it, and a lot more besides." He simply doesn’t have a formal title because... you couldn’t get one in German occupied Poland. But he was a respected scholar in Poland and abroad, and still is today. Yad Vashem clearly lists his profession as "professor and diplomat" ([32]).

IPN has little to do with this book, and anyway, the book is from 2002, before the earliest criticism of politicization and such discussed on the linked page. Unless you can find a source calling the publisher unreliable, it is an academic body affiliated with the government, and therefore quite reliable by definition. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 00:36, 25 July 2020 (UTC)
I would like to see your sourcce that the publisher is an academic body. According to both the Polish and our own article the publisher was a non-independent governmental body responsible for administration and messaging in the topic area. Bartoszewski doesn't have a formal title, which would have been doctor not professor, because he never received a doctorate (not Bartoszewski fault). Now that we agree that professor was honorary I think we are good on that front. Bartoszewski was by all accounts an exceptional human being, and I have little doubt in a world without WWII he would have been an impressive scholar. That doesnn't change the fact we are talking about an interiew of a Bartoszewski published by a government body for which he was the chairperson. Its the Holocaust, maybe the most researched topic in history, we do not need to make excuses for poor sources. If the interview had said anything of note we would have a secondary source.AlmostFrancis (talk) 02:27, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

It's a primary source. Interviews are of very little use, because they are not fact-checked. People frequently mix up names, places and dates, or phrase words in a way that doesn't accurately represent what they meant. it also gives them an opportunity to say things they believe but if they had to supply sources could not find them. TFD (talk) 02:07, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

I don't see a problem with using Bartoszewski's quote, nor with the book where it appears. However, it would be beneficial for all, if this is supported by another reliable secondary source.--Darwinek (talk) 23:39, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

Is The Media Fund a reliable source?

This is a narrow question arising from a discussion over here and as mentioned above:
Is The Media Fund a reliable source? --Guest2625 (talk) 04:19, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! Wait... did I say Sharknado? I meant The Daily Mail 3: Fight Over Every Word.

To be fair, Sharknado 3 and the repeated relitigating of our article on The Daily Mail are both multi-part disasters...
The latest round in the ongoing battle to stop Wikipedia from saying bad things about The Daily Mail involves this paragraph:

The Daily Mail has been noted for its unreliability and widely^{[disputed – discuss]} criticised for its printing of sensationalist and inaccurate scare stories of science and medical research,^[1]^[2]^{[unreliable source?]}^[3]^[4]^[5]^[6] and for copyright violations.^[7]

...and the discussion is at Talk:Daily Mail#Sourcing concerns. The latest bone of contention is this article:

Daily Mail: Most Unreliable Paper For 3rd Year In A Row --The Media Fund.

Author's bio.

So, are the sources reliable, and do they support the claims in the article?

References

^ Jackson, Jasper (9 February 2017). "Wikipedia bans Daily Mail as 'unreliable' source". The Guardian.

^ "Daily Mail: Most Unreliable Paper For 3rd Year In A Row". The Media Fund.

^ Collins, Lauren (April 2012). "Mail Supremacy". The New Yorker.

^ Goldacre, Ben. "The Daily Mail cancer story that torpedoes itself in paragraph 19". The Guardian.

^ Trevor Butterworth (21 February 2012). "Will Drinking Diet Soda Increase Your Risk for a Heart Attack?". Forbes. "Research" has also revealed the risk of the Daily Mail misreporting a study's findings, especially when there's an opportunity to write an alarming headline. As Dorothy Bishop, a Professor of Neurodevelopmental Psychology at Oxford University, noted in giving the paper her "Orwellian Award for Journalistic Misrepresentation" the Mail sets the standards for inaccurate reporting of academic research.

ISBN 9780007240197
.

^ Fletcher, Martin (29 April 2016). "What it's like to fall victim to the Mail Online's aggregation machine". New Statesman.

Changing the subject with a lurch, our article at Media Fund is for a completely different organization and should be disambiguated. Also, Sharknado (film series) says "In his quest, Fin fights Nazis, dinosaurs, knights, and even takes a ride on Noah’s Ark." I'm just saying. --Guy Macon (talk) 12:39, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

Of course if you want other shark-related cinema, check out my userpage. Only in death does duty end (talk) 13:10, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

Hmmm. I might have torpedoed myself by attempting to be lighthearted and fun. I really do want an answer. --Guy Macon (talk) 18:41, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

(...Sound of Crickets...) --Guy Macon (talk) 04:39, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

You also torpedoed yourself by posting a long list of sources which are going to have different answers. #1, for example, is an article from a reliable source but is essentially about how we, Wikipedia, banned use of the Daily Mail. It should be pretty obvious that we can't use ourselves as a source? #2 is under discussion below but I don't see any reason it should be reliable - just reading it says the DM is the least reliable, but only just above The Times which is a highly respected and reliable source. That makes it problematic in a different way. #3 isn't clear which bit of it is being cited: it's from The New Yorker, a highly reliable source, but seems to be about how the DM is powerful, rather than its reliability. The list is just too long without being more specific. --GRuban (talk) 10:43, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

vashivisuals.com and cinephiliabeyond.org

Hi, I found these two good sources for Raiders of the Lost Ark. They seem reliable, the first is by an A.C.E. member and the second has a full editorial team, but could someone give me their educated opinion before I rely on them too much? Darkwarriorblake / SEXY ACTION TALK PAGE! 11:28, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

Are newspaper articles never considered reliable for history?

