This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
WP:RSP is a useful tool in the right contexts, and can make it easy to separate the chaff from the wheat when trying to figure out how much stock to put in a source that is used consistently throughout wikipedia. However, RSP is not a perfect system, and it is not an infallible gospel on what sources can or cannot be used. Sometimes a source that has been found through consensus to be generally unreliable is reporting on something trivial or self-evidently factual. Other times, a source that is generally reliable makes a mistake in reporting, or biases in political standing or funding lead to the introduction of fallacious spin to a story or statistic.
Many generally reliable sources that could be trusted in almost all cases have reported false information around historical events in the heat of the moment, such as during the Vietnam War and Iraq War, and some discussions may even reflect a bias towards Western sources, despite having clearly propaganda oriented goals such as in the case of Radio Free Asia (which at the time of this essay being written is considered generally reliable despite questions on accuracy and biases). In such potentially controversial cases, case-by-case analysis of a source is still to be considered important, and should not be wholesale replaced simply because of a general consensus on a source.