Wikipedia talk:Identifying reliable sources (science): Difference between revisions

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:::History of science would not fall under this guideline in my view but rather [[WP:RS]] as it is not discussing science per se but history of science, thus it is historical rather than scientific even though it is ''about'' science. Policy such as NPOV for example, always trumps guidelines. Guidelines are intended to supplement but not replace policies.--[[User:Literaturegeek|<span style="color:blue">Literature</span><span style="color:red">geek</span>]]&nbsp;|&nbsp;[[User_talk:Literaturegeek |<span style="color:orange">''T@1k?''</span>]] 18:29, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
:::History of science would not fall under this guideline in my view but rather [[WP:RS]] as it is not discussing science per se but history of science, thus it is historical rather than scientific even though it is ''about'' science. Policy such as NPOV for example, always trumps guidelines. Guidelines are intended to supplement but not replace policies.--[[User:Literaturegeek|<span style="color:blue">Literature</span><span style="color:red">geek</span>]]&nbsp;|&nbsp;[[User_talk:Literaturegeek |<span style="color:orange">''T@1k?''</span>]] 18:29, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
::::This "policy trumps guidelines" meme is not actually true. Editors must use their best judgment to determine which advice to apply in a given situation. There should not be any direct conflicts between policies and guidelines, and any such conflicts should be resolved, not "trumped".
::::IMO this page provides information and encourages editors to choose higher-quality sources for scientific facts. It provides further information (e.g., that newspapers aren't infallible, that old sources may be out of date) without conflicting with any content policy. It explicitly says that history, social impact, etc. are not scientific information. Surely editors commenting here, if given a choice, would prefer to source basic scientific facts (e.g., the temperature at which water boils, the distance from the Earth to the sun) to a science textbook or a good secondary source in a peer-reviewed journal than to a local newspaper or a random website. [[User:WhatamIdoing|WhatamIdoing]] ([[User talk:WhatamIdoing|talk]]) 20:20, 24 August 2010 (UTC)


:I've been wondering whether merging this into [[WP:MEDRS]] might not be a bad idea. Much of the information is necessarily the same. [[User:WhatamIdoing|WhatamIdoing]] ([[User talk:WhatamIdoing|talk]]) 18:39, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
:I've been wondering whether merging this into [[WP:MEDRS]] might not be a bad idea. Much of the information is necessarily the same. [[User:WhatamIdoing|WhatamIdoing]] ([[User talk:WhatamIdoing|talk]]) 18:39, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

Revision as of 20:20, 24 August 2010

Origin of this text in WP:MEDRS

Much of the original version of this page is copied verbatim or closely paraphrased from Wikipedia:Reliable sources (medicine-related articles), specifically the version as it existed on 2010-12-12. That material as well as the text of this guideline are licensed under Wikipedia:CC-BY-SA.

If the method of adaptation is good enough for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, it is good enough for me. - 2/0 (cont.) 06:40, 12 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Statement of purpose

Over the next few weeks, I would like to get the obvious problems ironed out before advertising this page a bit more widely and then eventually proposing it as a supplemental guideline to WP:Reliable sources. All are free to contribute collegially. In particular, more examples are needed, especially non-American examples and examples unrelated to physics, the area I know best (disclosure: I am published in Physical Review and am a member of the American Physical Society; the possibility of personal or professional gain through their use as examples here is quite remote). The text of this essay is, and probably should be, overcomplete; reducing repetitiveness and keeping sections focused, though, is probably an area of concern. I would also be unsurprised to learn that I have replicated mistakes long since smoothed over at WP:MEDRS. The parallel between writing medical and scientific articles is close, but imperfect; nevertheless, it would be silly to fail to take advantage of the expertise and perspective of editors there regarding similar matters. - 2/0 (cont.) 06:40, 12 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Very worthwhile. As a non-expert, may I suggest that " In It can be helpful to create a subarticle devoted to the minority position, leaving a brief summary in the main article" should be accompanied by a mention of the WP:WEIGHT requirement that "such pages should make appropriate reference to the majority viewpoint wherever relevant, and must not reflect an attempt to rewrite content strictly from the perspective of the minority view. Specifically, it should always be clear which parts of the text describe the minority view, and that it is in fact a minority view. The majority view should be explained in sufficient detail that the reader may understand how the minority view differs from it, and controversies regarding parts of the minority view should be clearly identified and explained." I mention it in full because some editors took exception to my attempt to summarise the significance of this provision. This is of course particularly important in articles dealing with a political or social controversy in which science is disputed, and in my understanding the consensus scientific majority view should be shown as such as well as describing minority views favoured by various parties. Don't know if more emphasis is required on showing science correctly even when it is only part of the subject. . . dave souza, talk 22:10, 12 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Took a stab at it (including that typo - more proof that what we see is not what we think we see) - feel free to tweak or rewrite, as this is meant to be an open sandbox. Much as I may be impressed with my own writing and clarity of expression, there is no chance that this will ever be solid and comprehensive enough to be a guideline if it remains too closely tied to my own parochial viewpoint. - 2/0 (cont.) 19:54, 13 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, I think that pretty much covers it, nicely put. . . dave souza, talk 20:08, 13 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This is long over due.

I saw your post on ScienceApologist's talk page. Creating a variation of WP:RS that addresses the needs of science also interests me. I've been working on a variation at User:OMCV/Sourcing science material. If you do advance this I think it would be good to deal explicitly with all relevant types of sources especially patents. One of the biggest problems is that people just don't understand how science is transmitted. I also think shorter is better than longer, for example I haven't had a chance to read this entire page. I'll stop by again when I get a chance or if you would like me to stay away just mention it.--OMCV (talk) 00:25, 13 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Took a stab at adding patents. You have a good point about brevity, and trimming for the sake of redundancy or clarity of communication would be welcome. Any other comments and edits are also welcome - this is an open sandbox. - 2/0 (cont.) 21:47, 13 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Also, please check Wikipedia:Scientific standards. ScienceApologist (talk) 11:02, 14 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"Grey literature"

I think it might be useful to address the "grey literature" directly - publications that are reviewed, by peers, but not peer-reviewed. Forest Service documents are a nice example - I had a colleague once say that he prefers to publish within the Forest Service, because the review process was much less onerous. Now, obviously, there's a continuum of reliability in the world of the grey literature; at the high end they're as good as a book published by an academic press, while at the low end - I don't know, and that's sort of the problem. Guettarda (talk) 04:22, 13 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

White papers are also of interest. I'd classify them in the same category. ScienceApologist (talk) 11:00, 13 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
WP:SCIRS#White and grey literature - it could use some more examples and the language should probably be tightened, but does that hit the major points? - 2/0 (cont.) 07:26, 26 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
What about reports to Congress/Parliament? These would be unlikely to be mentioned in the peer reviewed literature, but might provide an accessible (both open access and targeted to a non-technical audience) overview of a topic, particularly with regards to any policy considerations. Should we mention them explicitly, or should we just leave it at produced by a widely-cited and respected researcher in the field to avoid stepping on the toes of WP:POLIRS? - 2/0 (cont.) 09:01, 26 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Academic sources, in general

Taking a cue from the development of WP:FRINGE which began as a fringe science guideline and now has developed into a much wider ranging point, I'd like to recommend changing this from Scientific Reliable Sources to "Academic Reliable Sources". This may require more work, but is very worthwhile as many of these ideas relating to sourcing easily cross over into the social sciences and the humanities -- especially disciplines like economics, history, sociology, anthropology, and linguistics.

