Wikipedia talk:Articles with a single source

illustration of the roman senate?

Surely that is rather an odd illustration to pick given the POV reflected in this essay? Isn't a government chamber precisely the sort of place a statement will be judged by the repute of the person making it? If that one person is respected then the statement will be accepted. If not, then it is liable to be rejected. Is that the model you are arguing for on wiki? Sandpiper (talk) 18:09, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Softened claims regarding original research

Interesting essay, hope my changes will help. I softened some claims that unsourced information must be original research. The alternative is that the information exists in reliable sources, but the editor(s) who put that information in the article did not bother citing sources – perhaps out of ignorance of wiki policy or because they believed their edits were so uncontroversial they were unlikely to be challenged. Baileypalblue (talk) 19:55, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

comments

• Reference lists aren't really a stated goal of WP, but they nonetheless are widely reported as one of its primary assets (through which WP is widely used as a jumping board for further research on any topic, esp. in schools & academia), so a single source inherently makes the article or section less useful to readers.

• Maintenance: it is generally much more difficult to verify (since any readers who happen not to have access to that one particular source are left with absolutely no alternative leads to try to corroborate with), and it doesn't help collaborating editors search for further information for improving or expanding WP's coverage of the topic.

• Over-reliance on a single source tends frequently to be a signal indicating that no additional sources exist (and often the first source is already obscure). Such circumstances do lead to the undesirable outcome that the article content alternates between original research and substantially-similar-derivative-of-one-source. Furthermore, the absence of additional independent sources makes it impossible to recognise which are the areas where the first source is incomplete, mistaken, biased, outdated, whatever. It is difficult to imagine that much content satisfying the WP community standards could ever be written on any topic for which multiple sources doesn't exist.

Cesiumfrog (talk) 03:01, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

One author or publisher

Should we not consider that a number of papers by the same author or by the same publisher are functionally a single source? It seems obvious, yet the essay says nothing about it. LeadSongDog come howl! 17:57, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

what about TWO sources...?

This is a long shot, but I don't even know where to begin searching/asking, so maybe some random stranger can help me out.

There's an article that's been bugging me for more than a year. It's got 57 citations in the body. The content is almost entirely relying on two freshman-level texts, 19 cites to one and 13 to the other. Both texts have a co-editor in common. There's a further six sites to a single journal article written by that editor. In sum, he is the source for 38 of the 57 appeals to authority.

Maybe that editor put all that stuff in this article, though that's (hopefully) far-fetched. My gut says there might be plagiarism or at least generalized close paraphrasing. Possibly worse, credit for these insights is likely being given here to a book's editors rather than a paper's authors. But even an old edition of one of these books goes for no less than $46 on Amazon, and I can't locate the content online without a paywall.

1. Is this a "single source" situation, or close enough?
2. Is there a means by which I may dispute the entire article, in hopes someone has access to the source(s)?

Weeb Dingle (talk) 00:17, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

@Weeb Dingle: What article?

And BTW, are you sure you didn't mean "cites" here?:

There's a further six sites to a single journal article ...

--Thnidu (talk) 23:26, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

Single source tag for stubs

I have been contributing my time to expanding stubs that exist in a enormous meshes of interconnected and even interdependent pages, many of which were created years ago as single source stubs, but do not get tagged as single source until this recently year after I make early stage, incomplete expansions. My curiosity became whether single source tags for the particular type of stubs that I have been working on were appropriate. That is, isn't the stub tag sufficient for two-line stubs, especially where the single sources have been accepted as sufficiently notable for each generating hundreds of stubs?

My first impressions of the single source tag was that is was a request for article improvement. But, having just read this policy, it is apparent that the concern is more about notability rather than citation sufficiency. To be more succinct, the application of the single source tag now states to me that the tagging editor is raising the question of the notability of the stub's topic.

Within the scope of stubs I have been working with, a primary single source for generating many stubs is global in scope, but contains many dated or informal classifications; so, many of my first steps on a page is to replace that single source with an authoritative, but regional, single source of current and formal classifications. This action can attract a single source tag.

Most of the time, though, scaring up an independent second source is as easy as a Martian Walker stepping over a ridge to scare up humans, especially when the authoritative single source lists additional authoritative sources. That is probably the way to go, but, it does take time, and there are hundreds (rough estimate) of such articles.

I guess, I am just asking for clarification.

IveGoneAway (talk) 15:50, 27 March 2021 (UTC)