Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 219

An article about FAKE medical journals used to identify a journal as a medical journal
I don't think an article that identifies fake medical journals should be used to identify real medical journals as such. Others seem to disagree and will not help me find better sources. 

Please advise.

Two articles where this is being done:

Article being referenced:

jps (talk) 16:14, 12 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Articles from Forbes Contributors are generally considered unreliable sources for facts (opinions are fine), primarily because they are effectively non-reviewed blogs for the most part, compared to staff Forbes writers. --M ASEM (t) 16:28, 12 January 2017 (UTC)
 * And academic journals about medical subjects are generally called "medical journals" (regardless of what they publish is bad science, pseudoscience, quackery or whatnot). Theer's no value judgment implicated in the term "medical journal". --Randykitty (talk) 16:46, 12 January 2017 (UTC)
 * jps, does this really need a source? Do you really think that someone's WP:LIKELY to come along and seriously wonder whether this might be a journal about poetry or something?  Usually, we don't bother sourcing such statements; the journal itself is a usable primary source for a general (i.e., vague) description of its contents.  WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:34, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I think that these journals are not real journals, in fact. In an age of fake news, it is important that we identify what is and isn't authentic as best as we can. If something is inauthentic, it seems irresponsible to me to WP:ASSERT, in Wikipedia's voice, that it is what it claims to be. Would we write that Weekly World News was a news periodical? jps (talk) 00:07, 14 January 2017 (UTC)
 * WWN was a news periodical, and we say that in the first sentence: "a largely fictional news tabloid".  If it's "news" and comes out "periodically" (i.e., weekly), then it's "a news periodical".  (Tabloid is the size of the paper, not a value judgment on the contents.)  WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:41, 14 January 2017 (UTC)
 * The edit says it was a peer-reviewed medical journal, which needs verification. And while it may be correct to say that a pseudo-scientific medical journal is a medical journal, it is misleading and should not be phrased that way.  Opinion pieces of course are not reliable sources for facts, and generally you would need an academic source to determine that something is an actual medical journal.  If it is, a source should not be hard to find.  TFD (talk) 06:33, 14 January 2017 (UTC)
 * The source is there: the journal is included in the Index Medicus, a prestigious curated collection of medical journals. What is not well-sourced at the moment is that this is somehow a "fake" journal (only sourced to the above mentioned Forbes blog and another personal blog). --Randykitty (talk) 09:17, 14 January 2017 (UTC)
 * It would be fair to call it a controversial journal, I think the term peer reviewed is tendentious in context as woo reviewed by a peer panel of woo-meisters is still woo. Guy (Help!) 09:32, 14 January 2017 (UTC)
 * But you need sources for that. In any case, "medical journal" and "peer-reviewed" are neutral statements in my eyes, because it doesn't say anything about the quality of the journal. It can very well be a bad medical journal and incompetent peer review. But, again, in order to say anything either way (good or bad), we need sources that verify such a statement. The personal opinion of us WP editors should not enter into that. --Randykitty (talk) 10:08, 14 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately, we live in a day-and-age where the institutions of academic publishing and peer review are being mimicked by bad actors to their own designs. This is why it is important that we identify with reliable sources (not just indices) that a publication is what it says it is. We do the readers no favors by declaring in Wikipedia's voice that a publication which contains misinformation and medical claims that, for example, fail WP:MEDRS spectacularly, is a peer-reviewed medical journal. For better or worse, the connotations of such a label are that the publication is an authentically peer-reviewed and mainstream medical journal. Even though those words are not there, that's the way most people read such a text. The fact that we can find no sources which explicitly state that the journals in question are peer reviewed medical journals is not surprising to me as I am fairly convinced that they are fake journals. I'm not asking that Wikipedia state that in its voice, but I am asking that it not state something that would mislead readers into believing something else. jps (talk) 15:16, 14 January 2017 (UTC)
 * This discussion has become incredibly shattered, with postings by you on different notice boards, article talk pages, etc. I refer to the discussion at Wikipedia talk:NJournals, where these issues are all being addressed. I don't intend to continue discussing here. --Randykitty (talk) 15:44, 14 January 2017 (UTC)
 * The basic question as to what to describe FAKE journals on their webpages cannot really be addressed at WP:NJOURNALs, I think. This is a question for either here or WP:NPOVN or the article talkpages, surely. I think since it crosses many different articles, it would be worthwhile to discuss it among others who are not involved in the discussion about overhauling WP:NJOURNALs since that is a separate matter in part. jps (talk) 15:58, 14 January 2017 (UTC)

CINAHL calls it a medical journal, so does Current Contents (which lists it under "Clinical Medicine"), Index Medicus, and the Journal Citation Reports. These are all reliable sources. You, on the other hand, have a blog post that says it's "fake". And of course your own infallible opinion, lest I forget that. So unless you can come up with reliable sources that say something else, we're done here. --Randykitty (talk) 16:06, 14 January 2017 (UTC)
 * We have a source for it being controversial, the article cited. Guy (Help!) 18:05, 14 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Those are blogs. But regardless, that still means that we first describe the journal and then provide sourced criticism. It still remains a "peer-reviewed medical journal". The sources then confirm that the peer review is incompetent and the medical science is crap. --Randykitty (talk) 18:09, 14 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I don't think that we can be held responsible for readers assuming that "medical journal" means "reputable medical journal that publishes only scientifically sound academic work" (a definition that would certainly disqualify NEJM). Medical Hypotheses is a medical journal, despite its reputation for carrying speculation.  Medical Humanities (journal) is a medical journal, despite publishing no science.  For that matter, I could start my own medical journal:  "medical journal" ultimately means "magazine that publishes stuff about medicine" – including the art of medicine, the human experience of medicine, the nonsense of medicine, etc.
 * If you want readers to have an accurate understanding of the journal's reputation, then you need to add more sentences, rather than trying to remove these words. (Those sentences should indicate that this is one of the most reputable journals about acupuncture, and not merely that you think acupuncture is a bunch of pointless garbage.)  WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:48, 14 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Whereas acupuncture and meridian studies is a journal about pseudomedicine, and Explore is a pseudo-journal about mainly pseudomedicine. Guy (Help!) 11:29, 15 January 2017 (UTC)

Interesting. That's not the impression I get from our own article on the subject: medical journal. jps (talk) 19:59, 14 January 2017 (UTC)
 * It is conceivably possible that the editors who are willing to write an article like medical literature (peace be upon them, may they increase, etc.) are disposed to think of it as a special and wonderful subject. You might find the article journal slightly more informative about the minimum standards for creating a journal, which are basically "someone publishes something, especially on a regular schedule".  WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:16, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Fair enough. Then are blogs journals then? jps (talk) 16:56, 17 January 2017 (UTC)

Reliable source?
Does the book "The Management of Official Records in Public Institutions in Sri Lanka: 1802–1990 by S. S. K. Wickramanayaka" count as a reliable source? This source is being used in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kachcheri, "Kachcheri is a Hindustani word[3] initially used for the Revenue Collector's Office in the early years of the British Colonial Administration in Ceylon."

[3] - The Management of Official Records in Public Institutions in Sri Lanka: 1802–1990 by S. S. K. Wickramanayaka.

Other than this book, there is no proof that indicates this word to be of Hindustani origin. I have provided sources including the Tamil dictionary that indicates this word to be Tamil, but it has been reverted many times, with indicating this source to be more reliable. Please, also check the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Kachcheri

Muvendar (talk) 12:18, 18 January 2017 (UTC)


 * I have addressed some of these issues at Talk:Kachcheri. --Guy Macon (talk) 13:49, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

History And Archaeology Through Laboratory Examinations
The blocked User:Mkd07 and their various Sockpuppet investigations/Mkd07/Archive socks made liberal use of a particular reference. "History And Archaeology Through Laboratory Examinations, Tome Egumenoski & Aleksandar Donski, 2012". Recently the Mkd07 sockpuppet User:ConstantinVacheron used it to support their creation of a now-deleted article, Phosphate analysis in archaeological sites. The article cited p.8 of the source in question but the article content was actually a near copy-paste from the open-access Sassa website.

"History And Archaeology Through Laboratory Examinations" seems not to have been published online. Wikibin has a brief summary of its authorship and content but I can find no peer reviews of the work itself. A search for its "main author" (Tome Egumenoski) draws a blank - more or less. It seems likely that the cited translator is one and the same as the Aleksandar Donski who has a YouTube page, dedicated to various Macedonian, Balkan-related (and apparently controversial) historical claims. An article about the cited work was created and maintained by Mkd07/their sockpuppets until its deletion.

I'm doing my utmost here to assume good faith here, despite the socking, but the work (assuming it exists in paper form) seems self-published at best. Apologies for not giving diffs here; if I gave them, there would still be no way to verify the information they were supposed to support. The source should not be used for any Wikipedia article, imo. Haploidavey (talk) 15:10, 11 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I'm assuming the work in question is not included in any journals. I also assume that the ISBN has been checked, and it has been determined that the publisher is not a major academic publisher. The Sassa website indicates it is managed by the University of Stirling, so it might presumably qualify as reliable on that basis, but the lack of any other independent coverage on the topics mentioned certainly would qualify any material sourced from it alone for consideration for deletion. I guess the most relevant question then becomes whether the SASSA website itself qualifies as reliable. I think I should probably leave that question best for others to deal with. John Carter (talk) 15:36, 11 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the quick response. The Sassa website is open source and GNU, same as Wikipedia; maybe reliable in some things, and less so in others. The problem here is "History and_Archaeology Through Laboratory_Examinations" - details above - which has been used to support some claims in various Balkans-related articles, but cannot be verified, and seems not to be published or commented on by any academic source at all. Haploidavey (talk) 15:54, 11 January 2017 (UTC)
 * While the above can be technically interpreted as true, most obvious readings of the second sentence are misleading or wrong. The SASSA website runs on the Mediawiki Software, which is under the GNU GPL (and hence Open Source), but not part of the GNU project in the narrower sense, managed by the FSF. But that refers only to the software platform - by that criterion, about 95% of the web are open source. The content, on the other hand, is under a Creative Commons license, but not under the GDFL (unlike Wikipedia). SASSA is also a Wiki, hence "like Wikipedia" in that sense, but it only allows contributions by registered users which have to go through an application process . SASSA was build by the University of Stirling with funding from the Natural Environment Research Council. It is run by a group of academics and has two advisory councils .Thus it is probably reasonably reliable for its area of expertise - at least on the level of a Master thesis or a Technical Repot by a serious university. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 09:56, 14 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks for clearing that up. Haploidavey (talk) 12:54, 17 January 2017 (UTC)
 * If, as you say, the Sassa site is comparably reliable to our own, then its utility for these purposes should be equivalent to how frequently we use our own site as a reliable source, which is to say, not at all. John Carter (talk) 17:06, 11 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Exactly so. Haploidavey (talk) 17:11, 11 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Phosphate analysis is an established archaeological technique with numerous credible sources in journals such as J. Archaeological Science and Geoprospection, and those listed in the SASSA wiki. There is no need to use the SASSA page or the queried article.  Martinlc (talk) 17:16, 11 January 2017 (UTC)
 * And I agree with that too; but perhaps I've not made my point very clearly. The deleted article is no longer a problem; nor is Sassa, no matter how used or misused. The deleted article is just one example among many in which "History and_Archaeology Through Laboratory_Examinations" has been cited in Balkans-related articles by various socks of a banned user. It, and its authors, appear to have no proven academic standing. So I'd like to remove it. Haploidavey (talk) 17:28, 11 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately, at this noticeboard, we tend to discuss only whether specific individual sources can or should be used in specific individual instances, not offer the sort of blanket approval you might be seeking. There are so many possible ways for sources to be used in so many situations that attempting to do so would be problematic. Having said that, if the source under discussion is not directly the source of a specific quotation or other item in an article which can't be sourced elsewhere, I can't see any real reason not to remove it. John Carter (talk) 17:36, 11 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Ah, the light dawns - after a fashion. Thanks for your replies - and on re-reading my query, I see that I've been less precise than I should, for which my apologies. Indeed, blanket approval for removal is what I'm after here. Haploidavey (talk) 17:44, 11 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I can locate only two instances of the source being used in articles. Based on its title, I don't see its relevance as the source cited in History of the Macedonians (ethnic group). The use on Early Slavs does seem more appropriate, if it is a RS source for that sort of specific data. Tiptoethrutheminefield (talk) 22:05, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

Military Press?
Hi! I was wondering if Military Press, more specifically their reviews, would be seen as a reliable source. I haven't heard of them before, but they do have an editorial staff and it doesn't look like they sell articles or are fly by night. What do you guys think? I'm leaning towards it being usable for the most part. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡)  14:54, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I'd say they are a small low impact source, probably not a great source for something major, or controversial, but for something minor like this I would call them an ok source.  InsertCleverPhraseHere  22:26, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Unless its something controversial it should be okay. Whats it being used for? A attributed opinion/review? Only in death does duty end (talk) 13:34, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

It appears to have substantial distribution in the San Diego area etc., and, as such, is at least the equivalent of any newspaper with similar free distribution. asserts coverage of 200,000 military personnel with a distribution of 75,000 copies. Reviews are opinions, per se, and thus are generally usable if cited and ascribed as such. Collect (talk) 13:45, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

NextBigWhat
I'm reposting this item that was brought up but not commented on; now with additional notes.

According to an independent investigation, NextBigWhat is a fake news site that pumps itself with fake twitter and Google+ followers: http://inc42.com/longform/nextbigwhat-fake-social-media-ethical/. Less reliable sources (e.g. quora.com) say that it's a paid advertorial site a la YourStory (blacklisted on Wikipedia).

Many articles citing this source are created with severe conflicts of interest or undisclosed paid editing; details are at WP:COIN ([//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest/Noticeboard&diff=684639082&oldid=684627507 permalink]). This may be related to the fact that NextBigWhat allows submittal of startup stories by PR interests or others (/submit-your-startup page on their website).