ScienceApologist (talk) 11:00, 13 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I can certainly see the utility of such a thing, but I think there may be too much detail lost if we generalize this to something that covers academic papers like Gogol, Pepys, and Andy Warhol: the history of the appearance of references to Wikipedia's controversial "In popular culture" sections in popular culture. Literary criticism and suchlike fields are a very different beast that probably deserves its own sourcing standards; for instance, I think that books have a very different status in more writing-intensive fields without an experimental side. My vastly limited understanding of is that it is a cross between everything is a review and nothing is.
Similarly, economics increasingly uses data-based modeling, but relevance has a much stronger policy component - how many journal articles has Alan Greenspan written? Even in computer science, the advice needs tweaking - that community is much more focused on rapid dissemination and conference presentations.
On the other hand, the advice to prefer scholarly sources and attribute weight to the aspects of a topic according to the sum of the attention of the relevant academic community can be generalized pretty readily. - 2/0 (cont.) 21:27, 13 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Promotion to guideline?

While this page isn't perfect, I think it is generally of a high-enough standard to be marked as a guideline. However, I think there should be wider community consultation on that matter first. This is an initial RFC to see if there are any major changes that need to be made. If there aren't, another discussion advertised on WP:CENT could be used to convert the {{essay}} tag to {{guideline}}? NW (Talk) 18:51, 20 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  • RfC Comment. One thing that I noticed on a quick read is that the Books section does not address the existence of single-author monographs that look like very serious scholarship but can actually be close to vanity publications, sometimes done for academic job advancement; these can be relatively unreliable or undue. More broadly, I might suggest seeing how the current ArbCom case on climate change works out, and whether it has any bearing on the content of this page, before taking this to CENT for the broader RfC. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:39, 20 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I added that we determine the reliability and relevance of a source based on how the experts in the field treat it, and added monographs to the self-published paragraph at WP:SCIRS#Books. - 2/0 (cont.) 07:57, 26 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for that. In fact, though, I've seen monographs of this sort that are not, strictly, self/vanity published. There are publishing houses that also publish well-refereed books that publish these things for the revenue stream. But I admit that it is hard to word this in a way that is useful for our purposes. Sometimes a scholarly book by a single author or a single lab group is very much a primary source, with none of the validity of a secondary one. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:24, 26 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm, I see what you mean. WP:SCIRS#Summarize scientific consensus includes the sentence: If an idea is cited by only a few research groups ("few" varying by field), it should receive very little or no weight in our articles. This gets a little at what I think your point is, but to paraphrase MastCell below we would do well to do more to encourage editors to see the forest more than the trees. Reliable sources do not exist in isolation (hey, that is catchy - maybe someone should add it to the page). - 2/0 (cont.) 18:19, 26 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, but if a reliable source falls in a forest... --Tryptofish (talk) 18:22, 26 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Like. Well, I am a fan of this page, obviously. Tryptofish makes a good point that #Books could better emphasize the role of the major academic publishing houses. I would not want to go too far the other direction by implying that all such books should be blindly followed, but mentioning external editorial control first and then the subtypes of books might work. - 2/0 (cont.) 20:57, 21 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Suggestions: I think it's worth carefully reviewing the wording about using primary sources, because (at least with WP:MEDRS) this has been the most heavily wikilawyered aspect of the guideline. Several editors who (to put it kindly) have difficulty with forest-tree discrimination have gotten hung up on the idea that primary sources are never permissible, and that all sourcing has to be review articles. Occasionally this has resulted in sprees where large volumes of appropriate journal citations have been removed "per MEDRS". Obviously, no policy can be proofed against misuse, but ideally we should emphasize the role of primary sources. That is, they can be used - just not misused. MastCell Talk 21:15, 21 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I did some reworking under WP:SCIRS#Definitions, but more is probably needed at WP:SCIRS#Respect secondary sources. - 2/0 (cont.) 08:49, 26 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Guideline creep is not an impressive course for WP. Additionally, this appears to be a form of inserting SPOV as a special class -- when just this week unanimous SPOV that H1N1 was going to be a worldwide destructive pandemic - was found to be wrong. Votes from the WHO etc. do not substitute on WP for fact. Nor does disbelief in what WHO avers as fact then become "fringe." Cirrent guidelines work fine. Collect (talk) 11:41, 22 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • To clarify then, do you have a problem with WP:MEDRS? NW (Talk) 12:32, 22 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Curiously enough, my comments apply to this particular RfC. Trying to ascribe positions to me on any other issue is thereful quite without meaning. Cheers. Collect (talk) 14:17, 22 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
A few things: first, H1N1 did become a pandemic. If you don't get that, then you don't understand what a pandemic is. As to its "destructiveness", the relatively low virulence of H1N1 was recognized more than a year ago by the "SPOV" (e.g. PMID 19524497, Cell June 2009, "The mortality rate associated with infection appears to be low... the spread and impact of this swine influenza virus are similar to those of viruses during an average flu season.") The H1N1 pandemic "only" killed about 18,000 people to date ([1]), so I guess that's not "destructive" enough to impress.

