User:Dervorguilla/sandbox19

RSVETTING

Annotated checklist

The material
 * Is it contentious or contended?
 * Contentious material is material that people might take a position on for ideological reasons.… If it's contentious, we … have to be aware of the possibility of deliberate bias.
 * Does the ref indeed support the material?
 * For instance, if it supports a quote, does the quote indeed appear in the ref, and so forth.

The author
 * Does the author have a Wikipedia article?
 * ''This provides a quick-and-dirty (albeit imperfect) gauge of notability, which is not the same as veracity but is a data point.…
 * What are the author's academic credentials and professional experience?
 * Is the author, or this work, cited in other reliable sources? In academic works?
 * This is a rough indicator of post-publication peer review and acceptance. (Pro tips: if there is a DOI link, this will often show "where cited" for scientific publications. If it's a book, searching at Google Books (enclose the book title in quotes) can bring up cites.) WP:NJournals describes some other citation-finding tools and methods.)
 * How does the author make a living?
 * If he works for a salary, he has an incentive to not get fired. That means if he's a professor at an established university and that's his main source of income, he has an incentive to avoid outright mendacity, since that'll get you fired. Newspaper reporter, same thing. But other entities might encourage mendacity if it supports their mission. If he makes a living writing books or whatnot, his main financial incentive is to increase sales rather than necessarily get his facts right.
 * What about reputation? Are there any big character markers?
 * ''If he's been fired for plagiarism or indicted for perjury or successfully sued for libel or whatever, those are data points.…


 * '''Does the author have an opinion on the matter? On the continuum running from "utterly disinterested investigator or reporter" to "complete polemicist", where does this person fit?
 * Even if he's utterly disinterested, he can still be inaccurate, of course. But if he's well to the right end of this continuum, that's a big red flag. It doesn't mean everything he says is inaccurate, of course, but it's an important data point. You have to be honest here – if he's a polemicist who supports your version of things, he's still a polemicist.

The publication
 * What is it?
 * Is it a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, or a magazine (or newspaper) known to have an effective fact-checking operation?
 * WP:RS, in its sections WP:SCHOLARSHIP and WP:NEWSORG, strongly indicates that these are the only sources that are assumed to be reliable. (This doesn't prove that they are reliable in a given case, just that the assumption that they are is your starting point.) Everything else is up for debate.…
 * If not, is there any reason to believe that anyone has checked the author's facts?
 * What's their circulation?
 * Size doesn't prove anything, but it's a data point. The New England Journal of Medicine and the North Carolina Literary Review are both scholarly journals, but they're not equal. Ditto the New York Times and the Easton (Maryland) Gazette''. A bigger operation means more resources for fact-checking, a bigger reputation to uphold, and greater liklihood of employing top-tier people.
 * What about the publisher? … What's their reputation?
 * Do they have an agenda?
 * What's their business incentive for veracity?
 * Some magazines and newspapers rely on their reputation for veracity as part of their marketing model. If they don't pay attention to that they're eventually out of business. Others, not so much.

Example #1

The author
 * Who is the author?
 * Peter J. Bowler. He's a historian of biological science and a professor at Queen's University Belfast.


 * Does the author have a Wikipedia article?
 * Yes, he does, Peter J. Bowler.


 * What are the author's academic credentials and professional experience?
 * … He's worked as a teacher or professor. He's a past President of the British Society for the History of Science.


 * Is the author, or this work, cited in other reliable sources? In academic works?
 * Yes, some. It's listed as a ref in J.L. Heilbron's The Oxford companion to the history of modern science and some other works.


 * How does the author make a living?
 * He's a professor at Queens College. This is probably his primary source of income, although he also gets book royalties.


 * What about reputation?
 * He's a member of good standing of various scholarly bodies, according to his article.


 * '''Does the author have an opinion on the matter? On the continuum running from "utterly disinterested investigator or reporter" to "complete polemicist", where does this person fit?
 * He's an academic. There's no reason to believe that he'd have any incentive to either glorify or deprecate Mendel's role.…

The publication
 * What is it?
 * It's a book:


 * What's their circulation?
 * Not applicable. UC Berkely is a big school and their publishing arm is also a big operation.


 * What about the publisher? What kind of outfit are they? What's their reputation?
 * University of California Press, Berkely. It's a highly reputable academic publisher.


 * Do they have an agenda?
 * No.


 * What's their business incentive for veracity?
 * It's high, as far as that goes, since they're an academic publisher.

Summary It's an acceptable ref. It's a book, and we don't like to use books as sources, since books aren't usually fact-checked, so we are basically depending on Bowler's reputation. It appears to be excellent. There are no markers to indicate that he would have any incentive to get this wrong (quite the contrary, he has an academic reputation to uphold) and every indication that he has the competence to get it right.

About fact-checking Most large magazines employ fact-checkers. Books publishers and most newspapers don't.…

When you cite a book, you are relying almost entirely on the author. Book publishers have little incentive to worry about facts since people generally buy books based on the author rather than the publisher.…

When you cite a newspaper, you are … relying … mainly on the publication.… Newspaper editors will expect reporters to check their own facts and they'll fire them if they don't and reporters know this. Newspapers do have an incentive to worry about facts since people do generally buy newspapers based (partly) on the paper's general reputation for veracity…. It depends a great deal on the newspaper, of course, and business incentives to get facts right vary a lot among newspapers….