Ken Arromdee: wrote: > On Mon, 5 Dec 2011, Steve Summit wrote: >> Even if Demi Moore is >> perfectly reliable on the truth surrounding her birth name, >> common sense tells you that a 140-character tweet (or two) is not >> the sort of place where you can make nuanced distinctions... > > The trouble with this reasoning is that BLP subjects who are not specifically > experienced with Wikipedia won't make statements with lawyer-like precision.
That's true, and remains so if you generalize it to "people who are not specifically experienced with formal reporting won't make statements with lawyer-like precision". > If you reject the BLP subject's own statement on the grounds that there could > be some nuance which makes it say other than what it seems to say, you end up > with an excuse that pretty much lets you ignore all BLP subjects whenever you > want. I think you've just proved that interpreting primary sources can be hard (and sometimes borders on OR), which is why when there's any doubt, it's correct for us to defer to secondary sources -- the more reliable and verifiable the better. So, yes, in this case, Encyclopaedia Britannica is more reliable than People magazine is more reliable than Demi Moore herself. (I agree with you that this is a surprising result, and that it seems to defy common sense at first. Truth has a way of doing that, sometimes. :-) ) But it's not "whenever you want", it's "when there's reasonable doubt", which there certainly is here. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
