Wikiversity talk:Reliable sources

Votes

 * Rayc 05:37, 19 August 2006 (UTC)
 * digital_metalk 13:33, 19 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Awolf002 15:49, 19 August 2006 (UTC)
 * -- sebmol ? 12:15, 20 August 2006 (UTC)
 * --Dario vet 12:24, 20 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Mirwin 13:39, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Comments

 * Looks good with the "whenever possible" modifier. Though get rid of all the mentions of "articles".   --Rayc 05:37, 19 August 2006 (UTC)
 * I went ahead and clarified why "articles" showed up in the text. Hope this helps. Awolf002 15:49, 19 August 2006 (UTC)


 * We need to develop our content first, create our own precedents and derive best practices from that. This policy is highly premature. -- sebmol ? 12:15, 20 August 2006 (UTC)
 * It needs a bit of local evolution. Specifically the bit about verifiability is a bit overdone and puts people adding useful material on the defensive. Always appropriate to improve material by adding to it or modifying it along with a citation and explanation why.  Arbitrarily deleting or moving to the talk page merely because there is no citation does not seem useful or desirable to me at this time considering our dire lack of materials.  Mirwin 23:05, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
 * We don't have a dire lack of materials any more, but i think we might have to find another method of confronting erronous statements on a page. A course on evolution could be very disrubted if someone were to remove a large chunk of the text because "it was unreferenced"--Rayc 00:17, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Limits?
I feel that this policy, like the verifiability one, needs to have mention of limits: contexts in which reliable sources may be less important than the discussion at hand. If I come up with specific examples, I'll mention them eventually. The Jade Knight 04:16, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

This policy is not actual practice
This policy has never, to my knowledge, been enforced, except erratically and idiosyncratically, long ago. No mature university would require their professors to cite reliable source for everything they say. Student papers submitted in university courses need not be peer-reviewed before being presented to a class. Rather, the policy was created here because Wikiversity users were Wikipedians, thinking like those involved in building an "encyclopedia that anyone could edit." Normally, encyclopedias retained experts. So how to build a reasonably reliable encyclopedia without relying on experts? The answer was to rely on material in "reliable sources." Yet I can say things in a paper approved by a peer-reviewed journal, I just did, that would not be accepted on Wikipedia.

The Wikipedia standards developed with a flat, single page per topic, project model that set up conflict, that attempted to exclude material created with a "point of view." The problem: experts have points of view, and amateurs who know a subject often have points of view as well, and generally know the topic better than "neutral editors," who may not understand the topic and who misread sources.

An encyclopedia also has a notability issue: material, for inclusion in an encyclopedia, should be notable. Not just any knowledge.

To learn about a topic at a university, it is not required that the topic be notable. A seminar can be set up if there are interested students. Here, that can be just one student. In controversial areas, speakers may be invited to present highly opinionated material.

Wikiversity has a neutrality policy, that is fundamental to WMF wikis; however, Wikiversity handles neutrality through inclusion, organization, and structure, not through exclusion of opinion and bias. We have many non-disruptive ways of handling this. It turns out that people are not upset if their opinions are attributed to them, as they are upset if the opinions (which they may think are fact) are excluded or deleted. Content conflict on Wikiversity is rare. To enforce the policy as written, conflict would become routine, it would be quite like Wikipedia.

Top level pages in Wikiversity may approach rigorous neutrality, and the only reliable measure of neutrality is true consensus. If it doesn't have consensus, there is a high risk that it is not actually neutral. So we push the material down, and negotiate for what is at the higher level to find consensus. We don't have to have consensus, here, to express our opinion or the results of our research. We have users who will support each other in this expression, so that it is not disruptive.

The policy needs revision, or to be deprecated. Thoughts? --Abd (discuss • contribs) 23:42, 15 February 2015 (UTC)