slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/6/05, Sean Barrett sean@epoptic.org wrote:
Just for the record, where is the policy stating that Usenet /cannot/ be used? I'm not being sarcastic; I genuinely don't know.
The relevant policies state that Wikipedia sources must be published sources, and that the publishers must be, in some sense, reputable, authoritative, and credible. These terms are impossible to define, but they boil down to relying on publishing houses that have some form of fact-checking procedure, or peer-review if it's an academic subject. Sometimes the degree of fact-checking will be minimal, but there should be some infrastructure within which information is checked, complaints are responded to, and obviously authors are usually not anonymous.
None of these things applies to Usenet. It is pretty much the definition of a source that should not be used (except in very limited circumstances as primary-source material). See [[Wikipedia:No original research]] for more details.
Are you looking at the same page as I am? It notes that for non-academic subjects, "it is impossible to pin down a clear definition of 'reputable'", proposes a series of litmus tests to try, and suggests one's intuition as a fallback. The page also mentions that a "mix of primary and secondary sources is preferred".
In practice I agree, the main value of old Usenet postings is as a primary source, for instance, technologies were often announced and discussed by the principals involved. (Noteworthy examples include Berners-Lee's announcement of the World Wide Web itself, and Linus' announcment of Linux on comp.os.minix, which is linked from our Linux article in fact.)
Stan