Talk:Marquee card

Circular citations?
I'm probably being narcissistic and paranoid, but I sometimes wonder if online communities sometimes get a little too self-referential :) On Jan 9, a reference to marquee cards being "silly and not necessary" is added to the wiki, based on a primary source almost 2 years old. (Full disclosure: added by me, hence the narcissism.) Less than 2 weeks later, an article on marquee cards comes out on Untapped, using that quote, paraphrasing it very much like the wiki did. Then we cite the article, although not for that quote. The quote isn't the point, it just got me thinking.

I'm not sure if the author based any info on the wiki, and if he did that's not a bad thing. Rosewater himself sometimes recommends checking the wiki. But the timing of the update & article makes me reflect on what we consider to be a "source". A wiki is a synthesis of available information and not intended to be original content; many other fan sites ALSO run articles that are similarly just writing up information floating around. The existence of those articles are like wiki pages, they don't actually add any sort of expertise or legitimacy other than that inherited from actual primary or secondary sources. Nobody should cite a wiki directly, they should cite the sources used by the wiki; this is well known. Similarly it seems like a good policy would be that we shouldn't cite articles that are just paraphrasing other, more direct sources. (All the links in the Untapped article are also citations here. Again this is not a criticism - they're exactly the links you would expect in an article about marquee cards, which is why wiki contributors added them.)

This observation does not apply to interviews, which are primary sources, or to journalists' or established critics' commentary on the game (secondary), or to an expert breaking down a complicated interaction or strategy, and so on - all of these have an author or subject with a clear authority to be a direct source of information about the game. But the recent Untapped article is clearly just putting together some pieces found elsewhere; it's not a firsthand account of any of this history it's describing, nor does it pretend to be. So I just wonder if it really adds anything to include pieces like that.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk :P

- jerodast (talk) 08:11, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * So... There are essentially primary sources and secondary sources. WotC, WotC employees, mtg products (cards, books,etc.) are primary sources. Everything else including our very wiki is a secondary source and doesn't hold the same level of authority. A secondary source can be added to the wiki, but I always would mistrust these to a certain degree for the very reason you just laid out. An article without a single primary source is indeed a bit iffy, which is fortunately not the case here.
 * We had a case in that in Germany where someone edited a wikipedia article with wrong information. Some newspaper used the wiki article as a source publishing the wrong information, and later said article was used as a source in the wiki article to proof that the wrong information was indeed correct. The situation was later rectified as the journalist owned up to their mistake. But not only we have that issue. So we should always be aware of our sources. - Yandere-sliver (talk) 14:22, 29 January 2021 (UTC)