On 8/14/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
e.g. the War on Blogs, wherein some editors have got it into their heads that ALL BLOGS ARE EVIL AND MUST NEVER BE USED IN REFERENCES rather than e.g. regarding them as, say, lesser sources than peer-reviewed academic papers and assuming the reader can read. The response to crap sources is to say "those are crap sources, cut it out" rather than countering foolishness with foolishness.
Exactly. Some blogs are very credible and reliable, because they are written by well-known people in their fields with their own personal reputations on the line. The same goes for newsgroup postings, back in the 'golden age' of Usenet.
On non-contentious topics, the right way to do it would be to shift it to the talk page for discussion and an attempt at sourcing, e.g. the stuff on the early [[Casio Exilim]]s being crap in low light is observed by a pile of Exilim owners (e.g. me) but I can't find a good source - so out it goes as original research, but it's on the talk page should I or someone find something verifiable showing this to be an issue.
Hmm, one would have thought that some review somewhere would have picked that up, but I guess that's why it's worth leaving it on the talk page, because someone eventually will find a source saying that.
On contentious topics, there is good reason to be hard-arsed about sources. But that doesn't mean you go overboard and legalistic because someone who hates blogs edit-warred that wording into WP:V.
I think it's largely a case of policy being driven by the hard cases - the one-tenth of one percent of articles, or fewer, that are truly contentious edit war battlefields.
-Matt