> I personally agree with that, as I do not believe that the notability requirement is leading to increased article trustworthiness.

> Interesting idea, and I'd like to hear more of this idea! However, from this I suspect you are mixing up the reliability of an article and the specific phrase "notability" (about how deserving a topic is to have an article). When deciding if an article is notable it will usually have little or no history!

The reason I am "mixing this up" is that the only argument I have ever heard for why Wikipedia needs a notability policy at all is the one that was cited by britta earlier in this thread: that without such a clause there would be tons of articles that are hardly ever looked at by anyone, hardly ever edited by anyone, and containing information that is difficult to verify. I believe that there are numerous better solutions to this than attempting to use the "notability" filter, as I maintain that "notability" does not actually lead to "veracity".

To be very clear about this, I will repeat the context from britta that started my involvement in this discussion:

>> The notability guideline (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability) is closely related to the verifiability policy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability) — from Wikipedia's perspective, if a subject has not been covered by multiple reasonably reliable secondary sources (in other words, if it isn't "notable"), we can't write a reasonably verifiable article about that subject. Every article has to include secondary sources as references, so that editors and readers can quickly fact-check.

Going back to your response:

> Its difficult because we simply do not know where NYT got that info: if Diggnation showed them some real figures (say, a screenshot) then the NYT article is better than a tweet!

I must apologize here, as I was intending to be using a different example, but you took me to mean the Diggnation example: this is my fault, I should have been more clear.

What was coming to mind with relation to the "Twitter post" example, is that there is a ton of journalism on topics I directly care about that is based on the Twitter feeds of people I work with: a lot of "person X said Y", which is then translated into some article on what is or is not possible with a tool that person X builds. The fact that a reporter read that statement and repeated it doesn't make it more true, and in fact the opposite is quite common: they are paying sufficiently little attention and have sufficiently little background knowledge that they repeat it wrong.

Please understand: I am not talking about a situation of "interpretation" or "research", but more like establishing dates on when things happened... I understand that this feels pretty blurry (but it seems equally silly to go into a detailed example of something where my example is itself biased; I am happier sticking with the examples such as Diggnation and RSA); it is simply a situation where "that dude at Wired that finds this stuff gets him readers" is not somehow more trustworthy than the place he got the information from... either the information shouldn't be published at all (I believe this is probably a quite reasonable course of action), or "that dude at Wired" should be skipped and the original source should be used.

That said, part of your comment doesn't rely on that misunderstanding I caused: it is true that we don't know where the NYT got that information, however that uncertainty really doesn't make it any more true; while it means there is some possibility that the information was gathered in a way that we should indirectly trust, as we can't see it we can't verify it, and it is honestly not in any way better than if some random person on Wikipedia just asserted it to us... reporters for major publications (such as the New York Times and Washington Post, both of which I have first-party experience with due to articles written about my work) really do trust that you are a reliable source on things that you control, and really do attempt to fact check by calling you back for verification.