User talk:Smcruise

January 2020
Please do not add or change content, as you did at Centenary 1000, without citing a reliable source. Please review the guidelines at Citing sources and take this opportunity to add references to the article. JBW (talk) 22:27, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

The reason why we need published reliable sources, not just the say-so of someone who tells us they have personal knowledge, is that experience over the years has shown that information from such a person is unreliable. You may have solid and certain knowledge, but very often when people post information giving their personal knowledge as justification, that information is inaccurate and unreliable. There are many reasons for that including: (1) the person is lying, whether as arbitrary vandalism, as a deliberate attempt to libel someone, as a deliberate attempt to boost the reputation of themselves or someone they know, or for any of various other reasons; (2) the person sincerely believes what they say, but their information is just wrong. Of course, very often someone who comes along and provides information based on their personal knowledge is perfectly right, but we have no way of distinguishing those people from the ones who provide inaccurate information, so we have to rely on published sources of information. JBW (talk) 18:24, 27 January 2020 (UTC)