To my knowledge, there is no guideline, policy, nor consensus that articles from major news organizations were considered unreliable for history.
There is an RfC
WP:HISTRS
. For this case in particular, there are no academic sources or other reliable sources that contradict the removed passage.
The essay advocates for preferring academic sources over news articles, which I agree with, but I don't see it suggesting that news articles are inherently unreliable. Aren't news articles acceptable for use in history coverage on Wikipedia, particularly when there are no academic sources contradicting them? — MarkH₂₁^talk 14:56, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

wp:primay implies that a newspaper to close to the events is a primary source.Slatersteven (talk) 14:58, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

Articles by good academic historians in papers should be treated as reliable. Later coverage by journalists should be treated with caution, though of course many of the best-respected journalists later write books. Current news reporting may or may not be primary, but should be treated as a last resort, though for very recent events it will usually be the only option. Johnbod (talk) 15:12, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

I've come across a lot of nonsense in history articles, up to and including claims that Michael Davitt was the inspiration for Gandhi's nonviolent strategy. So I recommend avoiding them, unless the article was written by an expert. Newspapers also are more likely to have an axe to grind in ethnic/national conflicts, although that may not be the case here, I don't know. (t · c) buidhe 15:26, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
Clarification for this particular case: it's two newspaper articles from 2005 and 2017 about what happened in the 1950s and 1960s. So far, nobody has found academic sources about this particular claim. — MarkH₂₁^talk 15:34, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
Ahh I see, then I would ask, is the issue an ongoing one, such as a contested claim?Slatersteven (talk) 15:46, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
@
1962 Sino-Indian War. — MarkH₂₁^talk
15:56, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
Then yes it is about an ongoing issue, establishing a claim. As such the newspapers fall into wp:primnary category.Slatersteven (talk) 15:58, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
@Slatersteven: This is one of the few things that both sides agree on and is about the current de facto situation, rather than about establishing a claim in the modern conflict. There is also an absence of competing claims from either side. — MarkH₂₁^talk 16:02, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
Then use another source.Slatersteven (talk) 16:05, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
So far, nobody has found academic sources about this. — MarkH₂₁^talk 16:08, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
India is not the only place that publishes newspapers.Slatersteven (talk) 16:15, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

Indian and Pakistani newspapers are particularly prone to unreliability in any circumstances, and if this is yet another part of the long-running saga you and Kautilya3 have been engaged in then partisanship is indeed likely to be a big problem with such sources. - Sitush (talk) 15:43, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

You could have saved us all some time if you had been more specific. This is the edit you are referring to and, yep, for example, Indian Defence Review is definitely not reliable for anything to do with a conflict involving India. - Sitush (talk) 15:45, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
@Sitush: I linked the diffs and discussion if anyone wanted to look at this particular case. However, this thread was intended to be a general question about the broad claim that Newspapers are not reliable sources for history. — MarkH₂₁^talk 15:56, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
Well, you sort of hid the diff a bit but it gets worse, doesn't it? You've just come out of a situation where you were called out for abuse of procedure etc and now you seem to be doing it again between here and an RfC. I've just see Wikipedia_talk:Noticeboard_for_India-related_topics#RfC_on_Demchok_pre-_and_post-1962_Sino-Indian_War. - Sitush (talk) 16:01, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
@Sitush: What are you talking about? I opened an ANI thread about Kautilya's personal conduct in a different (and now-settled) content dispute. The RfC that you refer to and that I linked at the beginning of this discussion is me opening a formal discussion about a separate content dispute. — MarkH₂₁^talk 16:05, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
You are being disingenuous, I think. - Sitush (talk) 16:11, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
You're entitled to your opinion. My stated question is still Aren't news articles acceptable for use in history coverage on Wikipedia, particularly when there are no academic sources contradicting them? — MarkH₂₁^talk 16:17, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

I would not say that newspapers are never reliable sources for history. If there are established scholars who write about particular topics and provide background that they know from their scholarship, I would not mind taking them to be reliable. But in the particular case that the OP brought here, that is not the case.
WP:SYNTHESIS
in OP's claims regarding what Arpi said. We also have to account for Arpi's own POV as a Tibetologist. How do you like his book title: "Born in Sin: The Panchsheel agreement and the sacrifice of Tibet"? Should I pick up random claims from that book and insert them as facts in Wikipedia?

