 | This is an essay on Wikipedia:Reliable sources. 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. |
 | This page in a nutshell: A published expert in one field is not necessarily a reliable source in another field of study. |
Wikipedia's verifiability policy advises considering the "creator of the work" when evaluating a source's reliability. It permits self-published sources written by experts "whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications." However, an expert in field A should not be given weight as an expert when writing in field B. It is not rare for authors to publish scholarship with editorial oversight in their field and then publish fringe theories in other venues.
In his article "Pulp History", Carlo Rotella compared the relationship between pseudohistory and history to the relationship between high fiction and pulp fiction. Rotella highlighted how often academics had abandoned their positions to pursue fringe theories. He proposed that pseudohistory aims to meet the same human need for explanations that true history does, but without the constraints of scholarship that would limit the explanation to verifiable facts. For example, Rotella found Boston's mythic and fictitious Viking past, enshrined in various New England memorials to events that never transpired, to be heavily influenced by Harvard intellectuals like Eben Norton Horsford, who abandoned the constraints of academia to build something closer in spirit to Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age.
[P]ulp history springs from the same source as academic history: the urge to make sense of what happened in the past. Unencumbered by peer review or footnotes or the carping rules of evidence, pulp history is in some ways the purer, more elemental expression of that urge.
— Carlo Rotella (2007)
References
edit- Rotella, Carlo (Summer 2007). "Pulp History" (PDF). Raritan. 27 (1). Rutgers University: 11–36.