Wikipedia:Appeal to authority
 | This is an essay on the role of Wikipedia. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | This page in a nutshell: At Wikipedia we do ad verecundiam all the time. This website is essentially a huge appeal to authority. |
Wikipedia is all about appeal to proper authority, take proper authorities out and there is no Wikipedia left. An appeal to the authority of proper experts (i.e. mainstream scientists/scholars) does not constitute a logical fallacy. Basically, it is all written in WP:RS and WP:VER: if appeal to authority would be outlawed, Wikimedia Foundation would be branded as a criminal organization.
The appeal to authority is not in itself fallacious. It would be a fallacy to quote an auto mechanic upon what is the best treatment for small cells lung cancer, but it would not be a fallacy to quote a professor of medicine upon what is the best treatment for it. Of course, it would be a fallacy to claim that the professor would be infallible.
Here we do arguments from authority big time. If we remove the appeal to authority, Wikipedia will crumble like a house of cards.
Wikipedia summarizes mainstream academic sources. In effect, this site is "one big appeal to authority." An appeal to authority isn't a problem when the authority actually knows what they're talking about. For example, anti-vaccers, moon-landing skeptics, Indigo children, and 9/11 truthers -- all of them are a problem of not listening to authorities who know what they're talking about. Pointing out what could be a fallacy in a particular context doesn't automatically win an argument, especially if that particular context is a red herring (see Argument from fallacy). Ian.thomson (talk) 17:48, 21 April 2015 (UTC)
Inside Wikipedia is quite unlikely to read something like "I know it since I've done the math" or "I know it since I have performed yesterday an experiment about it". Why? Because such talk is banned.
@Proveallthings: I did overlook Stephen Miller's reasoning, and I did it intentionally. And it's because me and you are attempting to do two different things right now. You're attempting to use evidence to find what is true. I'm attempting to survey the literature to find out what most scholars say about this particular question. That's because Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia of truth, but a service for summarizing what the scholarly community says. If we were here to discover what is true together on the Wikipedia talk pages, then you would be doing what is right (marshalling the linguistic arguments), and I would be doing something wrong (just quoting a bunch of authorities and pointing out that "your side" here consists only of people with a particular theological set of commitments). So let me be clear. I'm not saying you're wrong about "father". You, and Kenneth Kitchen, might be right. I'm just saying that, in terms of the way Wikipedia weighs sources, Kenneth Kitchen's opinion is out on the fringes in the scholarly world. Alephb (talk) 21:36, 23 August 2018 (UTC)
Appeal to authority is what Wikipedia is all about. It is not the place to argue with what the authorities say. Further, Wikipedia accepts academic and scholarly authorities, not religious and dogmatic authorities. Anything else is original research. Rick Norwood (talk) 16:01, 20 October 2013 (UTC)