The community may read this and decide that this is not an RS for business-related articles. - Brianhe (talk) 17:10, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

Beall
Beall's list is down. All content appears to have been removed from scholarlyoa.com - is this the result of legal thuggery? Guy (Help!) 21:44, 21 January 2017 (UTC)


 * He's not saying. It may have been in response to a suit; agreements to settle typically include a gag order in which the victim is not allowed to comment. Or he may have gotten tired of all the hassle. We just don't know. Shock Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 22:16, 21 January 2017 (UTC)
 * do we have an archived list?  InsertCleverPhraseHere  01:35, 22 January 2017 (UTC)


 * http://www.nature.com/news/controversial-website-that-lists-predatory-publishers-shuts-down-1.21328 Comment in Nature]. Guy (Help!) 12:37, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

Freedom of Information requests
Would the response to a freedom of information request be considered a reliable source? For example, a WP editor has made a FoI request to a local governmental authority to ask about a certain piece of information or data; the response to that FoI request is published on [www.whatdotheyknow.com this website]. Is the information contained therein allowed to be used as the solitary source for content on WP? --TBM10 (talk) 09:37, 22 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I would say yes as they are official public documents released by UK government departments, councils or police forces. Responses to FOIs are given in the knowledge that they will be published publicly if they are submitted via that website.  The C of E God Save the Queen!  ( talk ) 09:50, 22 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Such document usually will be primary sources. As such they should be used only for straightforward facts, e.g., "as of 2016 the population of Upper Rathole was 6." Shock Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 15:30, 22 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Agreed, from my (limited) experience with them, they are generally raw data. Iazyges   Consermonor   Opus meum  16:58, 23 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes, but with a proviso. Freedom of information act requests are sometimes sent in order to make a point. A journalist or campaign group will often send an FOI just to cause a stink. Similarly, the people who answer FOI requests often do so in a way that is extremely literalistic. If someone asked a question in a way that could be interpreted in two ways, and one of those ways gives the actual answer they are looking for, and the other way allows the public body to provide the illusion of an answer but without having to put too much effort in, FOI requests are often answered in the latter way. Not always, but quite often. In general, if an FOI request contains a straightforward and unambiguous statement of fact (e.g. the number of times that a particular hospital has had to close a ward due to a superbug), we should include it. But we should be careful not to use articles as WP:COATRACKs for random FOI "clutter". If someone sends an FOI to their local police force asking how many chicken tikkas they've consumed, that is of no relevance and should be excluded as trivia. FOIs are potentially useful but should be used with care, in my humble opinion. —Tom Morris (talk) 14:35, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

Question: Are the comments relative to India supposed to be under the previous headline?-- Jim in Georgia  Contribs  Talk  20:50, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

Foreign Correspondent's Club video on Youtube
Would this piece be considered a sufficiently reliable source or external link for the article on Soka Gakkai? John Carter (talk) 18:50, 23 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Can you say anything more about the provenance of the video, who the participants and hosts are? Itsmejudith (talk) 16:54, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

Wrong Side Effect Source?
In the article Hydrocodone/paracetamol, it has Euphoria listed as a side effect, with source 2 confirming that. However I have read over the documents and did not find sufficient evidence to uphold this. I am looking for feedback on my analysis, and willing to work with someone who is more experienced in helping newbies like me. Thanks!

--ExpertListener95 (talk) 14:41, 23 January 2017 (UTC)


 * I think you're right and this can come out. Euphoria is quite close to light-headedness and it doesn't seem impossible that it could happen with an opioid, but it would need a good source. This source doesn't have it, nor do others that I have briefly looked at. Have you seen WP:MEDRS? Itsmejudith (talk) 17:04, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

http://www.mdc.idv.tw/
On the Type_039A_submarine, the webpage http://www.mdc.idv.tw/mdc/navy/china/039ab.htm is used as a source. From what I can tell from a Google Translate, the page draws information from amateur sources, while other parts are apparently drawn from news and reports (names and dates of sources are given, but no links.)

The editors don't seem to have any particular qualifications; the site seems to be for a military history hobby group.

Is this site reliable/useful for Wikipedia purposes? - RovingPersonalityConstruct (talk, contribs) 10:16, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

Scrum (software development)
I came to this page as I knew nothing about the product and wanted to learn more. As I laid out on the article's Talk page, I could not tell the difference between the Wikipedia article and the sales pitch I had received in an email. The whole article seemed liked a combination of a manual on how to use the product as well as a pitch on why to use it. A seeming majority of the sources appear to be from Scrum or Scrum-affiliated websites and have Scrum in their URLs. Throughout the article regular common nouns are Capitalized The Way A Marketer Would Capitalize Common Nouns to make references to the product seem more important and proprietary. The maintenance tags were repeatedly taken down without any conversation about their merit and just out-of-hand dismissed despite some good-faith efforts on the talk page, but refusal to go into specifics. It's possible all the involved editors are adherents/users/subscribers of the article's subject and therefore do not have the partiality to discuss it in a neutral manner, but I really think the article needs better sources as well as disinterested eyes. JesseRafe (talk) 16:45, 23 January 2017 (UTC)


 * JesseRafe: Scrum is a product? Heh. There certainly are plenty of snake oil salesmen associated with the software development methodology business. Looking at it now, it's okay. Probably a bit too long, though there's plenty of good sourcing. The use of capitalised nouns isn't quite as big a sin as you make it out to be. If a term is used in a way that is different from common usage, it is common enough to capitalise it to draw that distinction out. Consider how in British English we talk about "small-c" and "big-C" conservatism (and indeed "small-l" and "big-L" liberalism) to distinguish between adherence to the political ideology and membership of the specific political party. That isn't just a practice of marketers or salesmen; alas, jargon is common in all walks of life.
 * I'd suggest that the best way to solve the problems with the article are to try to engage in good faith with other contributors and point out specific issues with the article. Suggesting that they are failing to be NPOV, or that the article is automatically not neutral because it uses terms of art in a way that marries up with some junk mail you received is not that productive.
 * Looking at the article now, some of the sections seem pretty well-sourced. The History section is a trifle pedantic but otherwise reasonably sourced. Most of the article seems pretty neutral and as far as I can tell, reasonably accurate. It definitely could do with more sourcing. I'm no fan of cultish agile practitioners but even as someone who is extremely skeptical of some agile practices including Scrum, the article doesn't seem egregiously bad. There's some bad writing, some stuff that needs sourcing, some tidying up, but nothing that gives me cause to suspect it was written by people dastardly trying to push an agenda, or a "product". I've added a couple of sources and I might add some more. I'd prefer it to not be fully protected so non-admin editors can collaborate on it. —Tom Morris (talk) 14:26, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
 * To clarify, JesseRafe did not lay it out on the article's page and that's the problem. Of course authors who understand the subject will be consulted when attempting to discuss it. We don't expect general media to discuss a highly technical topic such as scrum. Sports historians and experts are quoted at length on association football articles, gridiron football articles, basketball articles, baseball articles and any other sports article. Mathematicians are quoted on technical articles related that subject. Scientists (physicists, chemists, biologists, zoologists and geographers) are consulted on those articles. Why should we expect that a topic discussing Scrum development should be any different? I agree that capitalization is an issue, as with other software development articles, as those terms generally follow a different style of capitalization than Wikipedia uses in MOS:CAPS. The real problem is not that we're adherents to the methodology, it's that we have asked, per WP:BRD, that you make the case for inclusion of the templates and you have failed to do so. I have even offered that you tag specific statements rather than the whole article and you have elected not to.
 * Please don't forum shop. Discuss this at the article. Walter Görlitz (talk) 14:54, 24 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Scrum is not a product, it's a religion. Have you accepted Jesus as your scrum master? You won't get into heaven without a user story. Guy (Help!) 16:17, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
 * If I could extract one tooth from every person who claims to have used Scrum without even a rudimentary understanding of agile principles and why they sometimes work, I could keep the tooth fairies of the galaxy supplied for a significant time. Apparently, the important thing in their "Scrum" is to have both daily meetings and weekly meetings, in which the developers are told by the product owner what to do while the scrum master micro-manages everybody. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 10:25, 25 January 2017 (UTC)


 * There's a backlog anyway. --Izno (talk) 16:26, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

Reliability of The Imperial Gazetteer of India
Hello all,

It seems the editor User:Sitush feels that the source The Imperial Gazetteer of India is biased, or as he says "unreliable". I have found a similar discussion with this editor from a few months ago, where the previous opposition made a few good points (albeit in a crude manner), and cannot find any valid rebuttals by Sitush in that thread before it was derailed. I note that at least one editor asked why the source was unreliable and did not get a reasonable response.

I also note that many of the sources discussed, including the one provided by Sitush himself in the discussion above, all are in general agreement with the text that is being cited in the article Phulkian sardars (Bhati Rao of Jaisalmar was a Rajput [forget the golden fort part for now], and this was the branch responsible for the Sidhu Jats). Since it does seem that Sitush is of a religious denomination that may have some conflict with the legitimate content that is supported by British sources, in no small part due to the history and evolution of British rule in India, I am asking if others can objectively contest whether the Imperial Gazetteer of India is unreliable.

It seems this is a good source used for many articles involving India, and provides us with some confidence that there is corroboration of claims from a non-ethnic source. Is this wrong? I note this source is also on wikisource. Surely the editor has erred? Also, it seems William Wilson Hunter (the visionary behind this compendium) isn't somebody whose life work we dismiss with blanket arguments like "Raj sources not reliable"? I have not seen anything from the opposition that provides strong counter claims to what is provided in the multitude of sources supporting the content he disputes.

Some articles I've found that this source is used in: (etc)
 * Richard Burn (indologist)
 * North≤western Provinces
 * Great Famine of 1876-78
 * Agra Province
 * Imperial Service Troops
 * Presidencies and provinces of British India
 * Saiyid Khurd

It really does seem this is a good quality source that the opposition does not like due to the content, and not the source.

edit: Hello everyone. It seems User:Sitush and User:Bishonen are ignoring Wikipedia ettiquette, where item (3) on What is Wikisource? article clearly states wikisource provides wp:RS, thus refuting alleged bias claimed by these editors. Can we please get some action on this matter? It seems Bishonen was involved previously as well, and as an administrator he is ignoring the established criteria of Wikisource. I also find it very curious that Bishonen called following protocol 'disruptive editing'. I will be posting htis on the administrator's noticeboard as wel. Thank you.
 * Wikisource identifies three categories of sources it holds. It says that, of the many things Wikisource contains, some are reliable sources. And if you head to the original full page of which that is just a summary, here, and from there to here, you'll see that Wikisource contains a lot of sources in various categories. So a source contained in Wikisource might be a (1), might be a (2) might be a (3), or might be something else which is not included in that brief summary. It does not say that everything held by Wikisource is a (3) and that everything held in Wikisource is a reliable source. Also, "reliable source" is not a yes/no option, and what are reliable sources for some things are not reliable for others - they need to be individually assessed in the context in which they are to be used. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 17:43, 22 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Hi, well, nothing stated in that source is disputed by the others in the previous RSN discussion. The source originally used by User:Sitush (given here) to argue that the original content was invalid (on the basis of "Raj source"), was self-contradicting because the "non-Raj" source said the same things as the sources used previously (which are now also supported by the Imperial Gazetteer of India, which was not used in the prior discussion).
 * I also find it curious that User:Bishonen attacked my english here, when he deemed the previous editor's concerns over Sitush's ethnicity as a personal attack even though it seemed more about conflicts of interest.
 * Such a conflict is apparent here, where User:Sitush and User:Bishonen claim the sources are not reliable, yet have been supported by a multitude of references.
 * User:SageRad suggested that criticising others' English comprehension was a personal attack, and the previous editor was banned as a result. As an administrator who was intimately involved in the previous situation, User:Bishonen should know better than to use the same tactics as the previous editor, especially when others deemed it as a personal attack (I do not, but a violation is a violation).
 * Is this not a double standard, where the perpetrators are now behaving in the same manner as their previous opposition? Sitush wastes no time attacking other authors, and I have yet to see any body of work that he has produced that validates his stance. He seemingly disregards any source that is British, even though for this specific tribe (Phulkian), the most reliable of sources would be British (given their alliance as early as 1803&endash;predating the cis-Sutlej states by two years)
 * I think what you need to decide is whether you want to use this noticeboard to try to get a consensus on the reliability of this source for the context in which you want to use it, or whether you want to use it to attack two other editors. The former is what this board is for. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 18:27, 22 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Hello User:Boing! said Zebedee, thank you for engaging.
 * I disagree that I am attacking anyone. I think if anyone is being attacked, it was User:Bishonen attacking my english comprehension (as the other editor did towards Sitush, resulting in him being banned) instead of demonstrating the insufficiency of the source.
 * Now I will get back on point regarding reliability of the sources.
 * It is simple, really. One day, User:Sitush decided to delete legitimate content using "Raj sources unreliable" (a recurring theme if you inspect his edit history). Someone obviously took offense to that, as it is an attack on the reliability of the documentation of their family history.
 * As stated above, User:Sitush was originally challenged on this point (re: what made the cited content unreliable) by User:SageRad, and he did not muster an acceptable response, which presumably frustrated the (now banned) editor into asking about his english comprehension.
 * I think it is being charitable to say that Sitush's response to User:SageRad was arrogant, as it attacked prominent authors (among them James Mill, who fathered one of the greatest liberal philosophers of our time John Stuart Mill), but never answered the original question about what made the content of the source insufficient.
 * Was the (now banned) editor's response arrogant, as well? Sure, but it seems they correctly point out that the source Sitush provided to demonstrate the (removed) source's purported unreliability actually contradicted his point, as it contained support for the content that he removed
 * I find it hard to believe that the British would sacrifice the high quality of The Imperial Gazetteer of India (evidenced by its archival as a wikisource) by exercising bias (and thus being "unreliable") on this specific matter, especially after reading the source User:Sitush provides as evidence for the unreliability.


 * Secondly, I want to say, as the previous (now banned) editor also did, that this entire fiasco does feel like an embodiment of the history cited in The Imperial Gazetteer of India is on display here. Simply put, there were a select group of people who were fortunate enough to be allied with the British:

But the British Government, established at Delhi since 1803, intervened with an offer of protection to all the CIS-SUTLEJ STATES; and Dhanna Singh gladly availed himself of the promised aid, being one of the first chieftains to accept British protection and control.
 * To suggest that the Phulkian sardars' alliance with the British did not result in the majority of their history also being told by the British isn't reasonable. This alliance resulted in the Phulkians fighting Muslims, Hindus, and even Sikhs! (see below)
 * This clan did not like Maharaja Ranjit Singh (an alleged Sikh), and were suspicious of his plans after his friendliness with Muslims (whose history of griefing Gurus was still fresh at that time).
 * Thus, it is not a personal attack to show concern for removed content that is rigorously and multiply-sourced when the opposing editors are (likely) of faiths who are still sensitive about the events that occurred during the times documented by the The Imperial Gazetteer of India.


 * Lastly, and at the risk of belabouring the main point: the content unjustifiably removed by Sitush has multiple sources (the most recent of which is a wikisource).
 * After analysing the source provided by Sitush provided in the previous RSN, it is difficult to fathom that multiple "Raj sources" are all incorrect on this matter when they are consistent with what he originally provided.
 * In light of this, how can a reasonable person not infer the editing behaviour surrounding this content as a "Sitush knows [the] best [legitimate sources]" attitude? I feel I have taken a measured response that addresses the faulty criticism levelled by Sitush against The Imperial Gazzetteer of India.
 * This is not an attack on Sitush or Bishonen. Rather, it is an assessment of former & latter's behaviour on the earlier and current RSN respectively.
 * This response is simple Baconian induction of what they've provided.
 * I believe what was added originally was impartial and stuck to reliable sources, which are only disputed by those of religious denominations that were at conflict with the British (and consequently, the Phulkians) at the time.

