[WikiEN-l] So what do we do about this?

[Fastfission]

The key issue here is not the topic at hand but whether or not it is
verifiable. The main question here seems to be, "Do blogs count as sources?"
In certain rare cases they ought to be, but in general they are no better
than citing user pages on Wikipedia. If a blog can cite a source, then we
can find that source and cite it ourselves, I assume.

If you remove everything from the article that is cited with a blog, and
everything which is not cited but should be, what do you have? Perhaps it
would be a useful rhetorical technique to try on one of them, whether it
gets reverted or not.

Of course, all of the above rests on the conclusion that blogs don't count
as sources in and of themselves for articles of this sort. The people who
wrote the articles are obviously going to disagree on this, hence the entire
root of this dispute. I think it'd be nice to have some sort of "ruling on
high" every once in awhile about what counts as evidence and what doesn't
(what Foucault would call defining our "regimes of truth") but I'm not sure
there's any way to do it systematically or rigorously. But perhaps that
isn't needed -- perhaps a one-time, "this doesn't work in this situation"
wouldn't be so bad (seems to have worked out with the LaRouchies).

Again, this doesn't have to have to do anything with politics if it is
honestly just a source issue. If "real" sources on these topics come out
later, the articles can be rewritten, simple as that.

FF

On 10/18/05, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Oct 18, 2005, at 1:33 PM, Guettarda wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > I see. So saying "obviously you support election fraud" would be
> > appropriate
> > too, and not "needlessly" inflammatory? Interesting.
> >
> >
>
> I don't know how to answer this, except to say this. I have taught
> freshman composition at a respected university, focusing particularly
> on research. If one of my students handed me a paper that used those
> citations in that way, I would fail them. Regardless of whether there
> was election fraud, the article is a poorly written, POV mess. And it
> is not the place of Wikipedia to decide if there was election fraud -
> it's the place of Wikipedia to accurately describe the controversy
> surrounding it. A controversy that led to no successful challenges to
> the outcome of the election, and no lasting media coverage. Instead
> of this, though, we have 60,000 words of original research.
>
> -Snowspinner
>
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