User:Curly Turkey/Source abuse

A reliable source is a minimum requirement to back up a statement, but not in itself sufficient. We must hold sources to a much higher threshold of scrutiny, and never simply hunt for sources to back up the facts we'd like to include.

As an example, from a field I'm familiar with:

Comic book sales in North America peaked in the early 1950s and then plummeted to just over 10% of their peak by the 1960s. It's easy to find sources asserting the decline resulted from competition from the advent of television. Though these sources never back up these assertions with hard data, and we have the counterexamples of France and Japan, where comics sales continued to grow through the TV era, it's far easier to find RSes making the assertion than contradicting it. Stating television as the cause of decline of comic book sales may not be untrue, but from the sources we have, we cannot state it with confidence as a fact.