I felt that what was added yesterday only emphasised the correctness of the content originally removed by Sitush and Bishonen approximately three months ago. Thank you for your time — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.76.118.151 (talk) 16:36, January 22, 2017


 * In general 'historical' sources are unreliable in some areas due to the changing culture, further research, distance and time from events giving a more accurate and broader view, classified documents may have been released etc etc. For historical India, most contemporary sources have been superseded by newer ones. A historical source may be accurate for the opinion at the time, but not necessarily for facts (in fact more than likely to be not, given the historic bias in most publications). This is why RSN requires three things: Article, reference, content supported by reference. Please provide these three with a short explanation of why you think the source is reliable for the content. Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:01, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
 * The OP has been blocked for three months. - Sitush (talk) 11:26, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
 * They've been using a number of IPs, only one of which is blocked as a proxy. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 12:00, 24 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Hello User:Only in death. I believe all three have been provided above, and while I respect your decision to not read it all (for whatever reason), I can only do so much I'm essentially repeating the above..
 * Article: Phulkian sardars
 * Reference: The Imperial Gazzetteer of India
 * Content supported by references, using the article modified by Sitush on December 2015 (commentary: if it was so "unreliable", why did Sitush not remove it all in December 2015, instead of inexplicably deleting it entirely in September 2016 when someone added a source?) :
 * Rawal Jaisal's descendents were of Sikh origin, and were Sidhu Brars: Here are four separate sources   (note, again, The Imperial Gazetteer of India is a wikisource).


 * I feel it is completely reasonable to hold User:Sitush and User:Bishonen accountable for their deliberate misinformation. I have shown four separate sources supporting the claims that Sitush left alone after his massive December 2015 edit, which he inexplicably deleted entirely in September 2015 after a single source was provided. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.109.239.64 (talk • contribs)
 * Accusing User:Sitush and User:Bishonen of deliberate misinformation is another personal attack, and I have already warned you about that. So you are now blocked, and you will be blocked for longer should you repeat it when your short block expires. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 18:41, 24 January 2017 (UTC)


 * I would be highly unlikely to trust those sources for statements of fact about geneology, descent, or any other ethnic/race/caste/dynastic related facts - given the time period and biases (cultural as well as literal). Personally I would also exclude the information if they were the only sources available and look for better more modern ones to replace it with. If none are found, I would think a bit harder about if this material is worth including at all. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:26, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

deagel.com


This site seems to get used for two things. First, for news; it acts as an aggregate for articles published elsewhere, and since Deagel provides links to those it seems superfluous to use Deagel in this manner.

The second is for technical details for particular weapon systems; the site is like a mini-encyclopedia. However, like a lot of sites that do that, it doesn't show where it gets its information from.

I also have not been able to find much about the qualifications of the person(s) who run the site. http://www.whois.com/whois/deagel.com seems to suggest it's a one person operation (it's registered under "GAS DEAGEL".) My wariness is further increased by the country forecast for 2025; the view it takes seems very fringe.

Would this site be considered reliable/useful for Wikipedia purposes? - RovingPersonalityConstruct (talk, contribs) 09:46, 25 January 2017 (UTC)
 * From a quick look, it seems unlikely it would be a useful reference. However not all sources are unreliable for all things. As it says at the top, to correctly assess reliability we need the source AND the material it is being used to support (including the article). Is it in current use on wikipedia or do you intend to use it for something? Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:17, 25 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Ah, I just saw Deagel's JL-3 page used as a source for Wikipedia's JL-3 article. There's so little concerning the topic from professional sources that is makes me wonder where Deagel is getting its information from. - RovingPersonalityConstruct (talk, contribs) 10:36, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

Is a medical source unreliable if the authors are from China?
A source was recently added at the article spinal manipulation, it has been reverted for being an unreliable source. I am looking for the opinions of other editors.
 * The source that was added is: Does cervical spine manipulation reduce pain in people with degenerative cervical radiculopathy? A systematic review of the evidence, and a meta-analysis
 * The text added with the source was: "A 2016 meta-anyalysis concluded there was moderate level evidence to support the immediate effectiveness of cervical spine manipulation in treating people with cervical radiculopathy."
 * The reasons for claiming the source is unreliable seem to stem around the idea that medical sources from Chinese authors are inherently unreliable; discussion can be found at the spinal manipulation talk page here.2001:56A:75B7:9B00:A5FC:56E7:D1A6:3966 (talk) 20:58, 16 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Yes we should exclude it. 80% of Chinese studies in one review were found to have falsified data . It's not restricted to SCAM: Chinese studies are essentially never negative . It's an open secret . Given the evidence that cervical spinal manipulation is potentially fatal, there are all kinds of reasons why we would exclude a weak positive result from a community which is ideologically predisposed to producing positive results regardless of the intervention under test. Guy (Help!) 21:33, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
 * The source you provided to support the claim that "80% of Chinese studies have falsified data" is looking at pharmaceutical trials, which might be a problem outside China as well; the source says nothing about rehabilitative sciences and says nothing about mainstream medical journals publishing review articles written by Chinese authors. Your comment looks like some original research, mixed with some personal bias....what I do not see are any policy based arguments for excluding sources from Chinese authors that are published in mainstream medical journals.2001:56A:75B7:9B00:A5FC:56E7:D1A6:3966 (talk) 21:43, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
 * And the other sources make it absolutely clear that the problem also applies to SCAM. It is well known and has been for decades . Guy (Help!) 22:02, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I'm with Guy on this one. I've been a science geek for years, and the only part of this which is news to me is that it's so extensively covered in the literature. I thought it was still an open secret until basically this same exact question came up a few months ago on this same noticeboard. To be fair, this version is refreshingly free of accusations of racism. So far. MjolnirPants   Tell me all about it.  22:05, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Not to mention Clinical Rehabilitation is a low impact journal that even states in its own description that it is "sometimes provocative". Looking through a lot of their articles I can see what they mean. Capeo (talk) 22:11, 16 January 2017 (UTC)


 * On second thought, I'm just gonna go ahead and call a racist now, just so we can get it out of the way.  MjolnirPants   Tell me all about it.  22:13, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Flying out to Stockholm a few weeks back I had an absolutely fascinating conversation with a Chinese medical administrator. She was a cancer surgeon but had taken on a management role, while keeping up some of her practice. Her views on the differences between the urban elite, who prefer "Western" medicine, and the rural poor, who get no real choice, were very illuminating. Guy (Help!) 22:53, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
 * It's interesting how that relationship get inverted in the US so often, where the urban elites are the ones most likely to seek "alternative" treatments and the poor are relegated to clinics and emergency rooms. MjolnirPants   Tell me all about it.  17:18, 17 January 2017 (UTC)

The problem is not with ethnic origin, but with an academic/political "scientific" culture which does not test hypotheses. That problem occurs to some extent anywhere - would you trust a tobacco company on the dangers of smoking? - but seems to be pretty much universal in some nations, being even worse when matters of national pride are involved. The test for reliability therefore include the academic affiliations and bases of the authors and the journal, and the relevance of the subject matter to points of national pride. Richard Keatinge (talk) 18:18, 17 January 2017 (UTC)
 * In short: Yes - medical papers/analysis from China are highly suspect and unreliable. Slightly longer: On rare occasions they may be useable when used in conjunction with other more reliable sources. However if you have non-Chinese sources that can be used, you wouldnt need a Chinese one. I can gurantee your chances of gaining consensus to use a Chinese-sourced study to reference the benefits of a practice (that has been found by the medical profession to be dangerous) approach zero. Only in death does duty end (talk) 17:32, 17 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I can affirm that the culture is not conducive to exacting scientific studies, for more than just political reasons. The concept of "chabuduo" (half-assing the bare-minimum and saying "good enough") applies to many parts of life here.  I've had students show up to only half of the classes and wonder why they got a 50.  Combine that with an education system that crushes original thinking and I get to watch several future engineers take turns doing the same thing to unsuccessfully unlock the door after class.  Add in a contradictory combination of extreme pressures to succeed but also to avoid being the least bit different, and students will regularly plagiarize all examples used in class except for the definition of plagiarism.  Then there's a refusal to trust outside information.  Students keep using Youdao for translation even after being presented with undeniable proof from every foreign teacher they have that it is the worst possible translation software around (it confuses "vaccines" with "HIV/AIDS" and "do" with "fuck").  Students keep asking me why I'm scared of Donald Trump even after I explain things that CCTV wouldn't know to discuss.  There's also a completely different ethical background for what constitutes lying: when buying electronics, I'm regularly told that a piecemeal refurb with half the capacity of what I'm looking for must be what I'm looking for because the case is the same and appearance matters more than function -- and I'm disruptive for disagreeing because social order matters more than empiricism.  While I'm not teaching medical majors, I have no trouble imagining some students (not all, but enough) doing an experiment and giving whatever results are "successful" (possibly copying the data from a hopefully similar experiment or maybe plugging in whatever numbers get the results they want but maybe just copying numbers from the example in their textbook), regardless of the reality of the experiment.  Add in that many of my students believe the earth is flat (that indirectly came up through two questions on my final exam), choice in medicine is treated as a matter of fashion instead of life or death, and that about two-thirds of the country doesn't get the equivalent of a high school education, and there's no reason at all to trust any scientific studies published out of China (regardless of who the author is, because a little editing could get me listed as an author just so they can get a foreigner's name on there). TL;DR: Studies by Chinese people in almost any other country?  Sure, go for it.  Studies done in the PRC?  Hell fucking no. Ian.thomson (talk) 02:21, 21 January 2017 (UTC)
 * As the Skeptical Inquirer or Martin Gardner (I forget which) reported once, this is the same country whose exacting scientific standards allowed people to take home sealed, I think cardboard (?), black boxes for the purposes of determining those individual's psychic ability, and apparently didn't think that when the individuals returned later with the boxes damaged or the sealing broken that such might call the results or methodology into question. Ian is being more than generous in his last statement above. John Carter (talk) 22:34, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

For future reference, if nothing else, it is possibly worth noting that multiple reliable sources relating to Qigong fever have attested to the fact that at least during the peak of that era the government of the PRC was actively promoting several forms of traditional Chinese medicine both as, in a sense, an "opiate of the masses" for those who could not afford the more expensive and less readily available, generally considered more reliable, Western forms of medicine, and as a way to promote the Chinese cultural heritage, and thus also promote a "collective mindset" among the Chinese people. So far as I know, the government of the PRC is still, at least to an extent, actively promoting such thinking, and, on that basis, any sources which might be seen as in any way promoting these Chinese traditional practices which lack much outside support but seem to be have in some way linkage to Chinese governmental policies and practices should be considered suspect. John Carter (talk) 15:20, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

A Biography of the Australian Continent
At History of Indigenous Australians, the website 'Australia: The Land Where Time Began / A Biography of the Australian Continent' (specifically http://austhrutime.com/malakunanja.htm) is used to source the statement:

"The rock shelters at Malakunanja II (a shallow rock-shelter about 50 kilometres inland from the present coast) and of Nauwalabila I (70 kilometres further south) show evidence of used pieces of ochre – evidence for paint used by artists 60,000 years ago."

The wording is a bit of a mess, but I'm looking for comments specifically on the source. It looks a lot like a self-published more-or-less-blog to me, but wanted to get a second opinion. I don't think the content itself is particularly controversial. The source itself cites further sources, and it would probably be more appropriate to use them, but I don't have easy access to them and I'm guessing this is why someone used the web source in the first place. GoldenRing (talk) 13:15, 26 January 2017 (UTC)

Sources for articles on railway vehicles in Victoria, Australia
Hi all,

Having trouble with some other editors about whether or not I'm allowed to use certain sources as references in my articles.

Sites: A series of books were written by Bray, Vincent and Daryl M. Gregory over the period 2009-2014 listing most but not all of the details on Vincent's site; and Vincent also hosts a plethora of official Victorian Railways diagrams and detailed photographs not included in those books. Similarly, Bray's site has dated photos that can be used for locating individual vehicles; and Daryl Gregory has a limited presence on Facebook, identity confirmed within private groups like Victorian Railway Enthusiasts. The fact that the group(s) is/are closed isn't a problem according to WP:IRS's talk page: Do sources have to be free, online and/or conveniently available to me? No. Sources can be expensive, print-only, or available only in certain places. A source does not stop being reliable simply because you personally aren't able to obtain a copy. Additionally, the vast majority of people likely to read the relevant pages will already have (or will easily be able to get) access to the relevant forums.
 * Peter Vincent's site - One of three authors of a series of books on the wagons and carriages, culmination of decades of research and transcribing of records kept at the Public Record Office Victoria. Homepage doesn't seem to be working at the moment, but everything else is fine.
 * Norm Bray's flickr account

To a lesser extent, these sites, which host personal photos but also content scanned directly from archives, i.e. diagrams.
 * Mark Bau's site - diagrams, photos and scans from publications; the text content on the site is not always accurate. Examples could be the last four images here, for use in Diesel Electric railmotor (VR).
 * Rob O'Reagan's site - diagrams and photos
 * Les Brown's site - photos
 * Weston Langford's site - photos

These are for most/all of the articles listed in the VRLocos template, about half of which I've written and nearly all of which I've contributed to.

In both cases, this is based on the reliability of the individuals' posts and printed/published works (i.e. in the magazine Newsrail) over more than a decade.
 * Specific Railpage forums & posters - limited to certain posters who are recognised authorities on specific sub-topics, for example user Kuldalai 1, 2, 3 & 4 in the context of this article:, as he was directly involved in the procurement process. Note I intend to get copies of the other references mentioned in the article and include inline citations at first opportunity, so the forum references would not be the only sources.
 * Specific Facebook forums & posters - posts by Brett Leslie in the closed group Victorian Railway Enthusiasts, who is directly involved in organising carriages within train sets, and one or two other people who report sightings, exclusively in the content of tables like the one at VicRail N type carriage.