If anything, the popular press was far more alarmist than scientific media about H1N1, so I don't see the relevance of your example to this discussion. More generally, I don't think that pointing out isolated instances where you believe scientists were wrong about something is a coherent reason to oppose this particular guideline. MastCell Talk 17:13, 22 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Average number killed by flu in the US per year is about 25,500 [2] The "pandemic" killed about 25% fewer in the US than the average <g>. So yes - that is not "destructive enough to impress." Now as to WHO ... [3] from June 11, 2009. So as of June 2009, WHO was still promoting this as the "first global pandemic of the 21st century." I.e. the UN official agency was far more alarmist and asserted the pandemic as a matter of scientific fact. Groups can, indeed, be wrong. [4] JAMA noted "In June 2009, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the 2009 influenza A(H1N1) pandemic and in October 2009, President Obama declared it a national emergency." Seems the President did not heed your news that the news of a pandemic was exaggerated -- though you assure us that in June it was known that it was no worse than ordinary flu years. <g>. In short -- scientists goofed. Simple fact. And this is "on point" because it is also a declaration of scientific fact by a UN agency. Collect (talk) 17:29, 22 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I feel a bit silly continuing this discussion, but you're incorrect. H1N1 was a pandemic, full stop, so I don't understand why you're flogging that as some sort of exaggeration. You link a WHO statement from June '09 as an "alarmist" smoking gun, but that statement explicitly reads: "On present evidence, the overwhelming majority of patients experience mild symptoms and make a rapid and full recovery." So it seems that even in the sources you've hand-picked, the virulence of H1N1 was accurately described. I don't see a "goof" here. More to the point, even if the medical community had erred on the side of excess caution in the case of H1N1, I fail to see any relevance to our use of sources in natural-sciences articles. MastCell Talk 17:52, 22 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
As I noted, having fewer deaths than average does not actually impress me. It did impress the President who cited the WHO report. Your assertion that by June 2009, scientists knew it was a tempest in a peapot is thus not borne out. And the issue that governmental or multi-governmental scientific organizations can assuredly goof is clearly apt. Clear finally? Collect (talk) 18:17, 22 July 2010 (UTC) see also [5] "the Geneva-based arm of the United Nations relied on advice from experts with ties to drug makers in developing the guidelines it used to encourage countries to stockpile millions of doses of antiviral medication, according to the second report. " That is, "experts" were used to justify pre-selected conclusions for the WHO. Collect (talk) 18:21, 22 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I think I've said everything I have to say on the subject already. I still fail to see any relevance of these concerns to the actual proposed guideline under discussion. Even if one accepts that criticism of specific WHO actions has some bearing, it would apply to WP:MEDRS rather than here. MastCell Talk 22:18, 22 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed. I've asked Collect to clarify in regards to this guideline. Failing that, this oppose should be ignored. Viriditas (talk) 05:43, 23 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Try this: Try WP:CREEP for one. Second, that it would discourage properly RS material from being used contrary to WP:NPOV. Third, that WP recognizes no special status for scientific opinions as such (the part about groups being citable for opinions as a special class). Fourth, it is improper to say that an opinion properly posted should be "ignored" as a matter of WP policy. Need more? Collect (talk) 11:38, 23 July 2010 (UTC) As for the snarky asides, they should be redacted, rather than trying to decide to "ignore" my opposition. Thank you all most kindly. Collect (talk) 11:50, 23 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Further The fact that a statement is published in a refereed journal does not make it relevant is a matter of a great deal of concern -- for example anything published in Physical Review or Physical Review Letters is automaticall considered relevant in the Physics community - yet this "guideline" would relegate it to "does not make it relevant." While this may be true of small medical studies for MEDRS, it is not true in "hard sciences." The Neutrality and No original research policies demand that we present the prevailing scientific consensus, is also contrary to practice in Physics. Cutting edge science is built on the foundation of previous research, and paradigms almost always change only slowly is actually quite false. For example, results that have been reported only in conference proceedings or on a researcher's website are unlikely to be appropriate for inclusion except when reported as such in the author's biography is also quite false. Usually these ideas are proposed by serious researchers who pose a question as part of an endeavor to understand the results more deeply: how can these results be understood in terms of the theory they seem to contradict? ? is meaningless in hard sciences. Statements and information from reputable major scientific bodies may be valuable encyclopedic sources. is simply bosh as far as WP is concerned. And this is only the tip of the iceberg here. Genuine "Scientific bodies" do not vote on facts. I would also note that since mathematics is not a "research" science, that absolutely no math articles on current work could ever be written <g>. Collect (talk) 11:50, 23 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  • Every article I have published in PRL or PRB should be used as a source in every article mentioning mumble, mumble material or technique? Sweet, I will get right on it :). Seriously, though, I am trying to understand what you think that that sentence indicates that is not apparent to me.
  • I am not clear on your meaning in the next sentence; do you think that it should be clarified to recognize that, for instance, while many people like SUSY there is currently no consensus as to whether it accurately describes reality? I think that if that article fails to leave the hypothetical technical but naive reader with the impression that SUSY is a serious contender but the data for really testing it does not exist yet, then the article will have failed to inform.
  • I am afraid I am not sure based on your input how to improve the next two sentences, other than to suggest that they seem to mean something quite different to me than to you.
  • Usually these ideas ... This is intended to convey the fact that the common response by a researcher who finds data that seems to contradict a well-established theory is to tweak the theory, not to propose an entirely new paradigm. Well, after perhaps overzealously checking for experimental error; the trend in the early reported values of the charge of an electron is not a shining moment in experimental physics.
  • From the APS. I do agree with you that we need to advise caution when dealing with the pronouncements of organizations who only pretend to the trappings of science, though.
More importantly, Collect, are you just trying to shoot this out of the water, or should we try to find some common ground on wording and presentation? Opining that this should not be made a guideline on grounds of WP:CREEP is a perfectly sound reason to oppose, of course. If you would like, we can start new sections here to thresh out meaning. - 2/0 (cont.) 14:34, 23 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Collect, is your position that scientists frequently get things wrong, so we should balance them with the opinions of fringe theorists? TFD (talk) 15:20, 23 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Fancy meeting you here. You seem to think that setting up a straw man argument will get a response. It won;t. Thank you most kindly. Collect (talk) 16:49, 23 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support WP is supposed to be an encyclopedia, and articles should reflect mainstream views. While current policies should be sufficient to ensure articles are properly written, a number of persistent editors try to insert fringe views into them. Therefore clear guidelines are necessary. TFD (talk) 14:30, 23 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support per TFD and 2/0. I also think MCs suggestions are good. Verbal chat 17:48, 23 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support per all of the above. Science is never done (and never absolutely certain) ... so when political bodies and or businesses have to act they rely on the current scientific consensus of the moment which may change tommorrow. Likewise, Wikipedia must report the current state of the science (and uncertainties) along with its historical development and not tomorrow's paradigms or unverified cutting edge stuff. Vsmith (talk) 01:28, 25 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • I still think it would be worth addressing things like white papers, reports from national and international organisations like the FAO, WHO, USDA, etc. ...and, of course, the IPCC. I think it would be worth discussing white papers, research reports and the like. The key, perhaps, lies in the way that they are treated by high-quality sources - the IPCC assessments are accepted, for the most part, in the peer-reviewed literature. The Discovery Institute's in-house journal, on the other hand, not so much. Guettarda (talk) 03:49, 25 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that it is a good idea to distinguish between, say, the IPCC or NIST World Trade Center report on the one hand and the Bioinitiative Report or ILADS on the other. Maybe a short section on white and grey literature between #Scientific organizations and #Popular press? Or maybe cover it a merged section with #Scientific organizations? I do not really deal with such things myself, but reception by relevant reliable sources would seem the obvious standard. - 2/0 (cont.) 07:14, 25 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, gray literature is something that needs to be addressed. Otherwise it is likely to be a point of controversy. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 00:47, 26 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
More at #"Grey literature". - 2/0 (cont.) 08:56, 26 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. I can't support as currently written, because it is unnecessarily prejudicial to news stories and books written by non-scientists. As I've said before, some of the best books on controversial topics, including science, have been written by investigative journalists. Writing a guideline which might be used to exclude important sources like that is not helpful to what we're trying to do here. Cla68 (talk) 23:00, 25 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think this is an issue because the example you give is not a scientific matter or describing scientific results. The example you give of lets say an investigative journalist uncovering fraud or perhaps a court case or whatever, would not go in a scientific section but rather a section on "controversy". This is often what happens on medical articles and are more governed by WP:RS than WP:MEDRS.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 17:16, 27 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
My objection stands as I explained below. Cla68 (talk) 14:34, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support per all of the above. Recently there has been a tendency to ignore the caveats in WP:IRS and simply say "it was published in a book so it's reliable." This guideline would flesh out those caveats in the context of science articles. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 00:47, 26 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support While much of the popular culture content at Wikipedia is useful and interesting, as an encyclopedia, our core business concerns facts based on evidence, so this guideline is desirable in order to clarify just what is acceptable as a reliable source in the natural sciences. Regarding the discussion above concerning possible scientific errors: I see no evidence of a relevant error being corrected other than by sources which would pass this proposed guideline. Johnuniq (talk) 08:49, 26 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Reluctant oppose. It is a very well written guideline and I would like to support it but unfortunately I have a couple of concerns with it as currently written. While I believe that in general secondary sources should be used instead of primary sources I share the concerns raised by MastCell regarding wording on primary sources in that it could be misinterpreted by some to be overly harsh on primary sources. My main concern however, is the below sentence,

