[WikiEN-l] Abuse of your services

[Stan Shebs]

slimvirgin at gmail.com wrote:

>On 5/6/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
>
>>slimvirgin at gmail.com (slimvirgin at 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.
>
Whoa, that's getting pretty epistemiologically twisty... "A person
named 'J-o-h-n S-m-i-t-h' was mentioned as KotM on Usenet, but we
make no claim as to who that designates in real life".

The irony is that Mr. Astrologer has directly informed us that
he's pretty sure that Usenet was referring to him. At least I
think so - what if the email is from somebody pretending to be
him? Or maybe the astrologer is actually John Perry Barlow having
a whole lot of fun playing a net kook? Has anyone actually seen
this guy and Barlow together at the same time??

At some point you have to fall back on common sense, or else
be confined to working on philosophy articles.

Another irony is that Usenet was once as revered as a source
of good information as Google is today - I suspect part of the
disconnect in the discussion is the difference in perception
between people for whom it was an important part of their
lives (in my case, 1982 to 1994 or so), vs those who've
never known it as anything other than a flame board.

Stan