How do I get these people individually approved as sources, and then how do I make them immune to future deletion by editors who don't see this thread? One solution might be to add an entry on the Template linking to a list of reliable sources applicable only to those articles? Anothersignalman (talk) 15:15, 26 January 2017 (UTC)

Phactual
Would the website Phactual be considered as an RS for reference to a US legal case? this Is the one more specifically.  The C of E God Save the Queen!  ( talk ) 09:08, 28 January 2017 (UTC)
 * You're kidding, right? Let's start with "Wiener v United States (1958)." The blurb refers Chief Justice Frankfurter. Felix Frankfurter was never Chief Justice of the United States. In 1958, the Chief Justice was Earl Warren-- Jim in Georgia  Contribs  Talk  21:48, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

Should we use the anonymous "Consortium Against Terrorist Finance" as a source
I'm concerned about using this anonymous group as a source for anything. It's used in multiple articles including BLPs such as Mansour Mohamed Abdul Fattah al-Moslah. Looking at GNews I see two uses of it. I can't see how it qualifies as a reliable source at all. Doug Weller talk 11:59, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I can find nearly nothing on the group. The website looks professionally done, but the "About" document is information-free. As you, I only found two references to the group in Google News, one in French, one in Italian. There are four hits on Google Book (all in German), of which none looks promising (a novel, a 1983 book by Ruhollah Khomeini and two popular books from 2002 and 2009 that do not actually seen to contain the phrase). Google Scholar finds nothing for the full phrase. So I see no reason to accept it as a source, let alone a BLP source. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 10:00, 30 January 2017 (UTC)


 * No - They are a self-proclaimed "group of experts with decades of experience in the U.S. Government, academia, intelligence community, and a wide variety of businesses", or maybe they're not. There are too many red flags including their anonymity, no evidence of editorial oversight, no reputation for fact checking, and lack of WP:USEBYOTHERS.- MrX 13:26, 31 January 2017 (UTC)

Can The Independent online newspaper still be considered a Reliable Source?
I am currently involved in a dispute with another editor, which is (in part) about the RSness of The Independent newspaper, and in particular about this article's claim "In just one weekend, the website has posted false statistics about rising crime, when crime has actually gone down over the last eight years." which is misleading and wrong. http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/alternative-facts-white-house-website-donald-trump-fake-crimes-statistics-lgbt-climate-change-pages-a7540841.html. You are welcome to weigh in on our discussion, but I want to raise a more general point - can the Independent be considered a Reliable Source any more? Their standards have plummeted and they're basically a clickbait operation now, a shadow of the newspaper they used to be.

Evidence:
 * CEO admitting standards need to be raised "He also said that the website’s lightweight editorial approach, criticised by some of its own staff as a “click-bait operation”, would be re-focused to better match the quality tone of the print edition." I can't see any evidence this has happened - the print edition closed and the web-only version has remained poor quality clickbait. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/feb/12/independent-and-independent-on-sunday-closures-confirmed
 * Chief editor admits the Johann Hari scandal "severely damaged" the paper's reputation. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/jan/10/independent-editor-johann-hari-scandal It's been suggested that Hari's creative approach to the truth had been an open secret for years at the newspaper. http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/guy-walters/2011/07/johann-hari-independent-prize
 * Hari's dodgy articles are still up on their website without any mention of the scandal (try looking at the NYT for some of Jayson Blair's articles - each one has a very thorough note explaining that his work is not to be relied on and which bits were fabricated. That's what an RS does.) NPalgan2 (talk) 19:53, 28 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Who says, now, that they are a click-bait operation? Doug Weller  talk 21:04, 28 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Under a year is not recent enough for you? The decline in quality and clickbaitification of the Indy is a common criticism see http://www.adnews.com.au/opinion/death-of-print-the-independent-s-demise-teaches-us-what-not-to-do http://www.statepress.com/article/2016/10/spopinion-critique-of-modern-media https://theconversation.com/four-reasons-why-listicles-and-clickbait-are-killing-real-journalism-67406 https://www.marketingweek.com/2015/10/29/mark-ritson-i-was-right-about-the-i-newspaper-it-leaves-the-independent-in-worse-shape NPalgan2 (talk) 21:17, 28 January 2017 (UTC)


 * You say "still". This source is from October 2015. This one is recent, but isn't enough to say we can't use the Independent. This is also more recent, but is just using an Independent article as an example of problems with modern journalism: "Clickbait titles and eye-catching headlines are often used by modern journalists for the purpose of drawing immediate attention to their work." And I can't find where you told User:Volunteer Marek about this discussion. Doug Weller  talk 12:13, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
 * It's true that lots of newspapers have dropped standards and become more clickbaity, but it's incontrovertible - almost WP:SKYBLUE that the Indy has plummeted much further than any other anglosphere 'quality' newspaper. Look at this ludicrous "story" in the SCIENCE section - it's cannibalized from quotes Sky News, one of Forbes's worthless bloggers and the *Daily Mail*! Seriously, the Guardian and Telegraph and The Age have their problems, but they wouldn't have published this. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/donald-trump-body-language-inauguration-day-psychology-alpha-male-a7539256.html NPalgan2 (talk) 17:31, 29 January 2017 (UTC)


 * The Independent online edition is clickbaity, and in some cases takes liberties with the facts that would advise caution. For example: http://www.independent.ie/life/family/mothers-babies/my-sonthe-genius-29295077.html: as well as attempting (and, according to some, succeeding) to disprove Einstein's Theory of Relativity.  That's an egregious error that should never have made it through fact-checking.  However, I see this as an across the board issue with online media.  Sometimes it's reliable, sometimes it isn't.  I'd put The Independent in the same basket as the Daily Mail.   Sławomir Biały  (talk) 12:47, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
 * That last link is from the Irish Independent, a different newspaper. More broadly, while newspapers are generally useful and legitimate sources, WP probably relies far too much on media reporting as a whole, which is often cursory and slanted in its coverage, something which broadsheets are as guilty of as tabloids and online versions. But equally (see the discussion re the Mail above) there seems to be a trend to approach this issue the wrong way round, with people wanting to declare entire publications "not reliable" by citing individual bits of reporting that have been shown to be inaccurate. The RS policy doesn't work like that. It doesn't mean everything a publication reports is indisputably objective or correct, or that anything it says has to be included in a WP article. A newspaper – indeed even an esteemed acadamic journal – can make errors and still be broadly "reliable"; a newspaper can generally be "reliable" in a WP sense but include material that should never be referenced in an encyclopedia entry. Reliability is assessed by the paper's broader processes and structures; and whether a particular thing it reports is good content for here needs to be assessed in context, case by case.  N-HH   talk / edits  19:11, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I agree there is a cline, and that different parts of the same newspaper can have different standards, and that even respected academic journals publish garbage studies sometimes. But WP is don't cite 'tabloids'. And the Indy is getting pretty close to tabloid-standard. NPalgan2 (talk) 20:21, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
 * This is an excellent point. Maybe there are some things that we can cite tabloids and similar media for (see above proposal regarding the Daily Mail), and some things we do not.  It would be good to get some clarity about what's what.  (E.g., "celebrity gossip"?  sports results?  weather events?  police blotter reporting? art installations?)   Sławomir Biały  (talk) 20:44, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
 * There isn't any doubt that the The Independent online newspaper now has little in common with its former printed edition beyond its name - its standards have plummeted to the extent that it has lost much of the high and hard-won stature its print predecessor rightly held. But I think a source can only be said to be reliable or not reliable for particular claims or for particular content, it can almost never be given a "reliable source for everything" cachet or a "never reliable for anything" blanket ban. Tiptoethrutheminefield (talk) 16:51, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes, but the editor I was talking to seemed unaware of what has happened to the Indy, so I thought a discussion here that could be referenced later would be useful. NPalgan2 (talk) 19:26, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Just in case anyone ever gets confused, this discussion is not about the I (newspaper) which is no longer related to the Independent. Doug Weller  talk 17:12, 31 January 2017 (UTC)

Vox.com and Huffington Post at Smith & Wesson M&P15

 * ''Production increased almost ten times from 2006 to 2008, and tripled in the following year. From 4,600 in 2006, sales grew to over 100,000 per year by 2010.

My understanding is that sources are not automatically rejected for simple facts just because they have some POV on a topic, and that secondary sources are preferable to primary sources. However and  seem to be arguing that if there's a consensus to leave criminal usage out of an article then none of the sources can mention the criminal usage either. If so, that would seriously skew the neutrality of an article because almost all articles in mainstream sources, both academic and journalistic, discuss this rifle in the context of its criminal use. In the process, they mention other facts about it, including its sales. Sales figures are a common thing to report for a commercial product. To reduce the quality of an article in order to enforce a POV policy on sources is misguided, in my opinion. Amy I wrong? What the right way to interpret WP:V, WP:NPOV, and WP:NOR in this case? Felsic2 (talk) 02:12, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * This doesn't even represent the discussion at the talk page. Niteshift36 (talk) 02:20, 31 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Yes, we do not automatically reject sources because they are biased. NPOV applies to what is written in Wikipedia articles, not what's written in the sources. A consensus to leave criminal usage out of an article would not preclude the use of sources mentioning criminal usage from being used for other information.- MrX 02:48, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Sources aren't solely being rejected because they are biased. In fact, no source has been removed from the article at this point. The topic was merely brought up for discussion on the talk page and the discussion has been relatively short. As stated, this is being misrepresented. Niteshift36 (talk) 04:01, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I agree with the Niteshift36. This isn't a RS issue though better sources are available.  Rather it's using a strong POV source to WP:COATRACK rejected content via links to sources vs direct inclusion in the article.  Felsic2 has been trying to insert material into the article against both consensus and guidelines established by | WikiProject Firearms.  The innocuous production volume data can be sourced to neutral, reliable sources (the source cited by the Huffington Post, Vox didn't list a source).  Felsic2 has argued against using such references in lieu of two sources with very strong POVs and largely containing content that was rejected by consensus.  Thus we have coatracking where the coat the content of the linked articles and the hook is the otherwise innocuous production data.  Bringing it up here is a red herring as the issue isn't if the source is reliable (lacking a better source I think we would accept it) but if such linking is another form of coatracking and getting around consensus. Springee (talk) 02:50, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Actually, NPOV does extend to the content of what possibly biased but otherwise normally reliable sources might say. What changes is making sure that biased statements are evaluated within WP:UNDUE among all other reliable sources, and that the biased statement is presented as a claim with attribution and not in WP's voice. That bias doesn't immediately eliminate the source, but it may make the material from that single article inappropriate to include if it a single voice outweighed by otherviews, but that's a point for consensus-based discussion. --M ASEM (t) 03:11, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * @Springee: That's a rather strained interpretation of coatracking. Is there actually a consensus not to use sources that mention criminal use? - MrX 03:17, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * The consensus is to not discuss crimes in the article. Using strong POV sources to provide minor facts is certainly a way to include articles that would otherwise be outright rejected as out of scope for the article.  It's not blatant coatracking but given how easily we could used substitute sources (already added to the talk page) one has to question why we are even here.  There is a talk page consensus against discussing crimes as part of this article.  That consensus is supported by a larger consensus discussed at Project Firearms regarding when crimes should be discussed.  When asked why we shouldn't just change the references Felsic2 avoided the question, claimed it's a RS issue and started the discussion here. Springee (talk) 03:45, 31 January 2017 (UTC)


 * This is an ongoing issue with firearms articles where firearms enthusiasts like to remove/gloss over/ignore their illegal/criminal use. See any discussion about a high profile shooting where the gun is a major subject of the news (AR's etc). Local consensus almost *always* comes down to 'dont mention on the gun article its the spree-killers/militia/pirates weapon of choice' /cynic Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:36, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * , adding sources that discuss crimes is not the same as added text to the article that discuss crime. Your opinion of how references can be used is simply not grounded in any Wikipedia policy that I'm aware of.- MrX 13:17, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I would argue that it's well within the spirit of the concerns that lead to the coatrack essay. WP:OFFTOPIC and WP:TROJAN might also apply.  Certainly in this context I think it is clear Felsic2's intent was not simply to provide production figures.  Regardless, this RS question is a red herring since no one objected to the sources as unable to reliably source the material in question.  I think we can agree they are sufficient though other sources exist.  Springee (talk)
 * In case I didn't state my objection clearly enough, I think we should use secondary sources, such as Vox and HUffPost, instead of primary sources, like raw data from the ATF. As for my intent, it was simply to add production figures. Rather than citing essays of dubious relevance, let's keep the discussion grounded in actual policies and guidelines. Felsic2 (talk) 16:05, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * The company (Smith & Wesson) is a primary source. The government agency (BATFE) is a secondary source. HP/Vox are third party sources. Granted, we usually prefer third party sources, there are times were a secondary source fits quite well. In the case you haven't explained, the facts in question can be obtained from a secondary source (the US government), without POV commentary found in the third party sources being used. This proposed substitution would not remove any information from the article or diminish it, merely provide a more neutral source. That's it. Niteshift36 (talk) 16:59, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * That's a bit confusing. I'd say that HP/VOX are secondary sources by our criteria, and WP:TERTIARY says "Policy: Wikipedia articles usually rely on material from reliable secondary sources. Articles may make an analytic, evaluative, interpretive, or synthetic claim only if that has been published by a reliable secondary source." A typical example of a tertiary source is an encyclopedia, and at times these should even be avoided. This is of course a terminology issue here, but I think worth clarifying.  Doug Weller  talk 17:25, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I'd call them third party, but that's really not the primary issue. The issue is not whether or not HP is reliable or not. The question is really why a govt source that has no POV can't be used instead. Niteshift36 (talk) 19:17, 31 January 2017 (UTC)

You avoided answering the question when I asked. Given you want to cite production numbers there should be no issues with citing them from the ATF (a more reliable source than your articles) vs an article that doesn't state where it's numbers came from and another that says it got the numbers from the ATF. We can cut out the middle man. It's insulting to others to claim your only intent is to provide production figures. Consider that a link to the ATF data would provide information for all years vs just a select few. Springee (talk) 16:33, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I don't like your accusatory tone. Please avoid discussing intent and stick to discussing sources and policies. Felsic2 (talk) 17:00, 31 January 2017 (UTC)