Particularly troubling are the OP's claims that there are no academic sources contradicting them. I would like to know where he looked. There are plenty of sources on the Sino-Indian border dispute as well as the 1962 war. There is a troubling pattern on the part of OP in throwing up dubious claims and waiting for them to be contradicted by some other alert editor. This amounts to POV pushing by attrition. One has to make an honest-to-goodness effort on one's own to find out what the facts are. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 17:21, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
I have spent hours (an "honest-to-goodness effort") searching through Google News, Google Books, JSTOR, and a university academic library. I haven't seen a source contradicting this claim, which both the given Indian and Chinese sources agree on. — MarkH₂₁^talk 17:29, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
Would you care to show the Chinese source that supports the claim "Demchok were physically controlled by India from 1953 until its effective split in 1962", or even "By the mid-1950s, India physically controlled the settlements in Demchok on both banks of the Charding Nullah".Slatersteven (talk) 17:41, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
@
Dêmqog. They successfully defeated the invading Indian troops and successfully recovered their lost ground. Later, India seized the opportunity to invade and occupy the land between Dêmqog and 500 kilometers west of Dêmqog, and they shamelessly call this area "Demchok".]
— MarkH₂₁^talk
01:42, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
That does not support either 1953 to 1962 or By the mid-1950s. At best it could be used to say "in October 1962". It might possibly be usable for saying "1956 to 1962", but some might say it does not really say that, only implies it (please read
wp:v.Slatersteven (talk
) 08:38, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

As I anticipated, this thread is now just relitigating the RfC on the specific instance the original poster referred to. It isn't a general enquiry, nor is RSN a particular great place for generalised queries because pretty much all sources do have at least some limited extent of reliability and so context matters. - Sitush (talk) 11:43, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

The suggestion to adhere as closely as possible to what is supported by the sources is a good one, and that may mean that the article reflects a bit of uncertainty and ambiguity around these questions. On general principle, if there are no higher quality reliable sources that explain who possessed this territory and when, then it may be alright to rely on news sources. It's very odd that no academic sources can be found to help settle this question one way or another.TheBlueCanoe 15:55, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
Something else to consider... If there are no academic sources (and barely any media sources)... it is likely UNDUE to even mention it. Blueboar (talk) 16:09, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

Use of a politician's tweets and On The Issues

Please see
On The Issues. The citations to On The Issues, such as here, are merely snippets of O'Halleran's campaign website. ("Ban luxury trips: Luxury trips paid for by special interests happen under the guise of keeping members of Congress informed...Source: 2016 Arizona House campaign website TomOHalleran.com , Nov 8, 2016." I was very surprised to see an administrator, Missvain, make these edits. I reverted them, and she said she was "shocked" by my reversion. Am I crazy? Are we allowing these kinds of non-independent sources in the articles of members of the U.S. Congress? O'Halleran, and indeed most politicians, have tweeted (and used other social media platforms) thousands of times. Unless a particular social media post was picked up and discussed elsewhere, why is a particular tweet noteworthy enough to include here? Marquardtika (talk
) 03:28, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

WP:PRIMARY source. OTI does seem to simply rehash info from the politician without providing secondary analysis. It'd be better to find secondary sources, if possible, and is important to be careful in the context OTI is used. If we're discussing where a politician stands on the issues, their own statements can be useful, with caveats. – Muboshgu (talk
) 18:53, 22 July 2020 (UTC)
On the Issues is largely volunteer run. I think we need to be very careful with sites like this. There is a ton of data there, but seemingly no editorial oversight...and the way I have often seen OTI used is in a pretty contextless, cherry-picked way. I really don't think we should ever be using it absent other sources. Politicians have views and have made statements about lots of things; if those views/statements haven't been covered or discussed in independent sources, they aren't likely to be noteworthy enough to include in their biographies, and instead are likely to reflect the bias of editors who feel like picking and choosing which positions to include on a page. Marquardtika (talk) 19:01, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

WP:BLPSELFPUB applies: a small amount of material sourced to self-publications is OK, but it can't be the majority of the sourcing. -- FactOrOpinion (talk
) 20:13, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

A tweet from an account that is definitely controlled by the person whose account it purports to be (e.g. a blue check account, or an account linked from a RS) is, in my opinion, fine to attribute statements made by that person but it probably should not be used to write content in Wikipedia's voice or assign quality to those statements. I would prefer this content sourced to this tweet [33] -
He co-sponsored the
police reform
, including improved transparency, and accountability.

- be rewritten thus -
According to O'Halleran, he co-sponsored the
George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020
, which he said addressed "police reform by improving transparency, [and] setting standards for accountability".