Although significant-minority views are welcome in Wikipedia, such views must always be described as such and presented in the context of their acceptance by experts in the field.

The bolded "must always be described as such" concerns me a lot. To use the word must, this can't be a guideline but will need to be submitted as a policy first of all. The wording compells wikipedians to decide "the truth" and not only that, tell the reader of the article what is "the truth", via original research. This sentence isn't even talking about fringe or quackery but significant minority views among scientists. What happens if there are no reliable sources saying that such and such a view is held by a minority or small number of researchers, do we wikipedians perform original research and then decide the truth for our readers? Should wikipedians get in repeated content disputes over labeling researchers and research conclusions "minority view" versus "the mainstream view" if no sources are available? I know on medical articles minority views are governed by "due weight"; if a source says such and such is a minority viewpoint and can be sourced then it can be added to medical articles. I feel this wording has been chosen for a small number of controversial scientific articles and it is going to potentially have an adverse effect on a wide range of the thousands and thousands of scientific articles on wikipedia. If the text I have bolded is deleted I will switch my vote to support. The bolded text is unnecessary anyway with this part of the sentence "and presented in the context of their acceptance by experts in the field" which is quite adequate.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 18:16, 27 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Good point - a guideline supplementing a guideline supplementing a policy should make its intentions and place in this hierarchy clear. More at #Wording of sentence. - 2/0 (cont.) 13:08, 5 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you very much 2over0. Switching my vote.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 07:38, 6 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Preliminary support. My main concern has been resolved and there appears to be no opposition to it. I am changing my vote to support. The reason I am making my vote for support as "preliminary" is because I think we need to establish better consensus among editors on disputed points before acceptance. We are almost there.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 07:38, 6 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Preliminary oppose This needs some more fine-tuning. As it stands it seems slanted to default to keeping out content, which is opposite of the general Wikipedia expectation. This leaves it open to wikilawyering: if the research is recent it's too recent; if it's old it's too old; if it's just one review article "it's just one research group". The sentence "If an idea is cited by only a few research groups ("few" varying by field), it should receive very little or no weight in our articles" is an example of this slant; in my experience (particularly in the medicine area) there's often no more 2 research groups involved in a particular line of research (and often just one), which is not surprising considering that it could be less fun to be just verifying other people's findings. II | (t - c) 03:02, 2 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I think requiring editors to interpret the general guideline to specific cases is going to be a fault no matter what we do here, but where we draw the line of specificity is certainly open to debate. Particularly with "few" I think you may have identified a point that needs work. I think my reasoning when writing that was that we should let the people actually working in a field dictate what our articles report that experts consider important about a topic (with other matters being outside the scope of this proposed guideline, see #When to use, and when not, below). Perhaps the whole point could be reworded in those terms? Certainly "few" will mean something entirely different in the context of Magnetism vs. Meissner effect vs. Oxypnictide.
Also, I really like your change to describe a secondary source as a source which discusses information originally presented by different authors, as it is both clear and concise. - 2/0 (cont.) 13:01, 5 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong oppose - This seems to be just another incarnation of SPOV, which I also oppose. ATren (talk) 21:09, 6 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I disagree, there is little to WP:SPOV other than a brief POV argument on the "truth of science". This is a comprehensive guideline and there are lots of good faithed editors who are trying to come up with a sensible guideline. If you do not raise specific issues and join in the discussion then your oppose will not be very "strong".--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 21:55, 6 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose pending a definition of "science-related", which is crucial.--Heyitspeter (talk) 21:20, 6 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
That, about the crucial definition, is a very good point. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:24, 6 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Wording of sentence

I would like to support this guideline but can't due to this sentence. While I agree with what I think is meant by the sentence, I feel that it promotes original research, weasel words, POV issues in articles and also can't be used for a guideline as the wording "must" would mean this should be submitted as a policy, not a guideline.

I suggest changing this sentence

Although significant-minority views are welcome in Wikipedia, such views must always be described as such and presented in the context of their acceptance by experts in the field.

To this

Although significant-minority views are welcome in Wikipedia, such views should be accorded appropriate weight, and described and presented in the context of their acceptance by experts in the field.

Thoughts?

