On 8/14/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)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