Chetsford (talk) 20:24, 22 July 2020 (UTC)
Sourcing someone's views to statements by them (twit-like or otherwise) doesn't have reliability issues, but it raises a significant question of due weight: dude presumably makes lots of statements in public fora, why should this one or that one get picked out by Wikipedia editors for special notice? --
talk
) 20:52, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Yes
WP:UNDUE issues. I have no idea why, out of his thousands of tweets, we would feature a handful from two months in his entire congressional tenure, especially when there are plenty of reliable independent sources out there--newspapers, for example. Missvain, it would be helpful for you to weigh in here to share your thinking. Marquardtika (talk
) 15:55, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

While there are possible situations where we could cite a tweet by a verified account, it has to be done with extreme caution. Some things to consider:

Is it unduly self-serving? A statement that is framed in plainly self-flattering terms, which stakes a claim to beliefs that are obviously popular, or which casts the speaker in a good light cannot be cited to a primary source. Something like stating that they support freedom of speech or oppose tyranny shouldn't be cited to twitter because it is obviously self-serving; similarly, in-depth defenses of (or apologia for) their own views are generally self-serving. Is it a clever, snappy quip that someone wants to include because it does a good job arguing for their beliefs? It shouldn't be cited to a primary source (or, at least, we should avoid quoting the snappy emotional framing unless we have a secondary source for it.)

On the other hand, is it potentially-negative? For example, has an editor drudged up a quote where they seem to express racist beliefs, which no secondary sources have covered? Oddly, this isn't strictly forbidden under
WP:EXCEPTIONAL
claim. Basically, are we citing a tweet for a viewpoint that readers are going to find surprising or shocking? In that case we probably need a secondary source.

Similar to the above, is the tweet generally representative of their views, or is it an outlier? If it's not the way they usually present themselves, and it has no secondary coverage, then we'd likely be giving it
WP:UNDUE
weight to cite it directly. Again, the idea is that editors shouldn't be going through someone's twitter feed and plucking out tweets in order to prove something in particular about them.

If it's an unexceptional viewpoint that isn't particularly self-serving and which generally reflects how they're portrayed anyway, we might be able to use it; an example might be a politician expressing a view that is standard for their political party. But in that case, why hasn't it been covered anywhere else? For this reason the possible situations where we can use a self-published source for a statement of someone's views are fairly narrow. As it says in
WP:SPS, Exercise caution when using such sources: if the information in question is suitable for inclusion, someone else will probably have published it in independent reliable sources. --Aquillion (talk
) 23:27, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

We should not use tweets and indiscriminate compilers of positions (such as On the Issues). A politician's stated positions may be nuanced in a way that can't be captured by a tweet. Furthermore, the context behind a position can't be captured by a tweet. For example, a politician may state that they are against late-term abortions and phrase it in language such as "we can't let people do abortions just before a baby is born" – secondary RS would however clarify that late-term abortions are universally used in situations when the baby is not viable or when the health of the mother is at risk. Similarly, a politician may flip-flop on issues or hold multiple contradictory positions (Donald Trump for example held multiple positions on the minimum wage) – secondary RS would note that the politician holds contradictory positions or has changed the position whereas self-serving tweets would not do that. RS coverage is also helpful in determining what's DUE and what isn't DUE, whereas a self-serving tweet or a compiler such as On the Issues does not give any such indication.
talk
) 19:41, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

@Missvain: I wanted to make sure you were following this discussion. It is my assessment that there is not support among other editors for the type of edits you made to the O'Halleran page. Do you disagree? Based on the results of this discussion, I plan to remove the content cited to tweets and On the Issues from the O'Halleran page and from any other pages that look to be suffering from the same type of sourcing issues. Marquardtika (talk) 18:51, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
Thanks. I disagree, but, I don't have the mental capacity to sit here and try to state my case. Oral history from the subject (which is what Twitter is) is invaluable when it comes to sharing political positions. It's just a shame Wikipedians still struggle with accepting oral history, but, I've been dealing with that argument for over 10 years, and sometimes I win the argument, sometimes I don't. I'm just too exhausted mentally right now to give it a good go. Thanks everyone for your contributions to Wikipedia. Missvain (talk) 19:35, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

