Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/University of Canterbury/International Human Rights Law (2014 S1)

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Legislation, regulation and judgements are primary sources In a couple of recent edits apparently related to this course, legislation, regulation and judgements have been used as sources for statements of fact. These are primary sources, their use to support statements of fact is WP:Original Research and prohibited on wikipedia, which is based on secondary sources. WP:Biographies of Living people wikipedia has strict rules about what we say about living people, how we say it and what what sourcing is required. Material such as Child_Abuse_in_New_Zealand needs to be very carefully checked and the sourcing improved. Stuartyeates (talk) 20:54, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for your comment Stuartyeates. I have looked at the policy on Original Research and think that legislation and cases can be used as per the following statement of policy: "Unless restricted by another policy, primary sources that have been reliably published may be used in Wikipedia; but only with care, because it is easy to misuse them." Statutes and judgments would qualify as reliable publications I think. Also, there are many Wikipedia articles which are primarily based on a statute or case (particularly from the US). If Wikipedia policy prefers a newspaper article (a secondary source) on a case rather than a case itself, then I disagree with the policy, not least because media summaries of cases are often misleading and in some cases quite inaccurate. It might be the way in which students have used these particular sources, so comments on the pages you are especially concerned about would be useful. Otherwise, thanks for the "heads up." Humanrights4nz (talk) 08:55, 8 May 2014 (UTC)
 * You may be interested in Identifying_reliable_sources which says:
 * Wikipedia articles should be based mainly on reliable secondary sources.
 * I agree with you that most popular-press reporting of law material (and indeed any special material) is generally rubbish; however there are entirely publishing houses specialising legal materials and no apparent shortage of official and semi-official sources. I suggest starting with databases such as http://www.nzlii.org/ http://www.lexisnexis.com and http://www.westlaw.co.nz/ which seem to have quite a bit of secondary material on the subjects of some of the articles. Stuartyeates (talk) 10:02, 8 May 2014 (UTC)