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Wikipedia's policy on biographies of living persons[edit]
Hi there. We welcome discussion at Talk:Phil Mason about proposed content additions, but some of your statements there have made accusations against a living person that are not backed up by citations to reliable sources. Reliable sources include, but are not limited to, books, magazines, newspapers, and academic journals. Websites can also be reliable sources, but they must have an editorial board and a history of fact-checking. Self-published sources, such as blogs and YouTube videos, are not reliable sources. Our policy on biographies of living persons applies to the entirety of Wikipedia, including talk pages. This means that we must be very careful about defamation and making unsourced (or poorly sourced) accusations about living people. If you questions about this policy, you are welcome to ask them at the Wikipedia help desk (a forum for technical questions about editing Wikipedia) or the tea house (a forum for new users). You may also wish to read through our core content policies, a concise description of our most basic rules. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 00:13, 28 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@NinjaRobotPirate: Yeah, I didn't realize that a person's own youtube videos with their own statements weren't a reasonable source for their own biography. My mistake. An article somewhere else discussing those videos would be, though? That seems very backwards. However, even if Wikipedia doesn't accept it as a source, it stills seems a bit inaccurate to call it an "accusation" when it's literally his own works. Outside of Wikipedia's sourcing requirements, we'd hardly consider linking to his own videos as being "poorly sourced" :-/
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and, as such, it is built on what published professionals and academics have to say on a topic. If they have nothing to say, then we have nothing to say. Their work is presumably fact-checked and backed up by putting their professional reputation at stake. Their editor has also presumably disallowed them from writing about unimportant topics. If we reported every single instance of drama on YouTube, our articles would be unreadably long. There are other wikis that do allow this sort of thing, such as RationalWiki. Wikipedia is a bit more bureaucratic and formal. It's not so bad once you get used to it, but it can take a while. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 04:47, 28 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I get that, but primary sources are generally more reliable than secondary sources, especially when we consider the major fact-checking goof-ups that seem commonplace these days (potentially related to the speed of news being so important). Also, the Internet means that even niche areas have sources that Wikipedia finds acceptable, meaning that things don't necessarily have to be very culturally relevant to be referenced here. Prominent content generators have far larger audiences than many of these publications, so Wikipedia's specific interest in culturally notable content isn't necessarily served best by these rules anymore, I think.
