OK, this isn’t going to keep me up at night, but as a longtime member here I’m accustomed to “Cite?”
Anyway, I removed a comment on a Wikipedia entry, which a subsequent editor replaced. Yes, it had a published source, but the published source did not have a source for the claim aside from the author, admittedly a Grand Poobah on the subject. However, despite his expertise, there’s not any historical corroboration to back it up that I’ve been able to find.
Obviously not going to get into an edit war, but when the ‘source’ trail runs out early with no corroboration, personally I don’t think it should be presented as fact.
But it also could be, “Well, yeah, but that’s just the way Wikipedia works. Forget it, Jake.”
I do only a smidgen of wiki-editting. So consider me a semi-informed amateur, not a pro at this.
IMO …
An edit war is stupid. A factual conversation on the article’s talk page about your motivations and the objective concerns you raise here may get you a lot more allies and get your counterparty to understand what you did, rather than just kneejerk revert it.
Of course if your counter-editor fancies themselves the owner of that topic / page, you’re not getting anywhere without huge support from the rest of the editor community to forcibly oust that person from their self-appointed role.
Were I you, I would launch that talk page conversation and see what happens next. If nothing then your Jake / Chinatown comment is probably the healthiest tack to take.
If there is a published source that supports the topic, then I would disagree with complete deletion. As Wikipedia editors, we’re not supposed to do Original Research, which is what it sounds to me you’re doing: doing further research and concluding that in your opinion the source is not reliable.
However, it is open to us as editors to raise the issue of the strength of the source. That’s why there is a template for just this situation, the “better source needed” tag. It asks if the source is truly reliable. You follow that up with a post on the Talk page, as @LSLGuy suggests, and explain why you have a concern with the existing source. That avoids an edit war but raises the issue for discussion.
And be sure to do it on the Talk page for the article, not the other editor’s Talk page, because you want to make it a discussion of the source issue, not a personal dispute. Oother editors who are following the article then have the chance to take a look at it and possibly chime in.
Fair enough. I had another book on the subject that goes is much better sourced and goes into further detail, so it wasn’t just a plucked from air edit. However, at the time I made the edit, I did not post my citation for the removal, so that’s on me. Pot calling the kettle black, I suppose.
I’ll post something on the talk page first with the info that should have been included in the edit, then sometime later redo it with citations. (But I’m prepared for “Chinatown.”)
I took a look at it. I agree with the reversion of your reversion.
Even if you post your cite, though, that may not be sufficient to eliminate the High cite.
If there are duelling cites that contradict each other, that’s best dealt with by a summary along the lines of “Bloggs says that the situation is X.[cite]. However, Globbs says that the situation is not-X.[cite]”
Again, this flows from the “No Original Research” principle. Wikipedia articles are a summary of the literature in a particular area. If there are conflicts between the sources that cannot be resolved by further cites to existing sources, then the solution is to note the conflict, not try to resolve it.
I was about to post something very close to Northern Piper’s comment. The purpose of Wikipedia is to summarize what reliable sources have said. If you have another source that contradicts the High source, then you should present it and reword the article appropriately to reflect what both sources say. If you think that the High source is NOT reliable, then you can discuss that on the article talk page, or open a discussion at the Reliable Sources Noticeboard, but only if you have good evidence for the source’s unreliability based on other sources. A statement like “I’ve done my own research and can’t corroborate the source’s conclusion” is not going to gain much traction.
Thanks for the input, gang. I’ll revisit the wording at some point. I’ve always been a firm believe in The Sagan Standard and Hitchens’s Razor, but they’re not always practical on Wikipedia.
Hitchins’s Razor is actually a Wikipedia principle: unsourced statements can be deleted. But here, there is a source. Your query isn’t a lack of source, but a disagreement about the quality of the source.
And I don’t think Sagan applies here either. The High cite says that mustard sauce is traceable to German immigrants.
On the face of it, that’s not an extraordinary claim. Mustard is pretty common in Germany, and it’s not extraordinary to think that Herman immigrants brought it with them, and it influenced American cuisine.
Again, I would say your disagreement is the quality of the cited source, not that it’s an extraordinary claim.