Ken Arromdee wrote:
On Thu, 15 Jul 2010, Charles Matthews wrote:
Why is this any different from any other kind of "arcana"? And do people really lose sleep over this sort of thing? There must be a huge amount of insider-like knowledge associated with politics, sport, business, whatever. If we wait until this becomes "information" - is documented in at least some literature about the area - that should be fine. Most specialist areas have at least a magazine. I don't think simply multiplying instances where at the margin the content policy works as it is intended to by itself undermines its purpose.
The Internet is available to hundreds of millions people. I think that disqualifies anything on it from being insider information.
My experience on working on BLPs exactly contradicts that. You find postings to BLPs often consist of "well-known" "facts" that have been publicised using the Web, but are positive PR or attack material designed to harass, and not reliably sourced at any point in their life-cycle, though there will be "insiders" who know the truth of it all.
And the policy isn't working as it's intended to. The reliable sources rule isn't supposed to rule out arcana. We have rules that are actually about arcana to handle that. (Though I'm not sure exactly what the reliable sources rule is for. It's not, of course, about truth.)
Correct, in the sense that the assertion "this is true because I know it to be" appeals to authority. That the policy is not working out as intended is what is required to prove here.
And even this excuse doesn't work for the Bradley example. Having only one side of a dispute because one side of the dispute is a published author and can more easily get her side published in a reliable source certainly isn't "arcana".
You are shifting ground there, of course. It is true that in a sense we have subordinated NPOV to RS, by saying we are not going to allow vague assertions that there is more than one side to a story, only things we can verify.
Charles