On 25 Mar 2008 at 12:18:57 +0000, "David Gerard" dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
One point that bobolozo is missing, in his enthusiasm to get mass-deleting, is that [[Wikipedia:Reliable sources]] is itself ... not a reliable source. It's a guideline, and one with truck-sized holes in it. Applying it robotically is a recipe for bureaucratic stupidity. Thinking it can be applied bureaucratically suggests a lack of the level of judgement one should have before performing such a drastic mass action. Precis: if you think WP:RS justifies such a course of action ... you shouldn't even be considering the action in question, and need to go back and think more first.
Just today, I got (metaphorically speaking) beaten up bloody and left at the side of the road for "trolling", when I objected to JzG doing a mass purge of links to a site regarded as not a reliable source... he was purging it not only from articlespace but also from talk and project pages and even closed archives, with the justification that this made it easy to monitor for inappropriate links to it in the list of all links to the site. I regarded this justification as bogus, but was shouted down by the AN/I crowd.
On 25/03/2008, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote:
On 25 Mar 2008 at 12:18:57 +0000, "David Gerard" dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
One point that bobolozo is missing, in his enthusiasm to get mass-deleting, is that [[Wikipedia:Reliable sources]] is itself ... not a reliable source. It's a guideline, and one with truck-sized holes in it. Applying it robotically is a recipe for bureaucratic stupidity. Thinking it can be applied bureaucratically suggests a lack of the level of judgement one should have before performing such a drastic mass action. Precis: if you think WP:RS justifies such a course of action ... you shouldn't even be considering the action in question, and need to go back and think more first.
Just today, I got (metaphorically speaking) beaten up bloody and left at the side of the road for "trolling", when I objected to JzG doing a mass purge of links to a site regarded as not a reliable source... he was purging it not only from articlespace but also from talk and project pages and even closed archives, with the justification that this made it easy to monitor for inappropriate links to it in the list of all links to the site. I regarded this justification as bogus, but was shouted down by the AN/I crowd.
Which would be you falling afoul of the fallacy that "all A is B therefore all B is A." You need to think why in this case you're wrong.
- d.