Case in point. The Daily Telegraph would generally be regarded as one of the UK better newspapers in terms of accuracy.
[[James William Middleton]] is one of those terrible articles written by as pastiche of passing media stories. To that article was added the seemingly interesting fact that he memorised the Scripture lesson for his sister Kate Middleton's wedding, because he couldn't read it due to dyslexia. Despite being somewhat unflattering, it seems OK, because it is sourced from the Telegraph. However, if you look at the source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/theroyalfamily/8505562/uKate-Middleto ns-brother-triumphs-over-his-dyslexia.html What it says is "Belatedly, one learns the reason: James, is dyslexic. "He knew that if, on the day, he looked down at the words on the page, they would be of scant help," I am told." !!!!***"I am told"***!!!!! "I am told"- that means the paper is repeating hearsay, it isn't technically saying "this is true" only "someone has said". Who? We don't know? Could be someone who really knows - or not. If you look at my essay [[WP:OTTO]] it demonstrates explicitly that the Telegraph (at least on that occasion) was quite happy to parrot a story from the Daily Mail -dependent on an anonymous source - that the Telegraph itself probably didn't even know. Now, the story about James is quite possibly true (who knows)- and is certainly sourced. However, if we were actually serious about verifiability we would have to say "this is insufficient for verification". The problem isn't so much that we take verification over truth, but that we take the fact that something is mentioned in a source as being adequate verification, without examining carefully what the source is actually claiming, or the reliability of its information. And actually, if you were to apply a proper level of verification scepticism to all the information on articles such as [[James William Middleton]], you'd have very little of the article left. That may well be a good thing. Scott _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
