On 5/6/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
slimvirgin@gmail.com (slimvirgin@gmail.com) [050507 05:25]:
Right. If he's named as a kook (or anything) somewhere vaguely reputable, we can use it. But we can't allow Usenet to determine who is or isn't notable.
On that basis, we wouldn't have articles about Usenet at all. We do, therefore your assertion that Usenet notability is not notability at all ever is evidently not the case.
I'm struggling to understand why people can't see the difference here between using something as a primary and a secondary source. 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*. The sentence: "John Smith was honored as KOM," is about that Usenet group, but it is also about someone else.
As argued by Mperel, we wouldn't include the names of schoolgirls voted Slut of the Year by a particular school. We wouldn't include in the Stormfront article that Jane Doe was given Stormfront's Ugliest Jew of the Year award. We wouldn't include in an article about Wikipedia that such-and-such an editor (using his real name) is thought of as a real prat. And so on. It's unencyclopedic gossip using anonymous sources that are (at best) silly and sometimes downright nasty, and the whole point of all our policies about using good references is precisely to avoid sources like these being used, except in very limited cicumstances where we are writing about them (which makes them primary sources) - and even there we have to be extremely careful to balance their views about themselves with other's people's views about them.
Sarah