Novak Djoković, Nova S

Interview with grandfather of Novak Djoković (from mother side). Interview is from Nova S. (2020)[34] "Ekipa portala Nova.rs posetila je Noletovog dedu u njegovom stanu na Čukarici... The team(journalist) of the Nova.rs portal visited Novak grandfather in his apartment in Čukarica", "kaže Zdenko i dodaje da Đoković ima puno pravo da se predstavlja kao Srbin, iako po majčinoj strani ima hrvatske krvi...says Zdenko and adds that Djokovic has every right to present himself as a Serb, even though he has Croatian blood on his mother's side", "Ja sam po nacionalnosti Hrvat i rođen sam u Vinkovcima..I am a Croat by nationality(ethnic origin) and I was born in Vinkovci", "Uvek sam govorio da sam Jugosloven ili Hrvat, Srbin nikad nisam bio...I always said that I was a Yugoslav or a Croat, I was never a Serb", "Normalno je da će biti više priklonjen Srbima i ja nemam ništa protiv toga. Ne bi bolje prošao u životu ni da se predstavlja kao Hrvat...It is normal that(Novak Djokovic) he will be more favor to Serbs, and I have nothing against that. It would not be better in his life if he had presented himself as a Croat."[35] I am interested is this RS and whether this informations can be used for the origin of his mother? Mikola22 (talk) 11:23, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

Only in so far as "according to his grandfather". Why is this even important?Slatersteven (talk) 11:25, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
Because some editors consider that in the Serbian sources when is mentioned mother of Novak Djoković as Croat it means from Croatia not ethnic origin and in other case Serb mean ethnic origin. I am editor on Wikipedia and I have to respect other articles(in this case Dražen Petrović article), there is also in the source mentioned Serb, but in the article states ethnic Serb. This source would be a confirmation for the ethnic origin of Novak Djokovic's mother ie ethnic Croat fact(same as in the case of Drazen Petrovic). We cannot have two different facts and the sources are the same. Mikola22 (talk) 11:41, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
No, its a confirmation its what someone thought. It might be best if all reference to anything except where she was born was removed.Slatersteven (talk) 12:49, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
I don't know why we should move informations from the article about the origin of Novak Djokovic's mother or father if they are from reliable sources. In any case, a consensus is needed for that and if majority of editors decide, this informations will go out of the article. Otherwise we have and other articles from former Yugoslavia (famous persons) with such or worse sources so then it must be wider consensus and not just for the article about Novak Djokovic. In any case I am here for discussion, but all articles should be treated equally. Mikola22 (talk) 13:35, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
Other stuff is irrelevant.Slatersteven (talk) 13:37, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

@
WP:BLUDGEON. You are really pushing for make changes every day for weeks, although other editors disagree. The source doesn't describe Novak's origin, but states what Novak's mother tells what Novak's paternal grandmother said. Also, you don't translate texts from Serbo-Croatian correctly. Tthe term Hrvati / Hrvatice (Croatians) is often used in Serbian and Croatian languages for the citizens of Croatia, not only for Croats as ethnic groups. Comparisons with Drađen Petrović's article are also wrong. There we have precise translations into English.--WEBDuB (talk
) 15:43, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

@WEBDuB: "The source doesn't describe Novak's origin, but states what Novak's mother tells what Novak's paternal grandmother said." Show me in this source where Novak Djoković mother is talking about her mother ie paternal grandmother. Therefore if you came here without knowledge of what this source is talking about it just talks about you and your editing. Therefore you first must look at what the source is talking about and then accuse me, not the other way around because it could be characterized as personal attack. Mikola22 (talk)
Sorry, my mistake. I was confused by two sections about the Nova S. This is certainly RS. In this case, Novak's grandfather said that he has always declared himself a Croat or Yugoslav. That’s all we know about his maternal ethnic background.--WEBDuB (talk) 16:59, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
(I was confused by two sections about the Nova S) this first source from Nova S is not RS, let's move on and not use RSN for personal attack. I forgive you. Mikola22 (talk) 17:10, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
There was no such as personal attack. I agree that the source could be included and it can be explained that Novak's maternal grandfather is considered an ethnic Yugoslav and a Croat. I have nothing against this information being mentioned.--WEBDuB (talk) 19:09, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
If some person says that he is a Croat by nationality, then he is a Croat by nationality (ethnic), we must respect RS. As for "Novak's maternal grandfather is considered an ethnic Yugoslav and a Croat", he doesn't say that, he says that he always declared himself "or as Yugoslav or as Croat and never Serb" however, he clearly states earlier that he is of Croatian nationality not Yugoslav, and we must respect what the source says. Mikola22 (talk) 20:17, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
As you yourself said, in the same interview he said that he declared himself both a Yugoslav and a Croat. I think the source can be included, but it has to start with: “According to his grandfather...”--WEBDuB (talk) 22:00, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
It is only an additional source, "declared himself" it is a term which does not mean something concrete, in that context we must also state that he was never a Serb. It makes no sense to state that because it has no concrete meaning and the article is not about grandfather but Novak Djokovic. You can suggest this sentence on RfC and editors will decide. And that's it. Mikola22 (talk) 05:54, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

Novak Djokovic - The Biography

Source is: Chris Bowers; (2017) Novak Djokovic - The Biography John Blake,
ISBN 178606460X [36] and information from the source is "part-Croat ethnic heritage". Is this reliable source and whether this information can be used in the Novak Djokovic article. Mikola22 (talk
) 07:58, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

