On Fri, 12 Aug 2011, geni wrote:
But things the white nerds who wrote Wikipedia care about, like comic books or MUDs or text games or anime which are underserved by RSs? Well, if they don't have RSs, they can go screw themselves. (If you care so much about fancruft, go work on a Wikia! We're busy trying to figure out how to deal with editor retention.)
That particular subgroup would probably be better served by setting up a more conventional electronic open access journal. I would expect being backed by the charity behind wikipedia would get it enough profile to get some decent submissions.
I hate this response, along with variations such as "convince the person to publish it himself" and "convince the source to publish a correction". It amounts to "we don't need to listen to your complaint about bad policy because you can work around the bad policy by jumping through a lot of hoops". Jumping through the hoops is often completely impractical, and even when it's technically possible it's orders of magnitude more difficult than just using the source would be if the policy was fixed.
Imagine if we did this in other situations. "Yeah, it's the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. So if your date of birth is in error, just go get published in an electronic open access journal and we'd be glad to let you fix the entry."
Heh also paying for the scanning of the old time computer game magazines would be a viable approach.
Except in the rare cases where the owners give permission (or where you own a copy of the magazine and don't need the scan anyway), this solution doesn't work since illegal copies aren't considered reliable sources. We can't even link to them, never mind use them for sources.
Of course, scanning them will result in a don't-ask-don't-tell policy where Wikipedians insert information based on scans they're not actually allowed to use as sources, but they don't volunteer the information that they used an illegal copy.