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.
Sarah