Is Fluther a valid source?
My teacher doesn’t think it is from the name.
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46 Answers
No. At least I wouldn’t think so. Seems like fluther is the same as asking a friend for an opinion.
No, it’s not. Primarily because it is contributed, non-validated data. There is no quality control on Fluther other than the comments of others, and those are not always accurate.
You might use Fluther as a link to something else – a more authoritative website – but Fluther is not, itself, any sort of an objective environment.
Even as “finger on the pulse” of peoples’ feelings – this is a self selected group, probably more intelligent and literate than the general population, and therefore not representative of the world at large.
It depends. Sometimes answers are sourced.
A Fluther is a group of jellyfish. It’s a real word.
What if their are like 30 answers all the same?
Response moderated (Writing Standards)
It would not be a considered a legitimate source academically but if links to other sources were provided, they might be valid sources.
If you were sitting around a campfire having a bull session with your buddies having a few drinks, would you quote that as an academic thesis? That’s what fluther is. But it might point you in the direction to look.
Isn’t it like wiki-answers which is valid?
@Rockstar0224 You might be able to if you frame it right. Meaning you are not stating something as a fact, but rather that you polled 30 people on fluther and all 30 gave the same answer? That sort of thing. Depending on if there are no restricitons on how you set up a survey or questionaire. So, it is not so much a source, but a tool in an expirement.
If fluther provided you with good factual information, you should be able to find a valid source with the same information.
Because it is anonymous you can’t really use it as a source. If someone were to step up and say, “My name is Dr X with such and such credential and according to my research this and that are true” you could source that person, but not fluther.
@Rockstar0224 Does this same teacher allow wiki answers?
Plus, any site that allows ucme on it can’t be taken too seriously. ~
Looks like @thejosheeman may be the teacher in question.
Fluther may not be a valid source, but we can be the gravy…sometimes.
Well then he’s an imposter, or very confused.
@JLeslie I like the idea that i’m allowed…like a naughty child amongst the grown ups.
No, and neither is Wikipedia !!!
Best regards,
Your exasperated T.A.
You can treat such Q&A sites as the baby steps at the beginning of your research, to attempt to get the lay of the land and find pertinent websites and books to look into. But nothing on here is truly vetted or peer-reviewed. This is just a bunch of people talking at each other anonymously on the internet.
@bookish1 LOL
@ucme I hear your British accent when you write. It makes your posts better. I hope you actually have one. No, don’t tell me, don’t ruin it.
No. It’s a social site. It is no more a valid source than a cocktail party.
Let’s be clear. Encyclopedia Britannica, often considered the ne plus ultra of reference books, was itself frequently the object of criticism for including opinionated, one-sided articles, regardless of the fact that it was heavily edited and peer reviewed.
Although I respect @bookish1 ‘s opinion, peer review does not guarantee accuracy or perfection. It may come closer – but any edited publication must, by nature, take a point of view.
@JLeslie I certainly have an accent, but I suspect not one you’re familiar with.
You added the sarcasm tilde almost as an afterthought, there was really no need :-)
@elbanditoroso: Oh, shall we get into epistemology here? ;) I did not mean to say that peer review implied perfection or objectivity. But such publications have a better chance of eliminating glaringly obvious factual errors and ignorant interpretations than say… Yahoo Answers!
It is inherently wrong to cite Fluther as a source, because we don’t do homework! I bet if you went to the oldest republic still operating, using Fluther as a source would still be wrong!
For me Fluther is a valid source to the extent that other people’s knowledge, experience and opinions may validate my own, may open my mind to further exploration. I think it’s always a valid exercise to seek or simply be exposed to input from others, whether you agree with them or don’t.
Even if the answers are sourced, this is NOT a valid source of information. The questions are not checked for accuracy or quality. There is no guarantee made by the site maintainers of this either. If someone cites their sources here, go to THOSE sites and see if they are valid. ’
@JLeslie – Wiki answers isn’t a valid source either.
@bookish1—I accepted wikipedia in middle school papers, but rarely in high school papers. Buy high school, I expected the kids to be able to find the sources cited in wikipedia.
@elbanditoroso – Generally, I am not a big fan of encyclopedias as a source. They are frequently out of date—even the day they roll out brand new. The articles in Britannica are updated on a rolling basis every year. So a brand new encyclopedia can still be a decade or two off on some subjects. Encyclopedias are good starting points so you know what to look for in other sources. When I taught research, I accepted encyclopedias for middle schoolers only.
And the voice of the librarian was heard throughout the land!