Usual weak sourcing in sport related articles and ethno-nationalistic edit-warring among the Balkan area editors complement each other appropriately in this article. As of this book, John Blake certainly is not the best publisher for this kind of information, but - looking at the other sources in the article - Serbian ancestry of his father has even worse source. It seems main source of contention here is how to write known facts (how much "Croat" his mother is). My proposal: simply write where they (mother and father of Novak Djokovic) were born and do not search for their "ethnic heritage" (which is hard to reliably ascertain with such poor sources like tabloid press). Pavlor (talk) 12:13, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

If that's the only source, exclude. "Chris Bowers" appears as author only of a series of cheap tennis biographies from this publisher. Guy (help!) 12:39, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

The problem is that we don’t have a better source about the origins of his parents. For mother we have 2 sources in the article, the first does not speak about origin, second is from Serbian tabloid in which his mother is mentioned as Croatian (obviously in an ethnic sense) while other editor thinks it is a label only for Croatia. We also have the latest source(this month) from the one of Serbian television portal in which Novak Đoković's grandfather(on the mother's side) from Serbia says for himself that he is of Croatian nationality (Croatian ethnic origin) and that Novak Đoković has Croatian blood. I can also put that source for discussion. Mikola22 (talk) 13:12, 24 July 2020 (UTC)
Then we leave it out, we do not use crap sources just to fill out details. If RS do not care neither should weSlatersteven (talk) 16:18, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

Mikola22, As Steven says, leave it out. Guy (help!) 17:34, 24 July 2020 (UTC)
@JzG:, You mean all sources? Then informations about the mother and father must get out of the article. Mikola22 (talk) 18:50, 24 July 2020 (UTC)
That may be warranted. However, we discussed here source(s) concerning the mother of Novak Djokovic, so start with poorly sourced (and contested) informations about her. Ethnicity (or how it is called in the Balkans) of his father is sourced to
Happy TV, which again is not a stellar source, but at least this part was not disputed yet. Pavlor (talk
) 20:54, 24 July 2020 (UTC)
If this (best source that we have) must to go from the article then I guess other sources worse than this must to go from of the article. As far as the mother's side is concerned, we have nothing. That is, nothing should remain in the article from mother's side. (so start with poorly sourced (and contested) informations about her), where to start? I am the editor, I explained here sources which exist for the mother. If this best source is not good then all other sources(mother side) has to go out from the article, worse sources cannot stay while best source has to go. Or we will invent informations about his mother. Mikola22 (talk) 06:06, 25 July 2020 (UTC)
This is not some tit for tat exercise, you asked about a source and you have been answered. If you want to raise other sources do so, but in a separate section.Slatersteven (talk) 12:42, 25 July 2020 (UTC)

absolutely a reliable source! Slatersteven This book is the only full-length biography of Novak Djokovic. I'm surprised to see you call it a "crap source". I think that when a sports writer researches and publishes an entire book on a subject, we should take its word seriously. At least as seriously as the word of the many newspaper articles cited in the same article, which are by contrast not written by experts like Chris Bowers. Though there's no reason to think that it's a subpar source, even if it was we should still use it as being superior to the alternatives. I saw a featured article Edmund Sharpe almost entirely based on a self-published CD-ROM put together by an obscure, uncredentialed, amateur historian. The article passed featured article review, because no superior sources existed. Similarly, this book is the best source on Novak Djokovic, even if some claim it to be imperfect.Behindthekeys (talk) 06:52, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

We have very little information about the publisher. Does anyone know anything more about the Kings Road Publishing? We don't know if it's a self-publishing service. I can't find a reviewer in the book.--WEBDuB (talk) 22:12, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

Part of the Bonnier Group (actual imprint of this book is John Blake). Books like this are bordeline-RS, but weak sourcing seems to be quite common in sport related articles. Main issue here is the intended use of this book - it may be fine for uncontroversial facts, but I would be warry to use it the way the OP proposed. Pavlor (talk) 05:21, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

From the passages I've read, it looks well-researched and Bowers does a good job in exploring the intricacies of Novak's roots while also dealing with some sensitive political topics in a balanced manner. In the absence of better sources, I think it can be considered adequate. --Griboski (talk) 17:12, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

Novak Djokovic, Slobodna Dalmacija

Interview of Novak Djokovic in the newspaper Slobodna Dalmacija (2006). "Kad sam ušao u četvrtfinale Roland Garrosa, osobno me nazvao premijer Koštunica, čestitao mi na uspjehu. Šokirao sam se jer je znao baš sve o meni. I da mi je majka Hrvatica, iako je rođena u Beogradu, jer su svi njezini iz Vinkovaca i tamo imam puno rodbine.".."When I entered the quarterfinals of Roland Garros, Prime Minister Kostunica personally called me and congratulated me on my success. I was shocked because he knew just about everything about me. And that my mother is Croat, even though she was born in Belgrade, because all of her are from Vinkovci and I have a lot of relatives there". Slobodna Dalmacija newspaper [37] and information[38] Is Slobodna Dalmacija RS and is this information useful for his mother nationality. Mikola22 (talk) 20:03, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

