Ken Arromdee wrote:
On Fri, 5 Mar 2010, Charles Matthews wrote:
As usual, one has to sift the arguments. Why aren't blogs included under RS? That would be because they are generally unreliable?
One of the things that's bizarre about notability is that it requires reliable sources to establish notability.
Thought we went into all that ...
Something that has a Rush Limbaugh episode dedicated to it is probably notable in any sane sense, even if Rush Limbaugh isn't a reliable source.
Sorry, what if I say that I neither know nor care about anything Rush Limbaugh does or says (which is true), that I'm on the other side of the Atlantic from almost everyone who does care, and that puts me in the same position as about 90% of the world's population?
Likewise, whether blogs are reliable sources really shouldn't have anything to do with whether blogs indicate notability.
Fundamentally, whether or not we had "notability" or not as a guiding principle, the following should be true: the topics on WP should be determined by "pull" not "push". I mean thaty editors should be deciding what to include by what there is to edit. They should not be generated by what is crassly and in bad Latin called a "media agenda". That is because this effort is an encyclopedia, not a Limbopedia. Half-baked topics should spend time in wiki purgatory, until their sins of unreferencedness are expurgated.
Certainly if we didn't have the exclusion of most blogs, we would have a system that would be fantastically easy to game: how hard is to get some topic mentioned in a dozen blogs? It is true that the mainstream print media will run with stories that are basically a put-up job sometimes; but that doesn't prove we should be less critical, but more strict.
Charles