Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2018 July 26

Welcome to the Wikipedia Miscellaneous Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

July 26

Verifying book sources

When you review new pages, you often come along entries, that use books a sources e.g. K. O. Aysha Bai. How do you verify whether the article really cites these books? Could it not be that some authors make facts up, that are not included in the book? How do you verify that the content is really from the book? Thanks Stephreef (talk) 12:15, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

At a basic level, you can WP:AGF. However, the entire point of those references is to allow others to check that the information has been used properly/correctly. The way to do that is to read the sources yourself. If you find something you suspect is wrong or incorrectly added, you are encouraged to be WP:BOLD and do what you can to fix the article. Sometimes that means removing un-referenced or poorly referenced information. Sometimes hard-copy books get cited in articles because the user in unaware of online versions or previews in Google Books, in which case, you can sometimes verify the statements without leaving your chair. Matt Deres (talk) 13:14, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

But, the more important point is don't remove a book source just because you can't find it online. Knowledge does exist outside of the Internet, and no preference is given to books or online sources. If an online source does exist, then a "courtesy link" may be useful, but the lack of online presence has no bearing on a sources reliability. If you have genuine questions about the reliability of the source, raise a discussion on the talk page. References allow sources to be found. They are not required to allow sources to be found in three seconds. --Jayron32 15:08, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

You go to a library. If it's an obscure book, a university library may be more helpful.

Remember part of the point of Wikipedia is to take knowledge that is in books, and put it on the Internet. To do that, editors sometimes have to do legwork.

ApLundell (talk) 17:22, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

If the editor is an active participant you can ask, though you won't always get an answer, for a larger expanse of text from the source including the most relevant wording. I think the main reason for this is because you want to see if the paraphrasing used in the article is a reasonable representation of what the source is saying in the context in which it is saying it. This does involve an inconvenience for the editor who has to type this stuff up so one should express understanding of this. But a refusal to comply to any extent tends to raise red flags for me. If others disagree with this I should say that I have not found this in policy/guidelines but I think it is reasonable. Bus stop (talk) 19:40, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

Yeah lots of times I've looked in a book for something cited in a wiki article, usually because I want to find out more about the subject rather than because I think the wiki editor might be making stuff up. Everything so far has checked out: there's occasional minor errors but I haven't hit any actual fake citations that way. I'm sure they do exist, but they are rare. I wouldn't worry about it too much unless you're actually suspicious of some specific citation. If you can't easily get hold of the book, you could ask at WP:RX if someone can access a copy. 173.228.123.166 (talk) 07:59, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

Fairly recently I found a statement on Wikipedia which was the exact opposite of what the cited source said. I suspect it was an honest misunderstanding though, as the source was rather poorly written. I was able to double check with the source used by the source (if you see what I mean). DuncanHill (talk) 22:47, 28 July 2018 (UTC)