P.S. For the suspicious amongst us. :) Declaration of interest. None declared. I edit medical articles, governed by MEDRS, so this guideline will not affect my editing. :)--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 18:25, 27 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It seems like the major issue is changing "must be" to "should be" - is that correct? I don't have a problem with either wording - in fact, "should" is probably preferable to "must" for the reasons that Literaturegeek outlined. MastCell Talk 18:40, 27 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Yes that is the main issue, but also the "always be described as such" is an issue to me as it promotes original research and the "always" is policy type language. Wikipedians don't and can't describe the significance of research as this is original research (not to mention the POV wikilawyering content disputes it would envoke). Only our sources describe the signficance of conclusions and scientific viewpoints, per WP:NOR. Basically I can't support a guideline which appears to contradict one of the 5 pillars, WP:NOR.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 19:34, 27 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I made a few tweaks along these lines - see what you think. Exhorting editors to follow the sources for both the raw information and the weighting of it rather than our own intuition or prejudices I think is a major point of this guideline - anywhere you find language that may be interpreted otherwise, please clarify it. - 2/0 (cont.) 13:19, 5 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Looks good to me. :) Thanks.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 09:05, 6 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

When to use, and when not

I've been thinking about the idea of proposing this page as a guideline, and trying to put my finger on something that has made me uncomfortable about doing so. I'm coming at this as someone who has been a professional academic scientist in real life, and who is very receptive to making sure Wikipedia uses high quality sourcing, but who, at the same time, can easily see both sides in the current on-wiki controversy about climate change. I think this page needs to do a better job of delineating when scientific sources are, and are not, the proper sources to use on Wikipedia. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure that it will fail to achieve consensus, out of concerns that it will be used to game content disputes.

I've pulled out these three passages from existing science-related pages, to show how sourcing needs vary with the content that is being sourced:

  • From Parkinson's disease: "L-DOPA is transformed into dopamine in the dopaminergic neurons by dopa-decarboxylase."
  • From Autism: "Parents may first become aware of autistic symptoms in their child around the time of a routine vaccination, and this has given rise to theories that vaccines or their preservatives cause autism. Although these theories lack convincing scientific evidence and are biologically implausible, parental concern about autism has led to lower rates of childhood immunizations and higher likelihood of measles outbreaks."
  • From (gasp!) Climatic Research Unit email controversy: "The scientific consensus that "global warming is happening and that it is induced by human activity" was found unchallenged by the emails, and there was "no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit.""

The first (despite a bit too much alliteration) is making an unambiguously factual scientific statement, for which scientific sources are clearly appropriate. The second, summarizing scientific consensus in an area where there is a well-established scientific consensus, and where there are serious medical consequences to what we, at Wikipedia, do or do not say to our readers, is also clearly scientific, but nowhere near as clear-cut as the first, and deals with a subject where there is also a notable fringe view. The third, well... sits at the controversial interface between science and broader public issues.

It's not going to be easy, but I think this page needs to better differentiate amongst these sourcing needs, if it is to be accepted by the community. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:28, 2 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

To be clear, the scientific consensus on climate change is as strong, if not much stronger, than the scientific consensus that vaccines do not cause autism. The difference is that the media has lately done a somewhat better job of conveying the scientific consensus on vaccines, and has increasingly declined to give "equal time" to vaccine critics. As to your question about the CRU, it would seem to me that if we're discussing the scientific validity of specific findings, then scientific sources are the best place to look (in this case, the text seems to be quoting one of the outside reviews of the CRU emails). The scientific reviews occasioned by the CRU document leak were also covered extensively in the press, so we could probably use that coverage as well. If we're discussing the political impact of the CRU document leak, then there's room for both scientific sources and good-quality press sources. MastCell Talk 22:48, 2 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Gasp again: I didn't start this thread in order to have yet another page to argue about climate change. That's not the point, please. But at least I agree with your points about multiple kinds of sourcing being appropriate to that kind of material, and I want to draw attention to how that contrasts with dopa-decarboxylase, and to note the potential importance of not misleading readers into failing to vaccinate their children, without getting into an argument about the relative strengths of scientific consensuses for climate change versus autism and vaccines. Believe me, if we don't deal with this here, it will come up when the page is proposed more widely, as this first response to my post amply shows. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:57, 2 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
No, I don't want to have an argument about climate change either - it just seemed that of the three examples you mentioned, the CRU was the only one that presented much of a gray area. I guess my initial point was that the weight of scientific opinion on a topic is not consistently conveyed in popular-press coverage.

If you go back a few years, the autism articles used to be a hotbed of low-quality, agenda-driven editing. They've calmed down and improved in quality greatly since then - in part due to the heroic efforts of editors like Eubulides (talk · contribs), but also because the popular press no longer caters to the vaccines-cause-autism lobby the way it did a few years ago. It was a lot harder to write good-quality, neutral, encyclopedic material on autism when the popular press was committed to depicting Andrew Wakefield as a heroic Galilean martyr at the altar of scientific orthodoxy. It's easier to write good-quality, informative material on autism now, but the challenges have moved on to other areas.

I guess I'm mostly agreeing with you - the guideline needs to provide some suggestions on integrating popular-press/sociopolitical coverage and sourcing with expert scientific opinion and scientific sourcing, or it won't be very useful. On the other hand, we can't prescribe a rigid formula for balancing the two sources - the most we can do is come up with some general guidance and appeal to common sense. MastCell Talk 17:05, 5 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for that, my gasp is retracted! Yes, I think we do largely agree, and I want to point out that, of course, there is nothing particularly special about the three examples I tried to use to illustrate what I was saying. But what I do think is very important here is that we need to do more than appeal to common sense. (What, Wikipedians practicing common sense? Impossible!) You are right that we won't be able to prescribe a rigid formula, but I think we either need to provide some guidance about how to use scientific sources along with other-than-scientific ones, or the community will see the proposal as something that has an ulterior motive. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:56, 5 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I invoke WP:TENFOOTPOLE on your third example, but agree that this proposed guideline should not be used to exclude or marginalize well-sourced social or historical aspects of articles (this is intended to be supplemental to WP:IRS and WP:V, not WP:DUE). The second paragraph of the lead section already touches on the demarcation problem, and could probably be expanded to note something along these lines. I am a little worried that nobody will read a bloated guideline (currently 38 kB to 35 for WP:MEDRS); some of the points can probably be made more concisely without sacrificing accuracy); it is possible that delineating when this page's advice is relevant can be done by tweaking the text in #Definitions in addition to or instead of the proposed text below.
To reminisce about the incident that first spurred me that we need something like this page, about a year ago the popular press and much of the science journalism press completely mangled reporting the results of a Science paper on magnetic monopoles (see: Talk:Magnetic monopole#recent monopole 'discovery'). In such a case, a quality encyclopedia has to ignore the chaff, instead reporting the research itself. It is a fine line to walk between giving general advice on how to search for and identify reliable sources for this context without encouraging original research.
Proposed text for second paragraph of the lead section:

No source is universally reliable. Each source must be carefully weighed in the context of an article to judge whether it is reliable for the statement being made and is the best such source. This guideline provides advice for finding and identifying sources reliable for statements made about current or historical research in the natural sciences and closely related fields. It does not cover reliability in context of the social sciences, biographical detail, social or political impact or controversy, or related topics that are sometimes appropriately covered in natural science articles.