To me, we have the question "can 'hard facts' like production numbers be sourced to secondary sources that are clearly biased in tone?" There's a lot of issues at play, but to summarize this: So using the BATFE's numbers directly should be fine, and we don't have to include the secondary sources. Now if we were talking about a non-essential figure, such as the number of crimes that a certain gun was used in, even if still sourceable by the BATFE, this is where the presence of secondary sources is required, to tell us that, as a transformative source, why that figure was important and to put it into perspective. And that's where if there's a source bias, that could be a problem to include, since many biased sources will play with statistics to get the point they want to prove. That's where the evaluation of the opinion using those statistics for inclusion under UNDUE/FRINGE may be necessary. If a gun is widely criticized as being too frequently used in crime, then we can use these sources to justify that. If these are the only two sources in the world that consider the gun being used too often, and no one else addresses that, then perhaps this is too FRINGE-y to include. --M ASEM (t) 18:32, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * For any commercial product (guns included), production numbers are essential encyclopedic information. It is highly desirable, if not required, to include these if the source for the numbers can be meet WP:V. This is similar to reporting the population of a city; not including it when it is possible makes the article look bare.
 * We have a primary source (BATFE) and two secondary sources for production numbers. Even if we lacked the secondary sources, we would still be able to present BATFE's numbers to satisfy the essential encyclopedic quantity.
 * I agree with that reasoning.- MrX 18:44, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * FWIW, the vast majority of mainstream sources discuss this rifle's use in two of the largest mass shootings in modern American history. It could be argued that those incidents are what makes this rifle notable, as it's otherwise an unremarkable product.
 * Separately, the issue of biased sources cuts both ways. Currently, the sources in the article have an arguably "pro-gun" bias. If we exclude sources with one bias and allow those with the opposite bias, then there may be issues with the neutrality of the article. Felsic2 (talk) 18:50, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes, that is a separate issue about article content vs reliable sources. I think the RS question here has been address by Masem.  Springee (talk) 19:20, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Aside from the fact that that comment has nothing to do with reliable sourcing, what you just stated is really not an accurate picture of the extensive discussion that has gone on for months, discussion that has amounted to you saying one thing and every other experienced editor disagreeing with you. Niteshift36 (talk) 19:22, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Addressing the "pro-gun" bias, on the current page, I see two classes of information: specifications (the bulk of it), and the "official users". Both are going to be, arguably "pro-gun" sourced, but here, specifications are like production numbers and are essential information (to me, and speaking to that as the farthest from a gun enthusist you can be) - to not include these would make the article bare. So these can be sourced by the manufacturer or any source that is recognized for reliable reporting of these numbers even if they hold a general favorable bias. (but I can hardly see how specifications can be twisted that much). The "official users" though is similar to the crime numbers, in that this is far from essential information, and it does add a POV to this ("Oh, this legal agencies use this gun, therefore it must be okay"). Same type of balance questions will come into play here if this information should be included or not and how the source is biased or not. --M ASEM (t) 00:03, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
 * I don't really see it, but I'd have no objection to removing the official users section. FWIW, that section appears in many, many firearms, aircraft and ships articles. Niteshift36 (talk) 03:55, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

What's the rule on interpreting primary sources? WP:PRIMARY? ''Any interpretation of primary source material requires a reliable secondary source for that interpretation. A primary source may only be used on Wikipedia to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts that can be verified by any educated person with access to the primary source but without further, specialized knowledge. '' The BATFE and Shooting Industry sources  don't mention the topic of the article, the M&P15. Instead, they report on all rifle sales by Smith & Wesson. So we'd have to take a different source, which says that S&W's only rifle for a span of years was the M&P15. Would that cause a problem with WP:SYNTH? It seems like it'd just be simpler to stick with the reliable secondary sources already in use. Felsic2 (talk) 21:37, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

Are there any merits in these article as RS?
Source:
 * Temple Arson Report by Inspector General of Police Keshava Menon submitted to the Government of Kerala
 * Goerge, Anjali. "Sabarimala temple in the ‘secular’ world". MyInd. Retrieved 30 January 2017.
 * Organizer. "Hindu unity in Kerala through Ayyappa Exposing the atheist plot on Sabarimala". Organizer. Retrieved 30 January 2017.
 * K.P. NAYAR. "In Kerala's social lab, a Modi formula". Telegraph India. Retrieved 1 February 2017.

Article:
 * Shabarimala

Content:

In 1950, the temple was suspected to be set on fire by radical Christian extremists which destroyed the entire temple and had to be reconstructed.

Is there any merit in the aforementioned sources? I had a dispute with a editor who questions reliability of these sources. Advice ? Crawford88 (talk) 07:18, 1 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Surely better sources could be found, if this is true? The first source is a Primary Source (WP:PRIMARY). Second one seems like an opinion piece on a website that is not news-oriented. The Organizer is certainly a partisan site, and not a news site, so it wouldn't be factual or impratial. Last one is a commentary/musing on the history of the area, which only says that "It was suspected that a group was behind the arson...", without getting specific. This is based only on a cursory look at the sources. Others may find some merit in one or more of them. For controversial information, better sources need to be found. Alternatively, if there is a reliable third-party source stating that a notable government official (for example) suspected that the fire was set by Christian extremists, that could be pointed out. To just say "it was suspected..." is quite weaselly (WP:Weasel). First Light (talk) 08:13, 1 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Some more context. For a while the OP defeneded a photocopy of the report on Scribd and called it a secondary source. They then found the first source, the report of the police inspector, was kept confidential for years as mentioned in the 4th source which says it was suspected that "a group" was behind the arson but doesn't say who was in the group. The second source, Myindmakers,  describes itself as a "platform of ideas" and states:"Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. MyIndMakers is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, suitability, or validity of any information on this article. All information is provided on an as-is basis. The information, facts or opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of MyindMakers and it does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same." The Organiser, is  a publication by the right-wing Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and again fails our criteria as a source. The interview there is with the right-wing Hindu nationlist Kummanam Rajasekharan who seems to think there is an atheist plot involving Muslims and Christians and who states as fact that it was Christians who burned the temple. I've explained all of this to the OP at Talk:Sabarimala.   Doug Weller  talk 16:43, 1 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Crawford88, I would agree that the answer to your question "Are there any merits in these article as RS?" is a resounding "no, none." First Light (talk) 03:26, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

IPCC Fifth Assessment Report Summary for Policymakers
User:Cohler has proposed that the Summary for Policymakers of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC AR5) is not a reliable source, because "it is a summary and therefore can lead to misinterpretations" as stated here (be aware User:Cohler signs as TheClarinetGuy). I do not see any indication in Verifiability that summaries are inherently unreliable. Note also that in this case that the summary is written by a subset of the authors of the longer report. Am I perhaps missing something? Shock Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 18:44, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
 * My point was and is as I stated back at Talk:Global warming, the principle of best evidence in a scientific matter would always dictate that you go to the actual language of the scientific report and not to a summary written specifically for the benefit of non-scientific policy makers. And I might add, this is especially the case when there is any difference in the wording or phrasing, which can very easily change meaning. --TheClarinetGuy talk 18:54, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Furthermore, the SPM is a "line by line" politically reviewed and approved document (see IPCC fact sheet here), so common sense would dictate that scientific claims be sourced to the scientific studies they come from and not to politically reviewed and approved summaries. --TheClarinetGuy talk 19:00, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
 * The summary for policymakers is simultaneously reviewed by experts and government representatives - that seems very sensible to me and as a good source for something accessible to be put in the lead rather than the primary results from the scientists. Dmcq (talk) 22:08, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
 * A document by competent authors that presents a compact summary of a larger scientific work is an excellent source. It's a lot better to have experts summarise the field than to have random Wikipedians do the summarising. If the SPM is in direct conflict with the full report and this is either obvious or noted by other reliable sources, we can handle this as any case of conflicting sources. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 22:09, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Applying your reasoning, ClarinetGuy (aka Cohler), the IPCC reports are not reliable either because they are themselves summaries of the state of the science, as expressed in the many references cited at the end of each chapter in the assessment reports.  Fortunately we don't have to grapple with that absurd implication because you went astray when you started looking for "the best evidence in a scientific matter".  Since we don't do science, that's not our goalpost.  IPCC is a science-AND-intragovernmental outfit, thus the SPM is every bit as WP:RS as the full reports, and which we use can be guided by the specific context. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 22:11, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Well, the bottom line here, is that has inserted the statement "and their best estimate is that all of it, is..." into the article here and that is a patently false statement supported by nothing either in the summary or the report itself other than 's misreading of a graph and ignoring the explicit, bold-faced findings of the IPCC listed repeatedly in the summary, the synthesis report, the working group, which all say "more than half". "More than half" and "all of it" are very different statements. The IPCC never said the latter. --TheClarinetGuy talk 04:00, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
 * To quote from the IPCC AR5 SPM, page 17, section D3, last sentence of the first bullet point under the coloured box: "The best estimate of the human-induced contribution to warming is similar to the observed warming over this period" and the next bullet point quantifies the other contributions as "likely to be in the range of −0.1°C to 0.1°C" from natural forcings and "likely to be in the range of −0.1°C to 0.1°C" from internal variability. So I can see how one might arrive at Dmcq's statement even without the misreading of a graph. Also, this result is not particularly surprising - Berkeley Earth's Richard Muller made the same claim independently in 2012 ("Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases") . --Stephan Schulz (talk) 08:30, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
 * It's a fair summary for a non-specialist audience (i.e. Wikipedia readers). Guy (Help!) 09:46, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
 * @ClarinetGuy (aka Cohler) Sounds like you're changing goalposts, always a red flag. At article talk you said SPM does not meet our standards that define reliable sources for wikipedia purposes, which can be read at WP:Reliable sources.  In your "bottom line" comment in this thread you're not challenging that at all.  Instead you're challenging the way it is being used.  NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 10:29, 30 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Unless there is a credible reason why the summary in this case does not reflect the full report, I dont see the problem. Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:54, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I have discussed extensively at Talk:Global warming why the summary does not accurately reflect the main report. Citing multiple examples. Here for example you can see that the main report consistently uses the phrase "more than half" whereever it refers to this finding of the IPCC, not the word "dominant" as is used in the summary for policy makers. And "dominant" has different connotations and interpretations than "more than half". --TheClarinetGuy talk 23:37, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I do not find that a credible argument. The summary accurately reflects the body of the report. If your argument is based on the premise that the definition of 'dominant' can sometimes be used to mean different things *other than the obvious use to which it has been used in the summary* then its really a non-starter. Anything more than half can be generally be described as dominant. The point of a summary is to summarise - not to be technically accurate - as that is the point of the full report. Ultimately your argument appears to be we should be referencing the full report and using the technical definitions therein, rather than the more accessible summary. That is not however a reliable source issue. Only in death does duty end (talk) 15:52, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
 * So you have and I've repeatedly pointed out to you that the technical language from the underlying reports is unsuitable for the lead of the article. The body of the article is where things like 95% probability should go if at all. The statements are accurate and they closely follow a reliable source which has been heavily vetted and checked by both the subjects experts and people who know how to explain things to people in general. And in particular your objection on the basis of reliable source is completely wrong. This noticeboard shouldn't be bothered by this any more. Dmcq (talk) 01:04, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
 * More to the point, Cohler is no longer discussing our standards that define a WP:Reliable source. He's only making an argument based on his own WP:Original research,  which he asserts after his personal comparison between the IPCC summary report and the underlying WG1 report... which of course is a summary of the professional scientific lit overall.   At any case, he's abandoned the "not reliable" argument, apparently. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 15:44, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
 * It is certainly not WP:OR to point out that "more than half" does not mean the same thing as dominant (Merriam Webster here) and "more than half" is hardly "technical language". What is your source for asserting that "more than half" is considered technical language? noted above "If the SPM is in direct conflict with the full report and this is either obvious or noted by other reliable sources, we can handle this as any case of conflicting sources". IMO I think it's pretty obvious that "dominant" is in conflict with "more than half" based on the commonly understood definitions of those words as I have cited here with Webster. --TheClarinetGuy talk 16:19, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
 * I think it's pretty obvious that the two are not in conflict at all. "More than half" allows any proportion from 50.00001% to 100%. "Dominant influence" typically means the influence is more important than other influences combined. The two statements are perfectly cromulent together. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 16:59, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
 * I would further note that the non-technical language "more than half" has been consistently used by the IPCC since the Third Assessment Report (2001) which stated, "Human-emitted greenhouse gases are likely (67-90% chance) responsible for more than half of Earth’s temperature increase since 1951", then IPCC AR4 (2007) stated, "Human-emitted greenhouse gases are very likely (at least 90% chance) responsible for more than half of Earth’s temperature increase since 1951" and finally IPCC AR5 (2013) stated "Human-emitted greenhouse gases are extremely likely (at least 95% chance) responsible for more than half of Earth’s temperature increase since 1951." If the scientists who wrote those reports wanted to say "dominant" they could have, but they didn't. They chose the simple, unambiguous, non-technical "more than half". Words have meaning. --TheClarinetGuy talk 16:34, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Human activity is the dominant source because no other single source gets into double digits. As explained more than once above. Next. —ArtifexMayhem (talk) 10:47, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

Proposal to close thread
I propose this thread be closed pursuant to WP:MULTI. At article talk Cohler is asserting all of these arguments, but has abandoned claims that the IPCC Summary for PolicyMakers does not qualify as a WP:Reliable sources. Instead, we're now rehashing arguments about how and if it should be used in terms of WEIGHT, etc. Since its no longer a question of reliability, we should consolidate the multiple venues into just a single venue.... at article talk. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 18:42, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

Research to consider when deciding whether YouTube videos are reliable sources
The following shows how easy it has become to fake a YouTube video using an ordinary PC. I can only assume that someone with a lot more money and a lot more time can do a much more realistic fake. --Guy Macon (talk) 08:20, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
 * http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/~niessner/thies2016face.html
 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmajJTcpNk
 * I don't see the relevance to Youtube specifically as a source - anonymous Youtube videos would not be acceptable anyway, nor would videos containing copyright violating material. It's a pretty obvious fake technically - though I suppose that technology will improve. But faked video footage even from supposed RS sources is nothing new - the BBC has used video game footage and presented it as actual real battlefield footage and even once had a video game insignia presented as the symbol of NATO. And there was the infamous tail-wagging-dog "why don't you move a little to the right, the real skinny ones only, over to behind that bit of fencing that's still upright, stick in your stomachs and look miserable, real concentration-camp-like-miserable, that's great, just like that, ...darn it, the fence is the wrong way around, never mind, nobody will notice". Other examples include "the most staged photo opportunity since Iwo Jima". Any editor here can insert fake content already and give that content fake references. On obscure articles it is easy for that fake content to remain for years. I found this example recently, and corrected it . The deterrent for this would be a ban on the inserters, but that can't be done for IP address editors. The best defense against fakery of all sorts is to have a knowledge of the subject and a commitment to its accurate reporting. Tiptoethrutheminefield (talk) 16:06, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Isn't the point that YouTube is never our source. A film or TV programme may be a source, whether or not it is available on YouTube, and we link to the YouTube for convenience. It would be even easier to produce a doctored copy of a written source, but the existence of bad versions doesn't make the good versions unreliable. Itsmejudith (talk) 11:11, 2 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Read WP:YOUTUBE. Does that guideline say that "YouTube is never our source" or does it say something else? --Guy Macon (talk) 12:06, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

Vessel News / vesselnews.io
Is this reliable? http://vesselnews.io/shock-video-black-lives-matter-activist-says-need-start-killing-people

Benjamin (talk) 03:32, 31 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Not for factual information, no. Probably not for opinions either. It's a partisan website that is not a news site, but, in their own words, "a lighting bolt for exposing the leftist agenda, who seek to steal our freedom of speech, right to bear arms and refuse to call by name the enemies of our way of life–Radical. Islamic. Terrorists." And it's a one-man operation. In other words, a personal website masquerading as....something. First Light (talk) 10:19, 31 January 2017 (UTC)


