User:JulesH/Self Published Sources

Proposed text

See User:JulesH/Self Published Sources/Proposed Text

Experts and researchers

Wikipedia's policy on verifiability states (or rather has stated on and off for some time; this text is regularly changed and then reverted):

Anyone can create a website or pay to have a book published, and then claim to be an expert in a certain field. For that reason, self-published books, personal websites, and blogs are largely not acceptable as sources.

Exceptions may be when a well-known, professional researcher in a relevant field, or a well-known professional journalist has produced self-published material.

This text is fine for what it was originally intended to achieve: set out cases where self-published sources may be used for an encyclopedia that covers academic and current-affairs topics. But Wikipedia has grown beyond that.

What's wrong with the current phrasing

Quite simply, it makes it unnecessarily difficult to write articles that aren't academic in nature (and hence aren't generally the province of researchers) and aren't related to current affairs (and hence aren't generally the province of journalists). Wikipedia has a very large number of such articles, covering an extraordinarily diverse range of subjects. But sometimes the progress of such an article can be impaired because the best (or even only) authority on the subject has been self-published. This is especially true for modern cultural phenomena, which is often reported primarily and sometimes solely through web sites. It is also true for a diverse range of specialist interests, including segments of the collectibles and antiques markets.

But these are just examples, there's no need to list everyone who's acceptable

My interpretation of the policy has always been that the two categories are just examples, and that we should allow other similar examples in different disciplines, but unfortunately there are other editors who read the policy as excluding anything other than these two exceptions.

What should be changed?

The sentence needs to include phrasing that allows for some equivalent of "researcher" or "journalist" that applies to a much broader subject area than either of these two words. My proposal is to use "expert". The phrasing I originally proposed was "... a well-known expert in a relevant field, or a well-known professional journalist...". It should be noted that this is very similar to the phrasing introduced by User:Wolfkeeper and subsequently reverted by User:SlimVirgin.

Others had other suggestions:

• "Exceptions may apply if the author of the self-published material is a well-known professional researcher or notable expert in a relevant field, or a well-known professional journalist." User:Jossi
• "Well-known expert in their field of study, or a professional researcher in their field of study, or a well-known journalist." User:Wjhonson

Having examined the suggestions, I felt that the only important addition made by any of these was that the expert should be notable, hence I settled on the phrasing:

Exceptions may be when a well-known, professional researcher or notable expert in a relevant field, or a well-known professional journalist [...] (red text indicates insertion, bold-face highlighting is from the original)

This change was reverted after a few hours.

User:SlimVirgin raised a concern on Wikipedia talk:Verifiability#Self published sources: researchers & experts that it would be difficult to verify whether an expert was qualified to provide the information they are being used to verify. User:Wolfkeeper raised objections to this idea, suggesting it would cause problems when such a source was used as the professional status of the expert would need to be verified, and consensus sought for whether or not they were a professional.

Therefore my current suggestion is to re-insert "or notable expert" after "researcher" in the existing sentence.

Why "expert"?

I think the word "expert" sufficiently conveys the idea of a broad class of people who are collectively qualified to discuss almost any subject, while being exclusive enough to only include people who are adequately qualified.