[WikiEN-l] Who wins

[Molu]

  Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2006 22:54:31 +0100
From: Guy Chapman aka JzG 
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Who wins

Message-ID: <2f0g4297pqislk26ve83lh5sgbtvaf9m8s at 4ax.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

On Thu, 20 Apr 2006 14:09:58 -0700 (PDT), you wrote:

>So I wonder if it would be more pragmatic to drop these arbitary thresholds and just say "sources are required". 
>Each article has the best sources we can find for that topic. If the best sources are blogs then fine -
>the reader is left to him/herself to determine notability based on their own frame of references.

This has been suggested at WP:V but was soundly rejected as being
functionally equivalent to "articles must cite sources unless you
can't find any". There is a good reason that encyclopaedias typically
do not document facts which cannot be verified from reliable sources:
a significant proportion of them turn out to be false.

Consider: you wish to promulgate a "Fred is Gay" meme (you are a not a
friend of his, as we know friends of gays should not be allowed to
edit Wikimedia projects). So, you set up your blogs on LiveJournal
and Blogger, publish it, and then toddle off to Wikipedia to complete
the writing into canon of your new shiny meme. Job done. Can you see
how that might be bad?
Guy (JzG)
-- 
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

  Umm... No? What's so bad about it? Wikipedia has an article saying two blogs contain a sentence "Fred is Gay" and the reader draws the inference that the owner of those blogs is seriously retarded. Big deal. If it so happens that after a year T-shirts are selling reading Fred is Gay, Wikipedia was the first to document this rising star, good for Wikipedia. If it dies a quite death like so many others, Wikipedia has spent a few KBs writing an article few are interested in reading. So what?
   
  IMHO an extended interpretation of NPOV should not allow WP to judge particular sources as relaible and others as unreliable. Leave that to the reader.

		
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