 * First Light Even though there's a video of actual events? What is the possibility that those events didn't actually take place, that the video is somehow faked? Benjamin (talk) 13:44, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * A random and probably nameless BLM protester says some sh*t while holding a megaphone at a rally? Really? That's notable? And no, I wouldn't trust this website to tell the truth about when/what/where that video was shot, even if it were notable enough to include an article here, which it isn't. First Light (talk) 13:49, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * KOA Newsradio is likely an RS source, however. Collect (talk) 14:12, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * There you go. Whether it's notable, and for what, is another question for another noticeboard, or for the article talk page where you are thinking of including this. First Light (talk) 14:41, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * KOA News Radio simply repeated material from The Daily Caller, and The Daily Caller got it from someone called "BurgerVanDreamz who is streaming this from England". Also, User:Benjaminikuta started forum shopping before he even got an answer.--Guy Macon (talk) 15:12, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I don't think I act improperly, do I? I asked two different questions on two different noticeboards that just happened to involve the same source. Thank you for helping me improve. Benjamin (talk) 15:29, 31 January 2017 (UTC)

You need to tell us what you want to use the source as a reference for (and in which article) if you hope to get a useful response. The source looks to be very poor quality though. Fyddlestix (talk) 15:33, 31 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Could a source be reliable in some contexts but not in others? I guess the obvious context would be Black Lives Matter. Where else would it be relevant? Benjamin (talk) 15:39, 31 January 2017 (UTC)


 * No. Hyper-partisan websites are almost never accepted as a reliable source. Adding to that, it is not really even a political news site, it looks more like a glorified blog. Web videos are rarely accepted as reliable sources, YouTube being the obvious example. If we don't accept that we are certainly not going to go with this. -Ad Orientem (talk) 16:17, 31 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Could the video be faked, or what? Benjamin (talk) 17:01, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * It's maybe not faked, which still doesn't meet standards here. Partisan sources can do more than fake a video. Does a reliable source state that this was really a BLM event? Does a reliable source state that this person was part of the event, rather than a random person with a megaphone? Even if she was part of the event, was she speaking on behalf of BLM? What is the name of the person? Is she notable in the BLM movement? You see, there are so many things wrong with this video according to WP policies. It's also a primary source, until a truly mainstream reliable source reports on the event, who this is, etc.. Even then, is the event or she notable? Probably not. You really hit it out of the park with this one :-0, touching ever single base along the way: non-reliable source, non-notable, primary source, and maybe a touch of WP:BLP. Home run! First Light (talk) 03:04, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

No, not for that video's content - or for opinions about its content. An non-RS source commenting on an unnamed individual with unspecified connections to BLM (beyond being at their rally) voicing their personal extremist opinions makes for nothing usable for Wikipedia content. Of course, based on the way Wikipedia seems to be working these days, if it were the other way around - an unnamed individual with unspecified connections to Trump (beyond being at a supporters rally) voicing their personal extremist opinions - then it would be considered a verbatim repeating of Donald Trump's policy position and the position of everyone who voted for him! Tiptoethrutheminefield (talk) 17:20, 31 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Not even reliable for the video. What's the possibility that this video was faked?  Who knows.  But I don't know who the woman is, where, when or to whom she was speaking or what connection if any she has with BLM or any other group.  Even if it were reliable, you would need to show relevance.  Some guy who likes Donald Trump on Facebook just killed 6 people in Quebec City.  Is that reflective of the typical Trump supporter?  TFD (talk) 18:29, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I'm sure there will be Wikipedia editors who will be claiming it is reflective, and content on it should be included in some Trump election aftermath article for that reason. I recall we had Mike Tyson and his conviction mentioned in a Donald Trump article for no other reason than Tyson is a convicted rapist and Trump had some business sporting interests in boxing and Tyson seemingly is a Trump supporter. Tiptoethrutheminefield (talk) 20:23, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Can we stay on topic please? No one is (or should be) talking about trump here. Fyddlestix (talk) 20:26, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Not reliable for any purpose on Wikipedia, simply put. Even if it is a real person being their real self at a real BLM event. It's my consistent observation that about 1% of humans are certifiably insane. It is a common and boring tactic of sensationalist and ideologically motivated "reporters" to seek out the craziest person in a crowd of any size, then post that online, and hope people take it as representative. Given my observation, this is quite easy to do. It's just another reason we need to rely on secondary sources and apply due weight with care. Someguy1221 (talk) 03:14, 1 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Could the video be faked? - even though context, possible editing etc. should be taken into account, there is much worse. Peter Cushing, dead in 1994, "performed" in a film that was shot in 2015 and most viewers did not realize that. It is therefore a reasonable guess that a few government or private agencies have the means to produce 100% fake videos. Tigraan Click here to contact me 15:06, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

Rai al-Youm
The source is an article from Rai al-Youm here. It's being used to support these statements in 1982 Iranian diplomats kidnapping: According to the Rai al-Youm on-line newspaper, 'Abdeh Raji', known as 'Captain', and 'Biar Rizq', known as 'Akram', were involved in the abduction.

The abducted individuals were reportedly poisoned under the supervision of Elie Hobeika, a then Phalangist, in Karantina for 20 days and were moved to the prison of Adonis.

Later in 2016, according to what the London-based Rai al-Youm referred to as an accurate intelligence report, a recently released Greek prisoner from Israeli jails informed the Iranian embassy in Athens that he had seen the four abducted individuals alive in Israeli jails. Ahmad Habibollah Abu Hesham, known as a "spiritual father" of prisoners of Israeli jails, had made a similar comment that Motavesellian and the others were alive in Atlit detainee camp after visiting and inspecting prisoners in Israeli jails. He died in what Rai al-Youm claimed was a "made up accident by Israel."

Elie Hobeika verified the abduction of the diplomats and their handing over to Israel by Geagea's group What our Wikipedia article refers to as a London-based online newspaper looks to me like a propaganda website run by an expat. I don't speak Arabic but I don't get the impression there's any real fact checking or editorial oversight involved. The article is a GA nominee so I need an answer for the source's appropriateness. Chris Troutman ( talk ) 04:27, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I also don't speak arabic so i'm going only on what google translate gives me. From the get-go it seems pretty POV, so unless it's absolutely critical for GAN, and you think it will stand up there, then I would remove it. Iazyges   Consermonor   Opus meum  04:45, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
 * The source is used to reflect a rather important point. On the reliability, the mentioned newspaper is used as a source on other occasions by reliable sources such as the Washington institute for Near East Policy, Defend Democracy Press, Middle East Eye, New York Times, Jerusalem Post and etc. Moreover, the quoted material is reflected by other sources such as , and . Finally, we know that per WP:BIASED, "... reliable sources are not required to be neutral, unbiased, or objective." Moreover, the mentioned part is well attributed to the source for maintaining the overall NPOV. --  M h hossein   talk 22:01, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Abdel Bari Atwan is the editor-in-chief of Rai al-Youm, meaning that the paper has an editorial board. The fact that the source is referred to by other reliable sources adds weight. Besides the sources I mentioned in my previous comments, see how MEMRI has based his article on the report by Rai al-Youm. You can also see that the website is described as "the Arab world’s first Huffington Post–style outlet." -- M h hossein   talk 06:38, 1 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Could I have your opinion on this? You can consider my comments, too. Thanks.  M h hossein   talk 08:35, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Masem's view is respected, too. -- M h hossein   talk 19:57, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
 * If we have this specific article from this source of question at least being used as a source in works we do consider as RSes, then it seems reasonable we can source it to, but use attribution claims, as the quoted text above as done; I would definitely include the quoting RSes that use the article as part of our references to support it. One question I would ask would be if the English translation was done by an editor, or was done through one of the sources using the text like MEMRI. If we have the latter then it might be very worthwhile to frame this as "According to a report by Rai al-Youm, translated to English by MEMRI..." this "double-buffers" us from any chance of incorrect information (eg the claims being made by the people identified). It's okay if its not, though we do need to be sure the translation is right. --M ASEM (t) 20:10, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
 * M ASEM : Thanks for the clarification. This specific article is used a source/republished by Fars News Agency and The Truth Seeker. However, MEMRI, NYT and etc have used Rai al-Youm's reports as a source on other occasions (find the links above). The material used is well attributed to the original source. -- M h hossein   talk 20:34, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Do you think we can tell the story as "According to a report by Rai al-Youm, translated to English by Fars News..."? Here's a discussion on the reliability of Fars News. -- M h hossein   talk 19:29, 2 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes, I think given the previous determination on Fars, that's reasonable. --M ASEM (t) 19:53, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

Jessica Yellin's biography / personal information source: FrostSnow.com
On the BLP article for Jessica Yellin, this edit introduced the following content about her personal life: "Yellin keeps a low profile and keeps her personal life unknown." The content is sourced to http://frostsnow.com/jessica-yellin.

Is FrostSnow.com a reliable source for this BLP content?

Thank you! SueDonem (talk) 21:00, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
 * "She does not bear (sic) a husband." There's something quirky about that page. Its general tone makes me think unreliable.-- Jim in Georgia  Contribs  Talk  21:18, 1 February 2017 (UTC)


 * What a dodgy website. When you click on the article's author link, which says "Journalist," it takes you to a page with photos of some well known journalists who obviously don't work for frostsnow.com. That and the bad English makes it look like a clickbait site based somewhere in the non English speaking world. This isn't a reliable source for anything, much less for BLP content. First Light (talk) 08:21, 2 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Agreed. Beyond the article in question here, I've gone ahead and removed it as a source throughout Wikipedia. As it was exclusively used in BLPs, I've removed the content this "dodgy" source supposedly verified. SueDonem (talk) 22:52, 2 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Gmail contact address. Even a semi-professional outfit has its own email addy. Only in death does duty end (talk) 23:33, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

Appropriation
Why Progressives Are Wrong to Argue Against Cultural Appropriation http://observer.com/2015/11/why-progressives-are-wrong-to-argue-against-cultural-appropriation/ Is this a reliable source? Benjamin (talk) 08:07, 4 February 2017 (UTC)
 * It's an opinion piece so it depends how you want to use it. See WP:RSOPINION.  There's also an info page that helps craft the language when WP:Describing points of view NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 08:16, 4 February 2017 (UTC)

creationist book
Are books that publish creationist theory automatically not RS (As seems to be being cleaimed here and specifically in relation to this source  and it's claim that someone is a scientist?Slatersteven (talk) 14:30, 5 February 2017 (UTC)


 * They are reliable for stating the views of their authors, attributed as such. Whether the authors are sufficiently prominent to merit inclusion of their views is a separate question. They are not reliable for any statements of fact. So we could say "the opinion of Smith is that Jones is a scientist" or similar wording. Shock Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 14:45, 5 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Thanks. So in essence, no it is not automatically not RS, it just has to be used with care?Slatersteven (talk) 15:49, 5 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Yes. RS but only for certain limited uses. Use with care and common sense. Consider the following claim:
 * "The Creation Museum, located in Petersburg, Kentucky, United States, is operated by the Christian creation apologetics organization Answers in Genesis"
 * That is a statement of fact that we put in Wikipedia's voice without any citation, but nobody would have a problem if we were to back it up with a citation to https://creationmuseum.org/about/ A primary source like that is fine for a non-contentious claim about itself such as an address. Unless there is some reason to suspect that they may be lying about where they are located.
 * Now Consider the following claim from the same website:
 * "The evidence that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time is all around us." (Source: https://answersingenesis.org/dinosaurs/humans/ )
 * That is an extremely contentious claim, and the only use we could make of that source is to support a claim like "Answers in Genesis believes that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time." The way we actually handle it in our article is "contradicting science, the museum depicts the coexistence of humans and dinosaurs".
 * Also, just because a source is allowed, that doesn't mean it should be used if there is a better source. Note that our article on Creation Museum which I just quoted uses reliable secondary sources to back up the claim that the museum depicts the coexistence of humans and dinosaurs. --Guy Macon (talk) 16:24, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
 * See my question below?Slatersteven (talk) 16:28, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

Now to add, as this is getting all rather nasty over at the talk page, is this RS for the claim he is a scientist? .Slatersteven (talk) 15:52, 5 February 2017 (UTC)


 * This is already under discussion at Fringe theories/Noticeboard. Please don't fragment the discussion by asking -- or answering -- the above question here. --Guy Macon (talk) 16:30, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

In These Times
Source:

Article: American Legislative Exchange Council or to be within a new article

Content: "At ALEC’s 2016 annual meeting in July, the Convention of States was made a top priority. ALEC has adopted model rules for an Article V convention and gave its members model language for a resolution to call for a convention. The “State Legislators Article V Caucus” of the Balanced Budget Amendment Task Force (BBATF) is dominated by ALEC legislators, and pro-convention advocacy groups including BBATF and Convention of States are part of ALEC."

I had a dispute with 2 editors who question the reliability of the source, In These Times, as a longstanding socialist magazine. Help please. Calexit (talk) 18:11, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
 * It's certainly not what I would consider a broadly-accepted mainstream reliable source. I don't think it particularly has a bad reputation, but it certainly has a partisan/opinionated reputation, and I would be very careful about using it to make claims about political opponents. I would in-text attribute its reporting unless corroborated by a more mainstream source. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 18:17, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

Analysis of location of Ai
This is the source I'm talking about -- http://www.biblearchaeology.org/file.axd?file=The+Search+for+Joshuas+Ai.pdf --- it's a paper that was published to the journal of Critical Issues in Early Israelite History, a peer-reviewed journal. It has been cited multiple times in scholarly material, such as the 2014 book 'The Authors of the Deuteronomic History' by Brian Neil Peterson, page 94. It is also cited in the scholarly work 'The Israelite conquest : history or myth? : an achaeological evaluation of the Israelite conquest during the periods of Joshua and the Judges' -- in page 159. It is cited in this paper --- http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/0334435515Z.00000000044. These are a few examples to show it has been cited a number of times in many scholarly works -- all the sources that cite it can be found here in Google Scholar https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?cites=13627279837402623804&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en --- the author of the paper in question is Bryant Wood who has a PhD in Syro-Palestinian Archaeology and was the excavation director for the ancient site Khirbet el-Maqatir, which is a site that is part of the main discussion in the source that I'm asking evaluation for. In other words, the author of the paper is a PhD in the field, the paper is peer-reviewed and published into a respected archaeological and academic journal, and it has been cited many times in scholarly material. I think this easily qualifies WP:IRS. Any thoughts on agreeing or disagreeing?Korvex (talk) 04:16, 28 January 2017 (UTC)


 * The edit itself, which Korvex doesn't challenge, is "although most archaeologists support the identification of Ai with et-Tell, there is some disagreement. Bryant Wood has identified it with Khirbet el-Maqatir but this has not gained acceptance. "
 * The paper in question, by Creationist archaeologist Bryant Wood, is in fact cited in those two sources. He wants to add a link to the literalist website with which Wood is associated, containing a copy of the paper. Wood was indeed excavation director of a dig funded and organised by the biblical literalist grolup Associates for Biblical Research where Wood is its research director. I'd say that in this article and similar ones we should never use Wood on his own. The question is whether to use the link. Is it required to link to the original source where your sources already cite it?  Doug Weller  talk 06:40, 28 January 2017 (UTC)