This may be overly restrictive, but does it look like a step in the right direction? - 2/0 (cont.) 05:44, 9 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, it does, as do the other edits you have made. I think that what you wrote about not using non-science sources to determine scientific consensus is particularly helpful. (Only ten feet?) --Tryptofish (talk) 18:33, 9 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Towards consensus acceptance of the guideline, lets discuss

Ok, I have tried to resolve all issues. Please speak now or for ever hold your silence. :) Raise your concerns, support and objections below.

Issue 1 raised by Tryptofish.

Unresolved

I have made some edits to the guideline to try and resolve everyone's concerns raised during this RfC with the view of gaining a consensus. Tryptofish, raised concerns about monographs being used as sources early in the RfC. Wording was changed to try and resolve his concerns but did not mention monographs, I have changed the book section to specifically address this concern. The previous wording was when chosing a book to consider if it was well received in scientific circles but there are thousands upon thousands of sources for most academic field and very very few sources will it be able to determine how a source is received. Perhaps what was meant was how a viewpoint in the source was received. I have added in content regarding this. Please review the book section.Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources_(science-related_articles)#Books Tryptofish also raised other general concerns which I think I have at least partly addressed with my edits. Please review to see if issues are resolved to a satisfactory level.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 08:35, 6 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think that the edits you made about books/monographs were very good, and addressed my concern very well. Thanks! About my broader concern, discussed by me and MastCell just above, I'd like more time to think about and probably revise further about this. --Tryptofish (talk) 15:23, 6 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
You are very welcome. :)--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 20:48, 6 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm skeptical of discounting monographs - see diff of the updated language, which attempts to call monographs primary sources. Do we have an example of monographs which are problematic? Monographs are simply scholarly books for which the intended audience is other scientists/professionals rather than students, and Google Books supports this as well as a dictionary. These are high-quality sources which are in general fairly similar to narrative review articles. I also have an issue with calling secondary sources "primary" because "they seem primary". If the author is a step removed from the original presentation of the idea/research, then the source is secondary. And really, what reviews are not from single "research groups"? Many university textbooks and narrative reviews are written by single authors. At RS/N a little while ago I discussed the cost-benefits of secondary versus primary sources. These cost-benefits are dependent upon the extent of the discussion in the secondary source, not whether the secondary source is titled "original research", "review", "monograph", or "textbook". II | (t - c) 19:14, 13 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I'm going to have to give you an answer that would violate OR if it were in article space instead of here in a discussion amongst editors. Please think of it this way: it's pretty well accepted at Wikipedia that if someone creates a Facebook page or something of that sort, saying how wonderful and notable they are, we at Wikipedia do not accept that as a secondary source that establishes notability. We take note of whether a source is intellectually independent of its subject. Here, on this page, I'm pretty sure we would agree that a similar consideration comes into play with respect to citing a lab's web site as a source.
I'm saying, from a lot of personal experience, that academia is full of examples where scientists who want to burnish their professional credentials write monographs that play up the importance of their own work and disregard the work of their competitors, get them "reviewed" by one of their friends, and a publisher publishes it. Generally, review articles in high quality journals are reviewed more substantively before they are accepted for publication (but there can be gamesmanship there too), but I've personally seen this happen a lot with monograph-style books. And I've seen it happen in areas where the author advocates a minority viewpoint that is contrary to the scientific consensus. Their review gets rejected by a rigorously reviewed journal, so they publish it this way.
Now, please understand, I'm not saying that this is true of all monographs, just some. Deciding how to reliably source the scientific literature for a general, non-professional, audience requires some sophistication in judging whether something that is published has actually been accepted by independent researchers. If you look at my diff to which you link, the conclusion drawn is simply that, when using such sources, editors should make the effort to look at a variety of the literature and make sure the source is representative, rather than taking it on faith that it is. I think that's reasonable. I've looked at your Google Books and dictionary links, and find them completely unconvincing. Your own diff argues that there are places where primary sources are appropriate, and may be more appropriate than secondary ones, and that's a different issue than this one. I'm fully aware as I write this that other editors can in good faith be wondering "should we write this guideline this way because Tryptofish says so?" And I wish I had a better answer to that. Maybe we lack the capacity to make this proposed guideline able to distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources. If so, the proposal may need to be rejected as doing more harm than good. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:57, 13 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I have no problem with original research on talk pages of any sort - it is an integral part of editorial work. In this case we're doing something original to Wikipedia, so we can use "original research" right in the policy page. But that original research needs to be based on some data. Your point would be much more powerful if you could come up with some illustrative examples or some published discussion of the issue - there are meta journals which discuss this sort of thing as well as the field of sociology of scientific knowledge, although you are probably aware that generally such discussion makes scientists very uncomfortable, and you could maybe try hitting up DGG.
I can come up with plenty of illustrative examples of monographs which look like just basic scholarship. I'll admit that in most of these cases I won't have the intimate knowledge to tease out subtle promotional content. However, I can't see us allowing a blanket "unreliable" removal of monographs or categorizing them as primary sources. The issue of monograph authors not reviewing their own work appropriately is best addressed systematically by acknowledging that when a review/book author discusses their own work, they are not secondary sources - when we say we want a secondary source, we mean someone independent of the original presenter, who can therefore (on average) comment more critically. Such secondary commentary can occur in any type of publication; review articles are on average superior secondary sources, but not always. To jump back to my main point: since monograph is often used (arguably correctly) as a synonym for scientific book, saying that these are primary sources or somewhat unreliable ("Monographs by single authors or single laboratory groups are often best regarded as primary sources, as they may not reflect the views of other experts") is inconsistent with the preceding part of the paragraph and awfully confusing - as I mentioned earlier, how many books are written by more than one laboratory group? II | (t - c) 05:16, 16 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. As for data, I'm uncomfortable about giving examples, per WP:BLP—I'd basically be saying so-and-so is a bad scientist. The (current) wording in question is:
"Monographs by single authors or single laboratory groups are often best regarded as primary sources, as they may not reflect the views of other experts. If monographs are used as sources they should therefore be accorded appropriate weight and checked against prevailing viewpoints in the relevant field."
I don't really think that this wording is as bad as "a blanket 'unreliable' removal of monographs or categorizing them as primary sources". But I think that you make a very good point about whether or not the source is discussing their own work. It would be a good idea to improve upon the wording I just quoted, by framing it in terms of sources discussing the author's own work. Let's look at how we might do that. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:46, 16 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Issue 2 raised by MastCell

