On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 12:16 AM, Ray Saintonge
<saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
Hmmm!
Professor O'Connor yesterday tried to
distance himself from the
university's standards. "It was not as a piece of academic
scholarship, therefore did not follow normal citation methods used in
academic publications," he said.
and
He said there needed to be "a distinction
drawn" between a response to
criticisms in a newspaper and academic work.
There's a familiar ring to that from those who say that only what goes
into article space needs to be verifiable, and that the rule doesn't
apply to talk pages or the mailing lists. :-)
What goes into article space *needs* to be verifiable by *Wikipedia's
definition*. This rule does not apply elsewhere because it cannot.
Elsewhere things *should* be verifiable by *some other definition*,
presumably one that is much less strict. (Note that we don't allow a
lot of things in article space that are just fine on talk pages.
Signatures for one.)
It's an interesting analogy, but it breaks down pretty quickly.
I made an observation without enterring into word-play about "needs"
and
"should". I'm sure that academic publications have similar
"rules".
What is in question here is not what happens on article space. It is
more a question of the outright intellectual dishonesty of those who,
when called to substantiate their comments on on a talk page or mailing
list, respond with "I don't have to." Viewed from a strict rule-based
perspective they are right to say that. That approach is nevertheless
infantile.
Ec