Wikipedia talk:Training/For students/Verifiability
The video seems to me to run foul of Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine), which advises:
All Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources. Primary sources should generally not be used for health related content, because the primary biomedical literature is exploratory and not reliable - any given primary source may be contradicted by another, and the Wikipedia community relies on the guidance of expert reviews, and statements of major medical and scientific bodies, to provide guidance on any given issue.
Although primary sources are not absolutely forbidden for medical claims, they are strongly discouraged in favour of high quality secondary sources (literature or systematic reviews, meta-analyses and similar). There are plenty of primary sources that would qualify as a "reputable source" (as the video suggests) but wouldn't be suitable to support a biomedical claim.
Furthermore, the suggestion in the video that "... if there is an opposing view, it should also be included. For example, a quote from a reputable source like "Critics claim that vaccinations have never benefited public health" helps to balance the article and keep it neutral"
contradicts the advice in Wikipedia:Fringe theories:
"To maintain a neutral point of view, an idea that is not broadly supported by scholarship in its field must not be given undue weight in an article about a mainstream idea.
There really isn't any mainstream scholarship to support "Critics claim that vaccinations have never benefited public health" and although it's only meant to be an example, it's a very poor example. You only have to read our article on Vaccination to see how much weight is given to that sort of fringe theory - none, in that particular case.
You wouldn't suggest that the article on Earth should baldly state that "Some critics claim that the Earth is flat" in order to "help balance the article and keep it neutral". In fact, our guidance is clear that such fringe theories - if mentioned at all - should make clear their relationship to the mainstream view (the section Earth #Cultural and historical viewpoint does just that).
My advice is to use something as an example of conflicting sources that is so historical that the nationalists and POV-pushers don't care anymore. I've previously used the suspects for the murder of the Princes in the Tower as an example of how it's important to attribute opinions where reliable sources reach different conclusions (David Starkey believes Richard III was guilty; Paul Murray Kendall thinks Buckingham most likely). Hope that helps. --RexxS (talk) 19:07, 25 June 2014 (UTC)
- RexxS: Yeah, I'm not the biggest fan of this video (which, unlike most of the others, I didn't write). I think it's better than nothing, but I'd like to see it replaced with a more clueful introduction to verifiability and NPOV at some point.--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:58, 30 June 2014 (UTC)