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This information sourced from The Verge is not "supported by independent sources".
Articles should cite sources whenever possible. While we cannot check the accuracy of cited sources, we can check whether they have been published by a reputable publication and whether independent sources have supported them on review. Any unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
@Raymond Keller, "supported by independent sources" means that a portion of our WP article is cited to a reliable, independent source. The portion you removed was cited to The Verge, which is an example of such a reliable, independent source. Per BRD, you're supposed to discuss your proposed change here before reverting my revert. czar♔16:51, 13 August 2014 (UTC)Reply
@Czar, sorry to seem reverty. I should have discussed before making that last change. I'll explain why I didn't think I was revert warring: There were two distinct changes in my original edit. The first was removal of information that I felt was more appropriate to the company's main article— for style. I reverted the portion that I did not believe was being contested. The second change was removal of poorly sourced information. I left this contested portion and applied the dubious template. My mistake to mix the two.
Regarding the contested information, I believe the information was inappropriately sourced. I'm reading the policy regarding "not supported by independent sources" like so:
Articles should cite sources whenever possible. While we cannot check the accuracy of cited sources, we can check whether they have been published by a reputable publication and whether independent sources have supported them on review. Any unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
(Emphasis mine.) The antecedent for "they" and "them" appears to me to be "cited sources", not "cited material". And since the legitimacy of sources is an important and central issue, directly addressed by WP:VERIFIABILITY, I took the above quote from the WP policy regarding verifiability to be speaking to just that, to the legitimacy of sources. Given it means what I think, I might still have made a faux pas — Maybe I should be contesting before removing.
If I'm interpreting policy right, it's okay to contest the material and legitimacy of its source, and have fact checking done to see if the source "[has] been published by a reputable publication and whether independent sources have supported them".
It's fine to contest whether a source got a fact right, but The Verge is already known to be a reliable source with an editorial policy and whatnot. If you have another reliable source that shows that fact to be misrepresented or wrong, we can discuss it that way, but to question The Verge's reliability on Wikipedia as a whole would have to be run by WP:RSN since it affects more than this article. Otherwise, that source is fine as long as it's paraphrased properly. czar♔20:16, 13 August 2014 (UTC)Reply
Oh no, no, no — please don't take me as suggesting that the Verge is an unreliable source. From what I understand, Wikipedia recognizes three kinds of source:
the piece of work itself (the article, book)
the creator of the work (the writer, journalist)
the publisher of the work (for example, Random House or Cambridge University Press)
I'm referring to the article (and perhaps the author by extension), not the publisher. I was hoping that the fact that the particular assertion was not "supported by independent sources upon review" would be considered to invalidate the source article's assertion, as is implied by the above-quoted WP:VER text. Do you disagree? Is an assertion in a source article only invalid if it's contradicted by a different source article?
By our working definition of an independent, secondary source, if we trust The Verge, we trust a claim made within its reporting, yes. Why wouldn't we? Without knowing its context, that portion cited above appears to be about how to determine whether a source is reliable, not the claims within a source. It means that the way that we find whether The Verge is reliable is partly on how other sources trust the outlet's reporting. czar♔02:07, 14 August 2014 (UTC)Reply
Of course trusting a publisher implies trusting an article from that publisher and such an article's claims — what else would it mean to trust a publisher? I'm with you on that. I do want to make sure that we stay clear on the distinction between source meaning publisher and source meaning article. "Source", again, means either of those things (or even author). The above quote, from Wikipedia:List of policies, talks about the validity of an article. Judging the validity of an article involves judging both its publisher (and possibly the particular author) and whether independent sources have supported them. Meaning that the validity of a source article depends not just on source publisher, but also whether other potential source articles support our source article of question.
So the questions are really: What is meant by "support"? And how do we use that in our judgement? I take it to mean generally "agrees with". Clearly, if another article from a reputable publisher contradicts an assertion from our source article of question there's lack of support or even the presence of opposition. If no other article in the world confirms a particular assertion, if there's a lack of confirmation, you could call that a lack of support. That wouldn't, however, I'd say, constitute opposition. The assumption I'd been working under is that this lack of confirmation qualified as a lack of "whether independent sources have supported", as is a criterion in the WP:V analysis. On reflection, this must be wrong.
Looking at it practically, a lack of confirmation would be much too restrictive. There'd be many cases when a reputable publisher published accurate but exclusive information and it wouldn't be usable. Wikipedia would be much poorer for it. So, it doesn't make sense. My assumption had been a bad one.
From the other side, however, if a reputable publisher publishes inaccurate information as an exclusive, Wikipedia can do nothing but republish that false information. I believe that's what's happened in this case; I have information (that can't be used as a Wikipedia source) that opposes a number of assertions in the Verge article. Well, there you have it. Nothing to be done here.
Thanks for taking the time to discuss the matter with me, and civilly.
No problem. You may be interested in this article about how our job is to present the sources and not necessarily to find the truth. On your read of the quoted text about WP:V, I think the common interpretation is that we do not fact-check individual references, though we can decide whether that source generally has a trusted reputation. czar♔01:15, 15 August 2014 (UTC)Reply
Not a problem from me, I was simply undoing a recent spate of edits that had no explanation and didn't seem the right way to go about things to me. -- ferret (talk) 23:34, 26 December 2015 (UTC)Reply
