On 5/16/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 5/15/07, John Lee <johnleemk(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Since when have we banned the use of online subscription news-sites as
references, or made it policy that dead links cannot be cited as
sources?
The latter plainly contradicts [[WP:CS]], and a
brief overview of the
relevant WP pages reveals no overt ban on citations from subscription
sites,
but I just found out that somebody pulled out a bunch of such
references:
<
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ketuanan_Melayu&diff=13029126…
I was bold and reverted, but I would like to know if I didn't get the
memo
or if I've always been misunderstanding how
we do things.
Johnleemk
I think it's a basic misunderstanding of what verifiable means. If a site
is
subscription it means it's not verifiable for the person removing it at
that
point. That shouldn't prevent anyone from looking further than a simple
google search, though. There's other ways to get at subscription info. We
have a nice page for that ourselves.
Well, as I put it on the talk page after I reverted, meatspace newspapers
require subscriptions, but we don't ban them as references. Treat a web
source which requires subscription as a meatspace source and you'll see how
ludicrous it is to assume that subscription web sources are unverifiable and
inaccessible. (I just remembered that {{cite news}} even has a specific
option for mentioning that the source is subscription-only.) This reminds me
a bit of the time when a Singaporean editor said my Malaysian newspapers
weren't verifiable for him because they are censored in Singapore.
Johnleemk