slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/6/05, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
We can use Usenet as a source of information about itself, and about its awards. What we can't do is use it as a secondary source of information about someone or something else. Even if it's true that John Smith won the KOM award, we shouldn't include Smith's name, because to do so is to use Usenet as a *source of information regarding a subject other than itself*.
Whoa, that's getting pretty epistemiologically twisty... "A person named 'J-o-h-n S-m-i-t-h' was mentioned as KotM on Usenet, but we make no claim as to who that designates in real life".
That's not what I meant. I was using the name John Smith only as an example. My argument about Edmond is that we shouldn't name him at all, not that we should give him a pseudonym.
No, I was just echoing your use of "John Smith" as a generic example.
Another way to think about this is how you would write up policy. Would you declare "Usenet is not credible"? Some of the postings to it are authentic and authoritative though, so you'd have to introduce some way to distinguish. "No naming of non-notable people?" Then you're just in the never-ending argument about notability. "Have a sense of decency?" Nice, but too subjective for WP editors to use, given how many of them seem to fall outside the three-sigma range for human behavior... :-)
Stan