On 3/4/06, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com> wrote:
I wrote:
Those interested in verifiability, and in
particular whether
"insufficiently verified" information can be rightfully removed,
might be interested in a controversy bubbling over at the
[[Jeffrey Vernon Merkey]] page. That page contains information
critical of Merkey which was derived from the [[Linux Kernel
Mailing List]]...
Never mind; the issue is a bit more subtle than I appreciated at
first. It's not that unflattering things were said about Merkey
on the mailing list. It's that Merkey *did* unflattering things
on the mailing list, things that have been amply documented
elsewhere. (I remember reading about them at the time.)
See [[Wikipedia:Verifiability/Proposed revision]] for one that boils
things down.
I think it's a good idea for the question of "what's an acceptable
source" to be distinct to the rule of verifiability. The latter is
central to Wikipedia; the former is a much more contentious and fuzzy
issue.
People need to understand that primary sources are always acceptable.
E.g. if you're referring to a mailing list archive to discuss the
mailing list archive, or (for example) the text of someone's post to a
mailing list, that's totally fine and what historians and journalists
of computer history do all the time.