@keobooks I’m glad to hear it. But, it sounds like the teacher in question does allow it and she only is not allowing fluther because she never heard of it.
I have to chime in and agree with @janbb and @keobooks, Fluther is not a legitimate source. Even if the answers are sourced, Fluther is not a legitimate source. Now if someone wants to go to the place where an answer they want to use came from, they might be headed in the right direction. At that point though it is a question of the quality of the original source and really has nothing to do with Fluther.
Good heavens! No, you can’t cite Fluther or any other Q&A website for any school project. Yikes.
And anyway, your teacher has the last word on this – we don’t have the power to override her decision.
@JLeslie It’s not clear to me that the teacher has said that WikiAnswers is allowed – the “many people” who think it is valid according to the OP might be her fellow students… and they are probably about to get a wake-up call.
@glacial You’re right. i asked if the teacher accepted wiki answers and somehow in my head a decided the OP said the teacher does, but she never did answer an affirmative to the question.
I’ve seen a lot of very resolute wrong answers on here. Double-check your stuff.
Thanks, @janbb, I got that. Just saying what the site’s validity is to me. I wouldn’t use it for academic sourcing.
I’ve been very sad to see how little English teachers learn about valid sources. Considering that they are the primary ones who teach the stuff, you’d think they’d learn more. I worked a lot with English teachers and the rules they set were pretty moronic sometimes. One teacher said nothing with .com was allowed, but anything with .edu was allowed. I told her this was TERRIBLE advice because there were many valid .com news sources out there, and that any freshman college student could make a web page that said ANYTHING and put it up on their .edu site given to them by the school. She stuck to her rules.
I know teachers are short on time, but I think if they started keeping a log of which websites were valid and checked new ones out themselves without making a blanket, people like me wouldn’t have to re-teach the kids or help them un-learn the useless crap the teacher taught them.
@keobooks Yeah, this is one of the reasons I think students need to be made to interact with librarians more. Information retrieval is a huge part of their training; teachers don’t have the same skills at all – and they are skills that students need to be taught. Much of this stuff just can’t be picked up on the fly.
@glacial: Case in point for how students need to learn early on how to evaluate sources and not trust everything with an academic veneer that they find on the internet:
Last semester, two of my students cited articles from the Institute for Historical Review, which is run by a renowned Holocaust Denier.
I would think of Fluther as equivalent to asking a friend what they know about the subject.
I mean, I could say “Hey, @bookish1, what do you know about XYZ?”
And @bookish1 would say “I know 123. And I read about it in JKL book written by ABC”.
And now I know which book to start my research in.
Fluther is NOT a source. We’re a pretty damn good place to find sources, though. ^_^
Individually we could be considered sources for first-person stories that we tell about ourselves, I suppose, in the same way that any interview subject could be considered “a source”. But that’s not the same as a published reference, which is what your teacher wants for “scholarly” research.
And as individuals being “interviewed” via this medium, you don’t have the benefit of a face-to-face interview where you can judge our facial tics, mannerisms and tells to help determine how truthful we are. You can’t see my shifty eyes, for example, or my beetling eyebrows or the way I drag my knuckles upon the ground as I lurch from place to place.
Any source can be “valid” from the standpoint of that person’s own first-person narrative. Even then you as the interviewer have to decide how much credibility to give the source, and that’s hard enough to do in person.
One important distinction is the one between primary and secondary sources. A primary source is one that directly relates to the information. For example, a diary could be a primary source for the information directly relating to the writer. An eyewitness account by a reporter wold be another example. Someone on Fluther reporting a personal experience could be considered a primary source, though you would need to specify that the information was given anonymously.
Primary sources are generally more reliable than secondary sources, which are sources that got their information from a primary source or another secondary source. For example, someone quoting from some scientific study would be a secondary source, and would obviously less reliable than the study itself.
@LostInParadise Yes, but let’s face it: the OP is not planning to write a paper about the life of any one jelly on Fluther. So we are not a valid source for the work that they are planning to do.
Depending on the sort of assignment you’re completing, you should use peer reviewed materials. In an academic essay this is considered strong evidence because the papers published in a peer reviewed journal have been through a blind, evaluation process. Fluther is not an appropriate source in an academic essay and I don’t think I’ve seen many people cite scholarly papers in their answers.
Tell your teacher they aren’t the only one who thinks the name is a bit…....
off.
@Rockstar0224 you asked “What if their are like 30 answers all the same?”
Never happen. @Jaxk and @ETpro would never knowingly agree on anything.
@rojo But the other 49 answers would be the same
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