On Tue, 10 Oct 2006 16:14:39 -0700, Jossi Fresco jossifresco@mac.com wrote:
If there are multiple sources and one of them is a USENET post or a blog, we *may* include that posting as an additional source. But if that is the *only* source upon which we make an assertion in an article, in particular when the subject is controversial, we should deny the use of such source on the basis of lack of reliability.
Obviously if a Harvard professor has a blog we can treat what he says there as fairly reliable in terms of his field of expertise, but it has a much lower inclusion threshold than peer-reviewed journals. Yes is of course the messenger not the medium which is the measure of reliability, but the medium also establishes the bar to publication and thus the amount of external scrutiny the message has received.
I am always wary of articles where there are vanishingly few real sources. The Game is a classic example: the only non-Internet source we've ever been able to find is a single mention in a Flemish newspaper, which may well have got its information from the same blogs as everyone else. We don't have any idea how thorough the research was which underlies that particular space filler. You'd have thought that something which is reportedly a global phenomenon would have attracted more than one mention in real media, wouldn't you?
It comes down, I guess, to how one views Wikipedia: do we aspire to be an accurate and verifiable source of information, or is it a place where in the absence of anything better we can simply repeat what is noised about, regardless of whether we can show it to be accurate or not.
My bias is probably evident in the phrasing here :-)
For articles that there are not controversial, and that there is consensus from involved and knowledgeable editors, exceptions could be made, of course.
Consensus from involved and knowledgeable editors is very dangerous. Look how many involved and knowledgeable editors think that crop circles are of paranormal origin, the "Church" of Scientology is not a cult, Remote Viewing is a science, the World Trade Center was brought down by the Evil Corrupt Gubmint (TM). Here of course we have others involved, but consensus does not scale well; in the case of a minor crank theory it is very possible to find a consensus of 100% of all three involved editors agreeing that it most certainly is valid.
Guy (JzG)