User:Sławomir Biały/Human interest

I feel that it is high time we firm up some guidelines concerning the use of "human interest" soft news stories as sources. I have been involved in two deletion discussions of the BLP article Jacob Barnett, in which a number of such soft sources were used ostensibly to establish the notability of the subject: Articles for deletion/Jacob Barnett and Articles for deletion/Jacob Barnett (2nd nomination). The story here is that the Daily Mail ran a piece back in March 2011 that claimed, among other things, that Mr. Barnett had debunked the big bang theory, etc. This story subsequently became "viral", and was picked up immediately by a number of other news outlets who uncritically repeated some of the obviously absurd claims that the Daily Mail article made.

It seems to me that this is a general trend in news reporting, and that such soft human interest sources should be used with extreme caution. I think it is important that we should articulate this in our reliable sources guideline, because it seems like there is an enormous amount of confusion concerning the use of such sources (see the deletion discussions that I have linked to). I do not think that the current guideline goes far enough to dissuade the use of such sources. I propose adding to WP:NEWSORG something along the following lines:


 * Exercise caution in using human interest news stories as sources. Such stories may appear in places that generally do have a solid reputation for fact checking, but are not regarded as serious journalism and so are subject to a much lesser degree of scrutiny.  They may turn "viral", being repeated in many different news sources.  The quantity of such sources is no substitute for their quality, and it is essential that there should be at least some quality sources available.  Quality sources are distinguished by having some recognizable source of authority apart from the opinion of the author, such as commentary by experts and witnesses.