Wikipedia talk:Identifying and using self-published works

Re-org

I just did a pretty big re-org of this article, but changed no meaning (I think). The old version had many redundancies, and the points jumped around quite a bit. I tried to put all the relevant info in the right places. MichaelBluejay (talk) 03:34, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I looked through your changes, and I think you improved the page. Thanks, WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:25, 20 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Publisher as employer

About this passage: If the author works for a company, and the publisher is the employer, and the author's job is to produce the work (e.g., sales materials or a corporate website), then the author and publisher are the same. Isn't this also true of news organisations? If the author is a staff writer for The New York Times, the NYT is their employer and also their publisher, and it's the author's job to produce the articles for them. There's probably a good way of phrasing this that highlights the difference between this scenario and sales materials etc., but I can't think of it right at the moment. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 02:56, 25 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

experts in the relevant field

Self-published sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established expert on the topic of the article whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable third-party publications.[1] Take care when using such sources: if the information in question is really worth reporting, someone else will probably have done so.

This seems rather narrow. What about authors whose work has not been published by reliable third-party publications, but whose self-published work has been cited by reliable third-party publications? It seems rather absurd to say a source is inappropriate when the most respected authorities are citing them. I'm specifically thinking here of Leigh Rayment's website, which is used by Hansard, despite only being published on Rayment's personal website. john k (talk) 16:35, 17 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Government source

If a government body publishes a report written by that body, and puts a copy of that report on its website, is that a self-publishing source? Despite the tendency of some governmental bodies toward propaganda, that seems like a very reliable source, especially if the source is mentioned in the text ("The FBI reports that... [ref FBI website]").

Is it different if the government in question is not universally recognized, like Taiwan? MathEconMajor (talk) 16:44, 19 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]