Jimmy Wales wrote:
Travis Mason-Bushman wrote:
Or, perhaps, we could consider that if there are no indisputably reliable sources about a living person, we should not have an encyclopedia article on that person until such reliable sources are available. Or is that too difficult a concept to grasp?
Loosening our "reliable sources" criteria is all well and good when considering something like Pokemon or Star Wars characters, but we're talking about the lives and reputations of real people, and I am vehemently opposed to weakening the criteria for biographical sources.
What we write appears on one of the most popular Internet sites in the world, and there is a moral and ethical imperative for us to be responsible and prudent when talking about real people. Yes, that means accepting only sources which are clearly reliable to support information of a negative nature.
You have my full and unreserved support in this.
It all sounds reasonable as a general concept, yes, but as far as I can tell it is actually irrelevant to the main problem here. We have a source that according to everyone who's familiar with the field is reliable, but which is being stigmatized by the fact that it happens to be in a blog format. This is not a question of loosening standards as far as _reliability_ is concerned since the problem with the source is not its reliability but rather its format.
Also, adding "or is that too difficult a concept to grasp?" is a pretty lame means of argument, implying that anyone who disagrees is simply too stupid to understand the obvious correctness of the position. I'm hoping that this is not part of what you're giving full and unreserved support to.