We still have the problem of Croatia was not a nation at the time. So I am not sure we can say it was her nationality. Maybe "Said she was of Croatian decent". Not I am sure why this matters and is taking up so much time.Slatersteven (talk) 20:09, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
I do not understand so please clarify. Novak Djokovic said that his mother is Croat even though she was born in Belgrade, I don't know what it matters whether Croatia was not a nation at that time, which time? Please explain. You said that Serb is "if he says he is Serbian is he referring to his ethnic background his nationality" and this is same thing Croat. Mikola22 (talk) 20:25, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
Otherwise you said that if the source doesn't mention decent, neither can we. Mikola22 (talk) 20:33, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

You cannot be born in a country that does not exist.Slatersteven (talk) 20:35, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
Croatia exist at the time of birth of Novak Djokovic mother, but you probably think she wasn't born in Croatia and she can't be Croat nationality? Is that a problem? You suggest what we can state instead of nationality. Here we talking about ethnic origin , Croat. We can't state decent because source does not say this. The same thing is and in the Dražen Petrović article, the source only mentions Serb and in article writes(His father, of Serb ethnicity), If Novak's mother is a Croat, then she is of Croat ethnicity . Mikola22 (talk) 20:58, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
Mikola, Slatersteven is saying that she can be called an ethnic Croat. It’s just that you cannot say her nationality is Croatian as she never registered for it nor was Croatia an independent country but a state within Yugoslavia at the time of her birth. That’s all. OyMosby (talk) 22:00, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
Ok, then let him suggest what to write. If is decent then and article of Drazen Petrović must have such a determinanton. However when it comes to "Croat", it has the same ethnic meaning as the "Serb". We must have identical informations(in these two articles) because they are identical facts. That is my opinion. Let someone say what is most correct and so it will be in both articles. I edit Dražen Petrović article ( He is of paternal Serbian and maternal Croatian descent), this information was from article of Novak Djokovic and explained on talk page. Same editor remove this information from the article and with help of another editor in one article (Novak Djoković) keep "descent" fact and in Dražen Petrović article they keep ethnic "Serb ethnicity" fact. And it's about the same thing Croat-Serb. Otherwise I personally in my life never heard or read that someone from Dražen Petrović family sad that his father is Serb or Serb ethnicity. Someone else is talking about it(private persons not from Croatia, newspapers) and it is an integral part of the article. Otherwise Dražen Petrović is a symbol of Croatia and everything is known about him but this information does not exist in Croatia. Mikola22 (talk) 06:11, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
Why do you have to repeat that a million times? There is no place here to discuss that article, nor do you use correct comparisons. We don't have a reliable English source for Djokovic. In English, Serb = ethnic Serb and Croat = ethnic Croat. The term “Serbian / Croatian descent” refers more to the country. Petrović's father is not from Serbia (Bosnian Serb), but Djokovic's mother is from Croatia.--WEBDuB (talk) 15:57, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
@WEBDuB: "Djokovic's mother is from Croatia" Where does it say? She is from Serbia, Belgrade. Mikola22 (talk) 16:08, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
Exactly. She is from Serbia, but her parents are from Croatia. We do not have a clear source for ethnicity.--WEBDuB (talk) 16:52, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
@WEBDuB: That's why we have additional source from grandfather interview which confirms that Novak Djoković's mother is Croat (Croatian blood and his nationality ie origin.) Cannot term, "from Croatia", "Croatian citizen" and Novak claim "my mother is Croat, even though she was born in Belgrade" mean the same, a person from Croatia. Person from Croatia is not born in Serbia, that person is born in Croatia. This is RS, for now we have two RS and if you wish I can start RfC with your and my proposal and that’s it, so let the editors decide. Mikola22 (talk) 17:29, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
The newspaper may be reliable, but that does not mean that it is always neutral. (
WP:NEUTRALSOURCE
) I think we should find a Serbian reliable portal that states the same claim. “And that my mother is Croat, even though she was born in Belgrade” - This is not a correct translation.
Serbian: Hrvat (Хрват) = ethnic Croat, citizen of Croatia; Srbin (Србин) = ethnic Serb, citizen of Serbia

Croatian: Hrvat = ethnic Croat, citizen of Croatia; Srbin = ethnic Serb; Srbijanac = citizen of Serbia

We also should to find a English source that explicitly uses the term Croat and not to translate arbitrarily. Furthermore, this is source from 2006. (
WP:AGE MATTERS) Djokovic is a world-famous star who is in the media almost every day, there would certainly be a huge number of reliable sources of recent date in many languages for any important information about him. To conclude, this article doesn't meet enough criteria to be included in this case.--WEBDuB (talk
) 19:05, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
For now this is RS, focus on this RS. WP:AGE MATTERS, in various articles there are many sources from beginning of 20th century and they are RS, as for WP:NEUTRALSOURCE, this could be said for any interview or article about someone from newspaper. If you think that this source is not RS then you have to confirm it here, for now it is RS. Everything else is for Novak Djokovic talk page. Mikola22 (talk) 20:05, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
WP:AGE MATTERS, in various articles there are many sources from beginning of 20th century - But not for currently current and world famous people, especially not for disputed situations.

