On 6/9/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/9/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Jun 9, 2007, at 9:52 AM, John Lee wrote:
As I anticipated, the only reason the article was deleted was a lack of sources. That's perfectly fine.
What's not perfectly fine is how lazy people are when it comes to looking for sources. I often see quotations tagged with {{fact}} that have sources readily available on Google (I just select a random phrase from the quote, plug it in, and the search results nearly always yield something useful).
Likewise, http://www.google.com/search?q=Glurge yields more than enough sources on the phrase's etymology (though that's more for Wiktionary) and background. Is it really that hard to Google something?
Though in this case I have trouble finding many sources that meet stringent standards of reliability. 644 unique appearances on Google, though.
For me, this points to another problem with stringent standards of reliability. Yeah, we only have 644 independent sources on Google, none of which may be the most reliable of things. But we're dealing here with a neologism, and any source that uses the word, regardless of some ontological notion of reliability, is giving us significant information. Of course, the most stringent NOR monkeys will still cry foul over this.
This is, for me, the really disheartening thing about the deletion debate. If people had approached the subject as reasonable, thinking editors there would be a really interesting discussion of how best to source this article. But people approach it as robots and we get "Delete, neologism."
Stringent standards, eh? Deciding the reliability of sources is far from an objective thing, but I think one would have to be insane to reject all the sources that Google search turns up. wiseGeek, for example, seems decent enough. It's a shame that wordSpy seems to be self-published, but it does cite some real reliable sources that we could examine (unfortunately, that would require work in meatspace; Googling those sources turned up zilch).
In any event, there's sufficient evidence that this is a notable neologism with real sources about it out there; even if there are none that we can cite [[m:immediatism|immediately]], it's enough to keep the article in my book. I'm no inclusionist, and I love sources as much as the next guy, but I hate Taylorisation, and this seems to be a classic case of robotic application of the rules to wedge cases.
Johnleemk _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Amen to that. Wikipedia is supposed to evolve. To delete something that doesn't have sources, one is supposed to show they don't exist or havent been added despite attempts to contact interested parties.