Unresolved

MastCell raised concerns over over-draconian language of guideline regarding primary sources and concerns that the guideline could be misused by good faithed editors to delete facts cited to appropriately to primary sources or otherwise have a negative effect on the encyclopedia. I agreed and made some changes. Please review this section, Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources_(science-related_articles)#Definitions and see if this issue has been resolved or if other areas of the article need improved wording etc.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 08:35, 6 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I merged everything except the actual definitions out of #Definitions. The relevant material is now at #Respect secondary sources. If I have worsened the presentation or brought back material that is less than ideal, by all means revert or fix it. - 2/0 (cont.) 08:29, 9 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Issue 3 raised by Collect and Cla68

Unresolved

Collect raised concerns that this guideline was part of a POV battle to insert WP:SPOV. Similarly Cla68 raised concerns about this guideline's wording being used to exclude for example investigative journalism and books by non-scientists. I don't agree with Collect's specific points as I feel that scientific articles should be sourced preferentially to the best quality scientific sources. Newspapers and other non-scientific sources are generally inappropriate for discussing matters of science. However, although I think Cla68 misinterpreted the guideline (in that it is not a ban on social and political and non-scientific controversies), I do share some of the concerns on the points raised by Cla68 that this guideline could be misused to eliminate significant social, legalistics (eg court cases) and political controversies from articles and I improved wording to make it clear that non-scientific aspects of a scientific article can be included in an appropriate article section, eg "controversies", "social and economic" sections etc. What we need to aim to do is to avoid is this guideline being misused to promote the universal truth of science but equally we need to avoid the problem of inappropriate sources being used to promote dubious scientific viewpoints (often referred to as pseudoscience) via inappropriate sourcing when discussing scientific facts. We will never reach a state of perfection through such a guideline but please review this section to see if the changes have helped resolve these issues.Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources_(science-related_articles)#Use_up-to-date_evidence A further point is that I think what is needed is a scientific "manual of style" guideline, for example on medical articles manual of style guideline we have clearly stated that articles should have sections on social and economic aspects of say a drug or disease. With the manual of style for medical article, a POV pusher could not say delete article sections of say a court case against a drug company being fined billions or investigative journalists or politicians raising concerns about fraudulent research for being "not scientific". Equally a POV pusher on medical articles could not use newspaper sources to debunk medically sourced established medical facts.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 08:35, 6 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

To a large degree, the concern I raised about when to use scientific sources and when not to use them is intended to address these concerns raised by Collect and Cla. If we don't address these very thoughtfully, I can just about guarantee that these issues will arise even more prominently when the larger editing community scrutinizes this proposal. --Tryptofish (talk) 15:23, 6 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
True, but equally we have to be cautious that the guideline does not lead to unintended consequences of the promotion of fringe theories. The only other idea worth considering that I have is having a section in the guideline about article sections covering non-scientific aspects of science, eg political, social, economic, controversies, carefully word it (citing WP:RS, WP:NPOV, WP:UNDUE). Remember any guideline or policy can be abused. I am sure you have seen NPOV or UNDUE being cited during content disputes to eliminate significant minority viewpoints and conversely I imagine you have seen these guidelines being misused to insert and/or give undue weight to fringe theories.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 20:45, 6 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not arguing for it to be easy to promote fringe theories, quite the opposite. But I'm arguing for clear language (not easy, or I would already have done it myself!) to address the complaints that will come, both from those who favor fringe theories, and from those editors who in very good faith and for very good reasons want to make sure we don't suppress views from beyond the scientific community. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:57, 6 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, thanks for clarifying. Yourself, Cla68 and collect or anyone for that matter need to point what language of the guideline remains problematic.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 21:26, 6 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
My objection will have to stand, and I'll give an example why. As the recent Climategate incident indicated, paleoclimatology, or, at least, much of its research and conclusions, remains a controversial discipline. The use of tree ring histories as ancient temperature proxies, in particular, appears to be far from settled science. Not all of the debate over the credibility and issues over the use of tree rings is discussed in academic or peer-reviewed sources. For example, after MM03 criticized MBH98, which produced the hockey stick graph, Nature invited both sides to submit a follow up rebuttal to each other's papers. The journal ultimately elected not to publish either rebuttal. Although the two sides published their rebuttals on their blogs, RealClimate and Climate Audit, these are self-published sources and therefore problematic. Fortunately for us, there is a book which documents the unpublished debate, and that is the book, The Hockey Stick Illusion. This book is not a scientific textbook, it was written by a science textbook reviewer and accountant who self-taught himself on the paleoclimatic research related to the hockey stick graph. Again, by trying to narrowly define what type of literature we can use in science articles, we are going to cause more problems than we solve. Cla68 (talk) 14:31, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for your view. For an area (medicine) which has a similar guideline (WP:MEDRS) if such a controversy existed it would still not go in the medical science sections, but rather it would go into an article section called "controversy" or perhaps the "history" section of an article. I think that (as I outlined in my submission to ArbCom) the problem is that there are opposing editors who are POV pushing of the truth which has led to those articles to degenerate into a battleground. On other articles subject matters, such things are usually resolved fairly quickly, by following, WP:RS, WP:UNDUE and WP:NPOV. I do not believe a guideline can resolve the issues on climate related articles and that ArbCom intervention is necessary as they are behavioural. With that said, I do think that there should be a section in this guideline which covers non-scientific content article sections such as controversy, social, economic and politic content and a manual of style guideline for science articles, similar to WP:MEDMOS would be of value.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 10:16, 11 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

