Board Thread:Administrative/@comment-61022-20130320221142/@comment-122657-20130530155120

I'd say Marvel Encyclopedias are really the only other reliable source, because they're officially licensed by Marvel.

The others are too often getting things wrong. In an industry where freelance writers come and go all the time, there's bound to be a handful of them who will get their facts wrong, even in print.

Take Jean Grey, for instance. She's currently listed as an Omega Level Mutant because she was mentioned in two different off-beat side stories as being an omega when talking about another person, (i.e. "Quentin is nearing Omega level ability just like Jean.").

The more likely scenario is that the writers of those two side stories didn't intentionally classify her as Omega Level, but were mistaken in their own heads and it got put to the page.

So I think allowing references like other websites, trading cards, etc. is only deluding the truth we fight hard to represent. Imagine if we took everything posted on Wikipedia to be fact! There are certainly instances where a 'real name' of a character appeared on Wikipedia, and it wormed it's way over to us, even though it was completely false.

We need to strive to make our references 100% true. In a perfect world for me, we'd require the actual scan or screenshot of the reference to be the reference, and any others would be conjecture until their image was uploaded and connected.