 * We should accept the judgment of the editors of the journal about the reliability of the article rather than second-guess them. The journal would not for example allow a creationist to present the world was created 6,000 years ago as a fact or even as a credible theory.  However it seems here that the issue is not reliable sourcing but what weight to provide to an opinion expressed by the author which is not dependant on creationism.   In that case, we need a secondary source that explains the weight that view has in order to include it. And if it has no weight, it should not be included.  The fact the paper has been cited merely means that other others find its facts reliable, not that they endorse its opinions.  TFD (talk) 06:58, 28 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I'm afraid you have been misled as it isn't a journal at all. Zerotalk 07:12, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

Some corrections: (1) Critical Issues in Early Israelite History is not a journal at all. It was published as a supplement of the Bulletin for Biblical Research, a publication of the Institute for Biblical Research, which "offer[s] to evangelical biblical scholars and Ph.D. students a venue for creative, reflective and serious biblical scholarship". I.e., it publishes articles by people who pass the right ideological test. The volume is the outcome of a weekend conference and I can't find any evidence of peer review. (2) The paper http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/0334435515Z.00000000044 by a famous Israeli archaeologist definitely does not cite it, regardless of what Google scholar says. In fact it doesn't cite any of the 12 authors of Critical Issues for any their work. (3) "The Israelite conquest : history or myth?" which Korvex strangely does not provide a URL for, is a Masters thesis, so not even citable itself. (4) Assistant professor of Old Testament Brian Neil Peterson works with the Associates for Biblical Research (Bryant Wood's outfit), so he is hardly a supportive example. Altogether the case for this source is very weak. Zerotalk 07:07, 28 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Actually, this link -- http://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/5727/thesis_kennedy_t.pdf?sequence=1 absolutely DOES cite the paper in question, in page 159. This is an exact quote from the paper;


 * "The final site to be evaluated as a possible candidate for Ai is the only one of these sites at which excavations are presently being conducted. The site of Khirbet elMaqatir is located approximately 1 kilometer west of et-Tell and approximately 1.5 kilometers southeast of Beitin, near the town of Deir Dibwan. The site occupies about 2.5 to 3 acres, but the Late Bronze Age settlement may be slightly smaller (Kennedy 2011: 17; Wood 2008: 230)."


 * As you can see, the citation at the very end of the quote I provided cites a paper from 2011 that was written by himself (Titus Kennedy) -- in fact it's citing the very paper we're talking about. The second citation is from "Wood 2008: 230" -- Bryant Wood's only publication in 2008 with a 230th page that talks about Khirbet el-Maqatir is in fact 'The Search for Joshua's Ai' by Bryant Wood, the very source in question for reliability. The citation is abysmally clear. Zero strangely says its not citable because it's a thesis, although the Wikipedia website has its very own page on how to cite a thesis -- Template:Cite thesis. The paper is also clearly peer-reviewed, as peer-review is simply various experts reviewing a paper before publication, and the editors of the paper 'The Search For Joshua's Ai' are listed clearly on the top of it -- Richard S. Hess, Gerald A. Klingbeil, and Paul J. Ray Jr. These guys are good scholars. So the paper is in fact peer-reviewed and has been cited in several scholarly papers as shown. There are more papers and scholarly books that cite it that I haven't mentioned yet, and an example would include the book of Phillippe Guillaume's titled 'Land, Credit and Crisis: Agrarian Finance in the Hebrew Bible' -- I can't find the exact page where the book cites 'The Search for Joshua's Ai', although I can clearly see its in the bibliography. As for the 'creationism' Doug talks about -- I've already been over this with Doug and that is absolutely irrelevant as creationism has nothing to do with the source at hand, and the fact that Wood believes in creationism is just about as relevant to this issue as Newton's belief in alchemy is with the reliability of his work on gravity. Doug, your attempt to dismiss anything because the authors pertain to a worldview that is absolutely irrelevant to the reliability of the paper in question or even the field we're discussing of archaeology is a pure Ad hominem. Wood is in fact a PhD archaeologist with a good amount of published work in the field and the excavation director of Khirbet el-Maqatir. Just imagine if an Atheist academic was barred from publishing in a peer-reviewed journal because he believes the universe randomly arose, there would be an outcry and accusations of bigotry all over the place, rightfully so. So the only conclusion I see here is that the paper is a scholarly and peer-reviewed paper written by a scholar in the field that has been cited in numerous scholarly works. If a peer-reviewed scholarly book can reliably cite the paper in question, then why can't a Wikipedia page?Korvex (talk) 23:41, 28 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I'm afraid that you have a very poor knowledge of both Wikipedia policy and academic publishing. Templates are just macros for convenient formatting of text and they don't establish policy.  To see the policy on Masters' theses, read WP:RS: "Masters dissertations and theses are considered reliable only if they can be shown to have had significant scholarly influence."  Also, having editors is quite different from having peer-reviewers.  Guillaume does indeed cite Wood, for one sentence: "Maybe ancient Bethel was sited elsewhere, at el-Bireh rather than Beitin, and Beitin was Beth-Aven" (p227).  Finally, scientists have religious beliefs or lack of beliefs like everyone else, but it doesn't mean that anything goes. Seeking to understand the universe in terms of physical laws is the overwhelming mainstream position for both believing and non-believing scientists.  Ignoring physical evidence and believing in the physically impossible, such as a universal flood or an earth only a few thousand years old, is beyond the pale. Claiming that having such beliefs isn't relevant to someone's status as an archaeologist is simply preposterous. Zerotalk 00:59, 29 January 2017 (UTC)


 * edited books are dicey sources - sometimes some of the chapters can be reliable, but so much depends on the agenda of the publisher and the book editors or editor (who is often the person who invites authors to submit chapters). Seeing where this one comes from - a semi-scholarly organization with a very clear theological agenda, we should not use this source for something as controversial as archeology related to the Bible, unless it with attribution and appropriate framing - but it is even better to use mainstream sources in order to give content originating in such sources appropriate WEIGHT. Jytdog (talk) 01:44, 30 January 2017 (UTC)


 * I've unfortunately been gone for a few days, but I am now back. Zero, editors are in fact not technically the exact same thing as peer-reviewers, but what exactly is peer-review? Peer-review is when multiple academics review your research in order to see whether or not it can be published, and that's exactly what we have for Wood's paper with the 'editors' Richard S. Hess, Gerald A. Klingbeil, and Paul J. Ray Jr. One of the leading scholars in this field is James Hoffmeir, and he published a book called 'The Exodus and Wilderness Narratives' -- it didn't have peer-reviewers, rather it had two editors for its publication. Those two editors were Bill T. Arnold, and interestingly enough, the second one was Richard S. Hess, one of the exact three editors of Wood's publication. The briefness of Guillame's citation seems especially irrelevant to me, considering the citation I'm looking to use Wood's paper on the page Ai (Canaan) is also just as brief. And as noted earlier, the only thing preposterous about Wood's creationism is trying to use it in a field that's totally irrelevant to creationism such as archaeology, especially when Wood has a PhD in Syro-Palestinian Archaeology, which in and of itself should be vastly prioritized over his fringe views in an irrelevant subject. So it seems that this papers editors, which act just like peer-reviewers in this case as they did with Hoffmeir, as well as its publication to some theological-archaeological journal and having been cited in a number of scholarly works makes it more then good enough to get cited itself in the Wikipedia page.Korvex (talk) 22:26, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Peer review is a formal process quite different from editing. When there is peer-review, the editor acts as intermediary between the authors and reviewers, keeping the identities of the reviewers secret from the authors. This helps to ensure that the reviewers are candid in their remarks. It is permitted for an editor to engage in depth with the content of an article but there is no assumption that he/she has even read it. Zerotalk 23:17, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
 * I can't get my head around the idea that Creationism is irrelevant to archaeology. Do I really need to show what nonsense this is? When your religious beliefs affect your views of reality as much as Creationism/biblical literalism does, you end up with nonsense archaeology (usually called "cult archaeology" or "fringe archaeology", ranging from the Paluxy footprints (man and dinosaur had to be living at the same time) to the London Hammer and museums such as the Creation Evidence Museum. And of course to a mindset that makes it impossible for a Creationist archaeologist to acknowledge that archaeology might show that the Bible is incorrect. Doug Weller  talk 12:19, 2 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Obviously, any sort of religious conviction will taint results in related sciences. I think I've seen some atheist/humanist academics who have expressed opinions on religious matters which seem to be driven by their personal beliefs as well.
 * There is a question, unfortunately, fairly common in the field of religion and the occult, regarding whether "peer-reviewed" journals which in some way advocate for a given position really meet WP:RS standards. I don't know exactly how to address that. It also seems to be, maybe to a lesser extent, relevant in pseudohistory as well, and I wouldn't mind seeing that field put under pseudoscience DS if that were possible.
 * Regarding the case for linking to the source, I don't necessarily see that much objection to doing so in general, particularly if, as is sometimes the case, there are misprints in the paper versions corrected in the online versions. Some of us might remember an article in The Atlantic that underwent a lot of post-printing changes. I guess the question here is whether doing so would give unwarranted apparent credibility to the source. On that basis, I guess I could see not using the link, although if there were any subsequent changes or similar ways in which the online is "better" than the print, that might weigh to the contrary. John Carter (talk) 16:07, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

Emmett Till RFC
There is an ongoing RFC which may be of interest to the participants of this board.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Emmett_Till#Emmett_Till_lead_sentence_RFC ResultingConstant (talk) 17:36, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

Religiosity and Intelligence, self published opinion article being passed as scholarly,
This talk section was set up on the Religiosity and intelligence article to discuss my removal of this  material given a source of "The myth of the smarter atheist.  This source is a self published opinion piece, and violates WP:RS, and makes an extraordinary claim, as a lone source, so does not make the exceptions listed under WP:SELFSOURCE.  is insisting it is a quality source, however it is clearly not.  The article is balanced, as it includes ACTUAL published counterarguments-not self published opinion pieces. The fact that it is a self published opinion, contradicts the WP:SCIRS statement that "Most books and monographs that are self-published or published by vanity presses undergo no independent fact-checking or peer review and consequently are not reliable sources."

The text is as follows "The Lynn et al. study has been criticized by Artificial Intelligence researcher Randy Olson who has noted that the correlation between wealth and intelligence is stronger and more suited to explain the differences in IQ because countries with lower IQ scores are less developed and countries with high IQ scores are highly developed. Furthermore, he notes countries with 20% atheists or more, which also happen to be highly developed countries, actually flatline at 100 IQ on average rather than increase in IQ. Furthermore, more atheists in a population do not equate to increases in IQ since countries with populations that have virtually 0% atheists have scored more than 100 IQ."

and

"When looking at Kanazawa's paper on individual religiosity, or atheism, and intelligence, Olson noted that both the most religious people and atheists were all within the bounds of 'average intelligence' (90–109) and from a practical point, the level of intelligence is indistinguishable from the other since they both scored very close to each other."

Petergstrom (talk) 18:40, 3 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Olson is probably correct to note that country IQ scores and atheism will both correlate with development. That said, I agree completely with that http://www.randalolson.com/ is not a source that should be cited on Wikipedia. -Darouet (talk) 19:50, 3 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Per wikipedia's policy, I think this qualifies as a reliable source since this is not merely a blog by a random person. Dr. Randal Olson is a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Pennsylvania and also has contributed to both scientific publications and science journalism on various topics revolving around issues relating to informatics and intelligence. The wording provided by Petergstrom is actually more or less paraphrases of what Dr. Olson notes and the reference merely provides his professional observations and commentary on a research paper. Of particular interest is an important observation that Olson notes - that on the graph from the Lynn et al (added it here) clearly shows flat-lining and that increases in levels of atheists do not impact IQ or even increases in IQ since the average is at 100 IQ at 20% and even when it goes up to 70% atheists in a population. Average IQ is between 90-110 and in real life someone who has 90 or 110 IQ is indistinguishable. LynnHarveyNyborg-Atheism-IQ.svg


 * Of course if this was some random guy online then I would agree with removal, but the RS policy states that one should be cautious, not that blogs are prohibited from being cited on wikipedia. Here is what the RS policy notes under the "Exceptions" section: "Self-published material may sometimes be acceptable when its author is an established expert whose work in the relevant field has been published by reliable third-party publications. Such material, although written by an established author, likely lacks the fact checking that publishers provide. Avoid using them to source extraordinary claims."


 * I do not see how this can be considered an unreliable source in the proper context of a wiki article on intelligence. Any thoughts?Huitzilopochtli (talk) 02:28, 4 February 2017 (UTC)


 * "Relevant field" is the keyword here. Artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science. Expertise in this field doesn't automatically convey any academic authority in psychology or social sciences. Unless he has a track record of peer-reviewed academic publications in those fields, his self-published works are not RSs. P.S. I've skimmed through his publication list. He's done some cross-disciplinary collaboration, but I don't see anything that would be relevant here. Eperoton (talk) 03:19, 4 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Actually, it is not exclusively a branch of computer science since like the article you linked notes "The AI field draws upon computer science, mathematics, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, neuroscience and artificial psychology. The field was founded on the claim that human intelligence "can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it"." Obviously it involves the simulation and mimicking of intelligence including cognitive capacity and efficiency. The point to note is that these fields are inherently related and not separated. Similar to synthetic biology and biology - inherently related. Now as an intro from Berkeley notes, "The field of artificial r. intelligence, or AI, attempts to understand intelligent entities. Thus, one reason to study it is to learn more about ourselves. But unlike philosophy and psychology, which are also concerned with intelligence, AI strives to build intelligent entities as well as understand them." Also it notes "AI currently encompasses a huge variety of subfields, from general-purpose areas such as perception and logical reasoning, to specific tasks such as playing chess, proving mathematical theorems, writing poetry{poetry}, and diagnosing diseases. Often, scientists in other fields move gradually into artificial intelligence, where they find the tools and vocabulary to systematize and automate the intellectual tasks on which they have been working all their lives. Similarly, workers in AI can choose to apply their methods to any area of human intellectual endeavor. In this sense, it is truly a universal field."


