[WikiEN-l] Abuse of your services

[Stan Shebs]

slimvirgin at gmail.com wrote:

>On 5/6/05, Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.org> wrote:
>
>>Just for the record, where is the policy stating that Usenet /cannot/ be
>>used?  I'm not being sarcastic; I genuinely don't know.
>>
>
>The relevant policies state that Wikipedia sources must be published
>sources, and that the publishers must be, in some sense, reputable,
>authoritative, and credible. These terms are impossible to define, but
>they boil down to relying on publishing houses that have some form of
>fact-checking procedure, or peer-review if it's an academic subject.
>Sometimes the degree of fact-checking will be minimal, but there
>should be some infrastructure within which information is checked,
>complaints are responded to, and obviously authors are usually not
>anonymous.
>
>None of these things applies to Usenet. It is pretty much the
>definition of a source that should not be used (except in very limited
>circumstances as primary-source material). See [[Wikipedia:No original
>research]] for more details.
>
>
Are you looking at the same page as I am? It notes that for
non-academic subjects, "it is impossible to pin down a clear
definition of 'reputable'", proposes a series of litmus tests to
try, and suggests one's intuition as a fallback. The page also
mentions that a "mix of primary and secondary sources is preferred".

In practice I agree, the main value of old Usenet postings is
as a primary source, for instance, technologies were often
announced and discussed by the principals involved. (Noteworthy
examples include Berners-Lee's announcement of the World Wide
Web itself, and Linus' announcment of Linux on comp.os.minix,
which is linked from our Linux article in fact.)

Stan