WP:NEUTRALSOURCE, this could be said for any interview or article about someone from newspaper - Of course that could be said for any interview. Any statements made by interviewees about themselves, their activities, or anything they are connected to is considered to have come from a primary-source and is non-independent material. (
WP:INTERVIEW) Again, we need to be especially careful when it comes to disputed situations..--WEBDuB (talk
) 21:58, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
For now this source is RS. "disputed situations", it’s an interview from Novak Djokovic when no one knows who he is, I don't know what would here be "disputed situation"? This is RS. So far no one has said that this source is not RS. Mikola22 (talk) 06:03, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
For now this source is not RS. No one else has characterized this as a reliable source. The disputed situation is related to the article. In this case, it is more important to find a more neutral and more recent source.--WEBDuB (talk) 18:07, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

Primary source document published by NARA

1. Source. Central Intelligence Agency (September 25, 1961). Assassination Records Review Board (ed.). Form: Personal History Statement of Conein, Lucien Emile (PDF) (Report). JFK Assassination System. National Archives and Records Administration (published July 24, 2017). p. 3. DocId: 32399265. Retrieved July 1, 2020.
2. Article. Lucien Conein and Wyandotte High School
3. Content. Lucien Conein attended Wyandotte High School in Kansas City, Kansas.
Lucien Conein was a CIA official who played an important role in the escalation of United States involvement and war in Vietnam; he acted as the liaison between Henry Cabot Lodge (the US Ambassador to South Vietnam) and the generals that plotted the 1963 coup against South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. According to various sources, including a CIA biography of Conein, he was born in France, but sent to his sister in Kansas City, Kansas as a child. The CIA biography does not name the high school he attended, but states that he dropped out during his junior year; it cites an
Location (talk
) 22:00, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_304&oldid=1138648501"

[The_Guardian-1] Jackson, Jasper (9 February 2017). "Wikipedia bans Daily Mail as 'unreliable' source". The Guardian.

[2] "Daily Mail: Most Unreliable Paper For 3rd Year In A Row". The Media Fund.

[Mail_Supremacy-3] Collins, Lauren (April 2012). "Mail Supremacy". The New Yorker.

[The_Daily_Mail_cancer_story_that_torpedoes_itself_in_paragraph_19-4] Goldacre, Ben. "The Daily Mail cancer story that torpedoes itself in paragraph 19". The Guardian.

[forbes-5] Trevor Butterworth (21 February 2012). "Will Drinking Diet Soda Increase Your Risk for a Heart Attack?". Forbes. "Research" has also revealed the risk of the Daily Mail misreporting a study's findings, especially when there's an opportunity to write an alarming headline. As Dorothy Bishop, a Professor of Neurodevelopmental Psychology at Oxford University, noted in giving the paper her "Orwellian Award for Journalistic Misrepresentation" the Mail sets the standards for inaccurate reporting of academic research.

[Bad_science-6] ISBN 9780007240197
.

[Aggregation_machine-7] Fletcher, Martin (29 April 2016). "What it's like to fall victim to the Mail Online's aggregation machine". New Statesman.

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[7]

Victory in War of 1812

guns.com

National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH)

Realtor.com as RS for edits in articles

Quality sources for tentative haplogroups of historic people

bioRxiv (discussion on RS for haplogroups)

Miraheze and Their Wikis

Odd publisher: Ed-Tech Press

Landas

RfC on whether certain sources are considered to have a conflict of interest

datarabia.com

Indian Journal of History of Science

Can Photos/Images be used as reliable source?

Bild

Novak Djokovic - Happy TV

Novak Djokovic - Nova S

Novak Djokovic Jutarnji List

Is this PRIMARY or unreliable?

Is The Media Fund a reliable source?

Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! Wait... did I say Sharknado? I meant The Daily Mail 3: Fight Over Every Word.

vashivisuals.com and cinephiliabeyond.org

Are newspaper articles never considered reliable for history?

Use of a politician's tweets and On The Issues

Novak Djoković, Nova S

Novak Djokovic - The Biography

Novak Djokovic, Slobodna Dalmacija

Primary source document published by NARA