 * It is not computer programming or computer science, it has wider set of to tools to investigate intelligence from various angles and is not limited to those. Hope this helps.Huitzilopochtli (talk) 08:00, 4 February 2017 (UTC)
 * The vast majority of people who work in AI (or similar fields, which now have more fashionable names) are computer scientists. There are a few who engage professionally with cognitive science, but Olson is not one of them. If you like, we can discuss his publications which you think are relevant here. It's in the same ballpark as what I do for a living, so I can help you understand what competencies they involve. P.S. The Artificial intelligence article is reasonably well developed. If you look at it in more detail, you'll notice there's very little there that relates to the study of human cognition. Eperoton (talk) 15:49, 4 February 2017 (UTC)
 * When it comes to manufacturing intelligence entities, computers are a big tool (not many ways to make intelligence like ours otherwise), but how does that remove from the research on biological intelligence? Tools need to be used to mimic it no? In particular with Dr. Olson, he notes in his current research page : "My research interests lie at the intersection of biology and computer science, where these two fields have the unique opportunity for mutually beneficial research. On the computer science side, I draw on what we’ve learned about biological systems and how evolutionary processes work to engineer AI systems that make our day-to-day lives just a little bit better. Similarly, I give back to biology by drawing on my computer science knowledge to create digital evolutionary models that help us test and refine the leading hypotheses explaining how and why intelligent animal behavior evolves."


 * If Dr. Olson was say a physicist or a geologist, I would agree with you, but he is involved in research about mimicking intelligence using various tools and this does not separate him from understanding issues involving intelligence. Much of the research in intelligence is not really complicated either. Just like biotechnologists, pharmaceuticals, synthetic biologists, and medicine all are diverse but integrated with biology does that mean one should say they are not because each one has diverse goals. Clinical psychology borrows from chemistry, but should the fact that chemicals are used and studied remove it from being related to psychology? I do not think that would be fair considering that rigid borders on many fields of study normally do not exist. Physics and chemistry even overlap which is why noble prizes in physics have been coven to chemists and vice versa.Huitzilopochtli (Ramos1990) (talk) 19:10, 4 February 2017 (UTC)


 * From the standpoint of policy, our goal is to assess the author's scholarly reputation in the relevant field, which can be done based on their peer-reviewed publications or explicit statements made about their reputation in RSs. We can't use the author's claims about themselves (which, in any case, describe his collaborations on evolutionary modeling with only a bit of rhetorical flourish at the end). As I said, I'm ready to help take a closer look at his scholarly publications. From a substantive standpoint, most research that falls under the rubric of AI these days derives from internal developments in statistics and engineering and has no interaction with research on human intelligence. Eperoton (talk) 20:44, 4 February 2017 (UTC)

Note that while self published source by an established expert may be used, it is nevertheless never an optimal source and peer reviewed source are to be preferred. In addition the more contentious or problematic a topic gets the better the sources should be. Based on that even if you see Olson here as an expert, his self published sources should not be used here due to the contentious nature of the subject. Instead only reputable peer reviewed sources by him or others should be used.--Kmhkmh (talk) 21:07, 4 February 2017 (UTC)


 * I think that the general consensus is that this source is not viable, only ramos and jobas want the source to be used.Petergstrom (talk) 21:40, 4 February 2017 (UTC)
 * As User:Ramos1990 clearly pointed out, Randy Olson is an authority on the subject and it is therefore acceptable to use the reference in the article as long as the sentence is properly attributed to him. We have consensus to use the source within the article. It should be noted that User:Petergstrom has a history of militant atheistic agenda-driven editing on Wikipedia, as demonstrated by his attempting to add information to our articles about Jesus and Moses, saying that they both had schizophrenia (see Example 1, Example 2). On the article in question, User:Petergstrom has inappropriately censored content that he just didn't like, possibly because it called into question his own antireligious POV. Other editors reading this discussion should not take it at face value but realize that this is part of a deeper problem concerning User:Petergstrom and their editing behaviour.--Jobas (talk) 19:33, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

Hi everyone. Appreciate your collective inputs. Most editors here see value in Dr. Olson's observations which are not extraordinary (even the paper Olson critiques noted better correlations between national IQs and education), but as others have mentioned that though the source can be used with caution (per WP policy), a source with some degree of oversight is preferable due to the controversial nature of the topic. Hope this helps.Huitzilopochtli1990 (talk) 02:44, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

Is historyofjihad.org a reliable source for Philippine protohistory (900 AD to 1521 AD) articles?
Source: http://www.historyofjihad.org/philippines.html Article: Ma-i, any other references to Philippine protohistory (between 900 and 1521 AD) Content: "Before they reached the shores of Luzon, they subjugated the Buddhist Huangdom of Mai and that lead to its decline.The Buddhist culture of Mindoro gradually disappeared after Bolkiah forced the citizens of Mai to converted their faith to Islam. They forcibly converted and conquered people up to the fall of the Kingdom of Tondo."

Query: Requesting community consensus on the reliability of historyofjihad.org as a source. In this case, I think the text is actually a violation of WP:SYNTH, and I may take action to remove it on that basis soon. However, I want to know if there's anything in the source that is salvagable for the article. Before I do that, I'd like to ask if the community thinks the page is a reliable source? I'm not convinced it is, so I'm requesting feedback. Thanks! - Alternativity (talk) 08:55, 3 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Not reliable. It gives little information about its directors and appears to present an Islamophobic viewpoint.  It seems to be quoted on extreme websites, such as Stormfront, but not in mainstream media.  Furthermore, even if it were reliable, articles should rely primarily on secondary sources.  The problem with tertiary sources such as this website is that if there are questions about specific facts, they do not provide sources so we cannot resolve factual discrepancies between different tertiary sources.  TFD (talk) 15:18, 3 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Agee. It's not reliable for anything substantial. On the front page alone they promote two islamophobic movies (one by Durch radical-right figure Geert Wilders), and call for coordinated massive suicide attacks on Mecca. You can't make this stuff up.... --Stephan Schulz (talk) 15:52, 3 February 2017 (UTC)
 * So they have an agenda, that does not mean they are not RS, the issue of directors however is another matter. is there any evidence they have any kind of editorial over site?Slatersteven (talk) 15:59, 3 February 2017 (UTC)
 * An "agenda" like that is a giant WP:REDFLAG. Whoever controls this site has no interest to exercise editorial control with respect to factuality - as is obvious to everybody with a modest knowledge of history after reading the first few paragraphs of the main page. You might as well go to Stormfront or Jew Watch - sure, there is some editorial control there, but it very much does not contribute to make anything on the sites reliable. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 16:08, 3 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Indeed, it's not a reliable source for anything, and thank you Stephan Schulz for your beautiful and pertinent edit summary. Bishonen &#124; talk 17:06, 3 February 2017 (UTC).


 * http://www.historyofjihad.org has the appearance of a crudely put together hate site, and it shouldn't be cited anywhere on Wikipedia. -Darouet (talk) 17:43, 3 February 2017 (UTC)


 * NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Seriously, we have to discuss this? A site that says "How Religion is a weakness of the human mind"? That's already an unacceptable POV. As for reliability--yes, it's put together by a bunch of amateurs in garish colors--go to that page I just linked, where you find that the site motto is "Site motto", with the sub-motto "We thank you for visiting this page which states our Motto." There's more depth in "I'm at the Pizza Hut, I'm at the Taco Bell, I'm at the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell". As for reliability, cause suuuure a site this not-neutral can present facts reliably--well, here's the claim about scholarship: "Other contributors to this site include professors and members of the faculty from the Universities of Stanford and Michigan (Ann Arbor), Kansas State University, Ohio State University, and the London School of Economics." Yeah right. To whoever even thought this kind of thing was OK, NO. We need to see an editorial statement, and a list of members of the editorial board--and that's just for starters. Please. Drmies (talk) 17:51, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

The site doesn't look scholarly at all and frankly seems a bit agenda driven, so it does not qualify as a reliable source.--Kmhkmh (talk) 21:13, 4 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Hehe. Sorry, I felt I had to ask because I didn't want to be accused of acting unilaterally. - Alternativity (talk) 04:40, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

Source used selectively for contradictory information?
Template:LGBT rights table Europe



The source is cited 21 times, apparently mostly for the claim that sterilization is required in some countried before legal recognition of gender change. The source also says that numerous countries (Ireland, Lithuania, etc.) do not allow legal gender change. Our ... article (template?) lists a number of these countries as legally allowing gender change.

I know there is a lot of nuance in these cases, but it seems like if our article is going to declare a source to be wrong on some points (by saying that country X allows gender change), we shouldn't be assuming it is right on others (the places it is currently cited).

Hijiri 88 ( 聖やや ) 05:50, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Just in checking some dates, I found what might be the root of the problem: That source was written before Ireland passed a gender recognition bill according to the source cited in the template: "A historic moment" – Oireachtas signs off on gender recognition bill. It's not so much inaccurate on that point as it is outdated. This might be the case for any inaccuracy, as there has been a notable uptick in trans issues in Europe and the US in the past few years. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants   Tell me all about it.  15:14, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

mlbtraderumors.com
Is mlbtraderumors.com a reliable source on the Kris Bryant BLP? Is the use of that source, if reliable, something to be quoted exactly in the BLP? I first thought it was a simple copyvio, but then reflected that the source did not sound really major. Collect (talk) 22:16, 7 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Hmm, the site has 'rumors' in its URL... Difficult dilemma. J/k, does not sound reliable for a BLP. K.e.coffman (talk) 01:37, 8 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Not reliable for a BLP.  InsertCleverPhraseHere  02:52, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

Can Acclaimed Music be used to cite individual review scores?
I'm having a small disagreement with about the use of Acclaimed Music in the article Call the Doctor. In my opinion, Acclaimed Music is a tertiary source and therefore cannot be used to cite individual review scores. Instead, secondary sources should be used. Dan56 disagrees and thinks the source can be used to cite scores otherwise not easily accessible. I should also note that Acclaimed Music is not listed in WikiProject Albums/Sources. More feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. --Niwi3 (talk) 20:34, 6 February 2017 (UTC)


 * I understand secondary sources are almost always preferred, but I don't know where or what says tertiary sources are completely disallowed, let alone in an instance like this, i.e. citing individual review scores. Regarding Acclaimed Music, its reliability seems adequate. While a self-published sources, the publisher--Henrik Franzon--is a statistician and researcher whose work with Acclaimed Music has received, IMO, sufficient third-party coverage, as evidenced by the sources used in the article on Acclaimed Music and others specifically in the field of music journalism who've cited the website, including PopMatters, and the 33⅓ album book series (Matos, Michaelangelo. Prince's Sign o' the Times). According to WP:SPS,  On the matter of scores and ratings, Henrik Franzon would appear reliable. Dan56 (talk) 14:54, 7 February 2017 (UTC)


 * I'll just give my quick two cents here, since I've argued my point farther in the original discussion. Because this is a WP:SPS source that is merely aggregating/hosting reviews, I don't believe it should be used as a source for the specific reviews, for attribution reviews. If someone wants to use it to double check the review of an album from a 1993 print-only copy of Billboard magazine, sure, but if you want to cite the actual review, you need to cite the magazine itself, because Acclaim Music had nothing to do with the actual content itself. Its an attribution issue. This stance is in-line with how WP:VG handles the similar website MobyGames and how WP:ALBUMS currently handles Metacritic too. Sergecross73   msg me  18:09, 7 February 2017 (UTC)


 * I don't see the correlation between it "merely aggregating/hosting reviews" and its inadequacy as a source for a particular review score. I hear "attribution issue" again; sophisticated phraseology. But I don't hear much practicality or substance behind it. Either the source being used to verify something can be trusted or it can't, and IMO it can. Dan56 (talk) 18:57, 7 February 2017 (UTC)
 * In Wikipedia's eyes, I don't think it can. Its a self-published source with no editorial oversight or official connection to the sources its replicating. He's just a random statistician who decided to start up his own website to show off his personal stats at his personal website. Sergecross73   msg me  19:58, 7 February 2017 (UTC)
 * It's not really up to you to judge or decide the merits of his website; the third-party coverage and use of his website among other sources in music journalism speaks for itself, Serge. Dan56 (talk) 23:07, 7 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Pretty certain judging the merits of websites is the entire premise of RSN? Sergecross73   msg me  00:55, 8 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Pretty certain judgments on such things should be based on previous mention in reliable third-party publications--if you're going to regurgitate that it's a self-published source--as if I didn't already fucking explain that?? Dan56 (talk) 01:30, 8 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Coverage in third party sources hold more weight in notability discussions than reliability discussions. Like it or not, a personal website run by a statistician (not a writer or journalist with any sort of writing credentials) without any sort of editorial policy or oversight or any official connection to the content they are hosting, is very much so relevant to determining reliability on Wikipedia. It takes more than the media taking notice of it, and it fails in all these other areas. Feel free to keep badgering, but I've made up my mind, it's unreliable, and long back-and-forth discussions aren't exactly conducive to encouraging more participation on these discussions, if you have figured it out yet. Sergecross73   msg me  03:32, 8 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Just want to note that you can find more details about this discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Albums. I agree with Sergecross73 and have nothing else to add. --Niwi3 (talk) 20:11, 7 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Per Sergecross I cant think of why we would cite a third party website to cite a previously published review score. Just cite the original publication. Its not required to be online. Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:59, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

Question about Reliability of a Source (Haircutadvice.com)
Hello everyone. I was wondering if I could use the following source for the Liz Sanbourne page: 1? I would be using it for the "Critical reception" subsection as the website talks about how Marshall breaks the traditional look for women on soap operas. However, I am assuming that this site would not be usable on Wikipedia, but I just wanted to double-check to make sure. Thank you in advance and I apologize if this is obvious. Aoba47 (talk) 19:35, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
 * What exactly would you be using it to say? That her hair is curly? That her curly hair is unusual for a soap opera actress? I think the former probably doesn't need a citation, unless you added the word "naturally" to it (people could argue that she perms her hair, as unlikely as that may be), as photos of her show her with curly hair. If you're going with the latter (which I suspect), then I don't this this source is good enough. I think you should find a recognized critic (or at least a professional critic) who talks about it. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants   Tell me all about it.  15:09, 7 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Makes sense. Unfortunately, there are relatively few sources about this subject matter and I believe that I have exhausted all reliable sources that could be used, but I just wanted to double-check. I apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your comment! Aoba47 (talk) 18:38, 7 February 2017 (UTC)
 * It's no inconvenience! Responding to (notice I didn't say "answering"*) questions like these is exactly what this forum is for. And your particular question was better formed than most in that you gave the source, the article and described how you intended to use the source.
 * * I didn't say "answering" because this forum is for starting discussions and finding a consensus, not getting a definitive answer from an 'expert'. We're all just regular editors here. Except for me, of course. I'm an expert in everything. Just ask my ego, he'll tell you. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants   Tell me all about it.  18:53, 7 February 2017 (UTC)
 * By itself no. I wouldnt see any problem with a specialist hair website being used as a supplementary source if it turned out there was discussion about her hair already out there in the usual places that cover TV series. This is not usually a thing, but there have been issues over the decades with portrayals of black characters in media - accusations of 'whitening' etc which can focus on their hair (being straightened, 'white' cuts and so on). So I would not actually be surprised if this characters appearance had been discussed at the time she appeared. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:13, 8 February 2017 (UTC)