We should all take a careful look at the recent edits. I'm not sure that we will really have consensus for deleting everything that was deleted. I have an open mind about this, and that's why I've been pushing all along for us to deal with these issues now, so that does not mean that I, personally, object to all or most of the deletions. But I wouldn't want to see us get into revert wars over it. --Tryptofish (talk) 13:55, 24 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Revert wars are underway it appears. :-O--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 18:33, 24 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
It seems that this objection is based on a view that scientists are often wrong and neutrality requires that their views be balanced with those of sceptics from outside the scientific community. Of course many scientific orthodoxies have been overturned: there is no ether, Piltdown man was a hoax and a comet did hit the earth 65 million years ago. But most fringe theories never gain acceptance. We cannot second guess the best opinion on scientific subjects. People who read articles about scientific topics want to read what they would find in textbooks, not alternative theories. There are of course articles in WP describing fringe theories and of course people can always find websites promoting them if that is what they wish. TFD (talk) 19:57, 24 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Issue 4 raised by II

Unresolved

ImperfectlyInformed raised concerns about wording on "few research groups" pointing out that often only a few research groups conduct research, which is true and I agree that it could have an adverse impact on our articles and could be misused by editors to POV push to keep content out of articles. Please review this article section.Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources_(science-related_articles)#Summarize_scientific_consensus--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 08:36, 6 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I still have some issues with this section. For example, this sentence: "Scientific consensus can be found in e.g. recent, authoritative review articles, high quality journal articles, or widely used textbooks". I've read a few reviews/articles/textbooks and I'm biased to the medical/toxicological (and in the social sciences, finance and economics) perspective. In these areas, it is not my impression that reviews and books regularly use the word "consensus", nor am I sure that they want their readers to come away with a consensus view. I thought that the point behind WP:RS/AC is that we don't call basic scientific findings "consensus" and we don't generally collect a few articles saying the same thing and say that this means consensus. Most scientific facts don't need consensus. The scientific areas where the word "consensus" starts getting thrown around tend to be the ones which are political and somewhat uncertain. Many scientific facts are either so uncertain or so esoteric that there is no consensus except partial agreement among the five-six scientists working in the area, which is not really something they'd call consensus. Anyway, there's a lot of talk about consensus and I think it's confusing. There's also no impression on how to assess this so-called consensus. II | (t - c) 08:15, 11 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for view. I think what the consensus section of the guideline is trying to do is to say is give most weight to the dominant view of scientific literature and less weight to minority viewpoints weighted against their prominance in a given field or area of a field. The only solution that I can think of is that that section is merged with other sections in the guideline and consensus reworded into terms of "dominant" and "minority". This would, pardon the pun, require consensus of other editors here. :)--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 10:40, 11 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
WP:MEDRS has a section on scientific consensus which has been part of the guideline for a long time without causing any problems or controversies among editors.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 18:32, 24 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Issue 5 raised by Heyitspeter

Unresolved

Heyitspeter raised concerns that the guideline does not define what "science-related" means. Defining this may help resolve some of the remaining issues raised by other editors. I think that it should be defined as scientific content in science related articles of which (scientific content) will naturally be the bulk or entire content of most if not all scientific articles). Criticisms, controversies, legal, socio-economic, politic issues and other non-scientific content issues, when notable can be added to a non-science related section towards the bottom of the article (we still need a science related manual of style guideline, similar to WP:MEDMOS), following the existing guidelines and policies such as WP:UNDUE, WP:NPOV and for sourcing WP:RS. Wording will need to be carefully constructed to make the less likely to be misused to give undue weight to notable minority viewpoints or conversely we have to be careful that the wording is not easily misused to suppress notable minority content.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 21:36, 6 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think that this is largely the same issue that is being discussed at #When to use, and when not. - 2/0 (cont.) 03:52, 7 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, that's right, it is. I do think that Peter summed it up in an important way by noting the lack of a definition of "science-related". --Tryptofish (talk) 16:58, 7 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Scope of the page

I have added a section entitled "Scope" to this page. I believe that this page is meant to apply more to climate change more than it is to apply to Climatic Research Unit email controversy, more to evolution than Kitzmiller v. Dover, and more to superconductor than to Schön scandal. However, the page as it stands does not make it very clear if that is the case. Therefore, how should #Scope be worded to clarify that point? NW (Talk) 14:48, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Err, I suppose it would help if I read the rest of the page before posting this. I think that a section about the scope of this page would be helpful nonetheless. NW (Talk) 14:49, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I proposed a scope. Cardamon (talk) 23:27, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I moved it to the introduction with some text from #When to use, and when not. Feel free to move and improve it back if this works better as a separate section. - 2/0 (cont.) 19:31, 20 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Editors may wish to take a look at this discussion, which is about the use of paywalled sources. NW (Talk) 02:59, 21 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

A bad precedent to set

I have serious concerns about the propriety carving out a separate sourcing guideline to deal with any one topic. It sets a very bad precedent. This will end up with every topic area defining its own sourcing guideline... which in turn will result in conflicts and disputes (especially in topics that fall within two areas). We could easily justify a separate WP:IRS (history-related articles)... which definitely would be different from the guidelines spelled out here. Yet we have articles like History of science that could be classified under both topic areas. So which guideline would we follow?

The idea here is well intended... but I think it will cause more problems than it solves. Blueboar (talk) 17:49, 24 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You do know that WP:MEDRS already exists, right? NW (Talk) 18:05, 24 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
My thoughts are the same as Blueboar's, plus a couple more. One is the ambiguous relationship between a specialized guideline and a general policy. Is the specialized one intended to override the general one, vs. set up a condition where a source must meet both of them, vs a condition where a source would have to only meet one of them. ? A second thought is the general theme of making these more restrictive then the general policy. While that might be good for certain cases that someone might have in mind (e.g. a contested technical topic) such would be not good for others (e.g. knocking out a source on an undisputed more basic topic. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 18:13, 24 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
History of science would not fall under this guideline in my view but rather WP:RS as it is not discussing science per se but history of science, thus it is historical rather than scientific even though it is about science. Policy such as NPOV for example, always trumps guidelines. Guidelines are intended to supplement but not replace policies.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 18:29, 24 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
This "policy trumps guidelines" meme is not actually true. Editors must use their best judgment to determine which advice to apply in a given situation. There should not be any direct conflicts between policies and guidelines, and any such conflicts should be resolved, not "trumped".
IMO this page provides information and encourages editors to choose higher-quality sources for scientific facts. It provides further information (e.g., that newspapers aren't infallible, that old sources may be out of date) without conflicting with any content policy. It explicitly says that history, social impact, etc. are not scientific information. Surely editors commenting here, if given a choice, would prefer to source basic scientific facts (e.g., the temperature at which water boils, the distance from the Earth to the sun) to a science textbook or a good secondary source in a peer-reviewed journal than to a local newspaper or a random website. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:20, 24 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I've been wondering whether merging this into WP:MEDRS might not be a bad idea. Much of the information is necessarily the same. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:39, 24 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]