User talk:ASK472k

Welcome.[edit]

Hello, ASK472k, and welcome to Wikipedia. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question and then place {{helpme}} after the question on your talk page. -- Jeandré (talk), 2010-08-09t00:00z

Reliable sources.[edit]

Re [1]

http://twitter.com/mvtweets doesn't qualify under Wikipedia's reliable sources requirements - we'll need something like an article from the New York Times. -- Jeandré (talk), 2010-08-09t00:00z

Reply.

If a news source shows itself to be reliable with a history of fact checking and good editorial practices, it could become an acceptable source for Wikipedia, but the problem with social media sources is that they are often not attributed to a specific person or the information is provided by several unknown people. For this reason Wikipedia itself is not a reliable enough source for Wikipedia articles.

Real-time information is not Wikipedia's goal - we are a tertiary source, summarising mostly secondary sources. (There is another project by the foundation called Wikinews that allows originally researched news reports.)

In the first few years of Wikipedia no references were required, but as the site grew more people tried to spam it with their garage bands and pet physics theories. Because of this Wikipedia developed the No original research and Verifiability policies; which along with Neutral point of view are now the 3 most important rules for the site.

Of special interest are articles containing biographical information about living people, or people who have recently died. Because of all the negative results unsourced edits to such articles have caused on the site, we created the Biographies of living persons policy, which requires very strict referencing for such articles. Good faith is not enough for articles with biographical information.

If you want to discuss this further by email, you can send a message to info-en <AT> wikimedia <DOT> org with "[Ticket#2010080810010191]" in the subject.

As for information from the "horse's mouth", we've had problems with that too, and created the Autobiography policy, asking for 3rd party vetted sources instead. -- Jeandré (talk), 2010-08-09t10:08z