On 7/9/06, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
Letters to the editor are checked for authenticity by the newspapers printing them; in fact, the fundamental thing making a source reliable is fact-checking. Usenet posts do not have fact-checkers.
I always find it mildly amusing -- and disturbing -- how conservative and, dare I say it, naive Wikipedia can be when it comes to comparing old media with the Internet. Every printed source is held up as a symbol of journalistic integrity, and a guy in Ohio hacking up a moderate article about some website 2 hours before the deadline is considered, per WP:WEB, to make the thing more notable than a hundred blogs with thousands of readers, because he's a "reliable source." Con artists like Stephen Glass or Jayson Blair must have been evil geniuses to pass through the firewalls of fact checking built by the New Republic or the New York Times.
It turns out that when the New York Times actually writes about us, they do a crappier job at it than the average blog. But, they are printed on paper and sold on newsstands. It is almost like the physical manifestation of news on paper carries with it some magic, transcendental moment in the age of rapid, electronic distribution. Those who wikify the 1477th revision of an article about a minor pop celebrity look to the profession of The Journalist with the awe of devout altar boys.
Take it from a published author and journalist: the process of actually taking an article from submission to print is much messier than you might think, especially in newspapers. Fact checking is often a luxury; as a writer, I had my articles messed up more than once by an editor who thought he knew what he was doing -- and my byline ended up on them. In one case it was so bad that I completely severed my connection to the newspaper, and had to publish a correction online.
So, let's get back to the case of people posting on Usenet. If you have a group regular participating again and again in the same newsgroup, and you want to cite a particular post from that group that was _not contested_, you can pretty safely assume that it was posted by the same regular. Sure, you might be dealing with an elaborate hoax dating back several years. Then again, the newspaper you are citing might be subject to the very same kind of elaborate hoax. At some point, you have to start making _reasonable assumptions_.
And if you want to verify that it was really written by person X, then take off your WP:NOR hat for a moment and send the guy an e-mail. Problem solved. The assumption that anything posted on Usenet is not reliable is not reasonable. The assumption that an _isolated_ post that does not match an established pattern needs to be treated with caution is much more reasonable. The assumption that, if an author contests the authenticity of a post, we need to believe them, is generally reasonable.
And if you want to say "blog X said Y", then of course "blog X" is an excellent source for that. The question in both cases is more one of notability and relevance than one of reliability. What needs to stop is the blind worshipping of printed paper.
Erik