--- slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/7/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
At least newspaper editors can be tracked and held
accountable for
what they wrote. As for the trustworthiness.
They're at least as
trustworthy as the attached newspaper (as far as
they are), not being
published in the original sense has nothing to do
with it. That last
line was my point with regard to being used a
source.
That's precisely the point: newspapers (and their websites) have a fact-checking infrastructure in place. A reporter writes a story, it's checked by the assigning editor, checked again by a copy editor, again by a page editor, and again by a proof reader, all of whom are looking for obvious legal and factual problems as well as style issues. Depending on the size of the newspaper, it might also be checked by a fact-checker. If it's a sensitive story, it might be looked at by the managing editor, the editor-in-chief, the publisher, the lawyers, and even the owners.
We don't have the resources to do any of this, which is why we rely on sources that do. Usenet isn't one of them.
Sarah
Sarah, I'm still at a loss to understand your argument, and I'm not saying that to be difficult, I honestly don't understand your objections. In this particular case, we are discussing a Usenet newsgroup. This newsgroup "awarded" this guy with their "Kook of the Millenium" award. Would this newsgroup not be the best source for information on to whom they they gave the award?
RickK
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On 5/8/05, Rick giantsrick13@yahoo.com wrote:
Sarah, I'm still at a loss to understand your argument, and I'm not saying that to be difficult, I honestly don't understand your objections. In this particular case, we are discussing a Usenet newsgroup. This newsgroup "awarded" this guy with their "Kook of the Millenium" award. Would this newsgroup not be the best source for information on to whom they they gave the award?
RickK
Hi Rick, I'm not sure I should post here much more on this, because people must be getting fed up, but in brief (and because it's you):
The newsgroup *was* the best source of information about their Kook of the Millenium award. I was only concerned about actually naming the award winner because that person is a private individual who seems to be upset about the whole thing. There are other award winners (Kook of the Month or whatever) who are public figures: Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, and so on, and it seems fine to name them (though a bit silly). But I felt a line was crossed when Wikipedia named a private individual who didn't want to be named in an article about a subject with no encyclopedic merit, where we lose nothing by removing his name. That's all. It was an argument-from-kindness, which obviously didn't go down well.
It raises the larger issue of whether Usenet should ever be used as a source in Wikipedia when it concerns individuals, or topics other than the workings of Usenet itself, and my argument was that the name of the award winner in this case counted as a non-Usenet topic.
If you're going to argue that individuals, once named and described in a certain way on Usenet, become Usenet topics, where Usenet may be used as a source, then anyone could create a WP article called "Opinions about Jews on Usenet," or "Anti-Islam newsgroups" and could proceed to repeat all the anti-Semitic or anti-Islam slurs you routinely find in certain newsgroups, perhaps even naming individuals and repeating what was said about them. And why stop at naming them? If the newsgroup gives out their home and work addresses, maybe we could do that too, and claim only to be quoting Usenet, which the article, after all, is about.
Do you see my point? Slippery slope. Another editor discussing this elsewhere used the phrase "garbage in, garbage out."
Sarah
slimvirgin@gmail.com (slimvirgin@gmail.com) [050509 07:33]:
The newsgroup *was* the best source of information about their Kook of the Millenium award. I was only concerned about actually naming the award winner because that person is a private individual who seems to be upset about the whole thing. There are other award winners (Kook of
Again, mixing the specific and the general. Edmond Wollmann has worked hard to make a public figure of himself by making a public nuisance of himself, loud, long and hard, for many years.
While applying due consideration in the general case to private individuals would almost certainly be an appropriate consideration, in this specific case it isn't. Not at all. Not even a little bit.
- d.