On 7/9/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
I always find it mildly amusing -- and disturbing -- how conservative and, dare I say it, naive Wikipedia can be when it comes to comparing old media with the Internet. Every printed source is held up as a symbol of journalistic integrity, and a guy in Ohio hacking up a moderate article about some website 2 hours before the deadline is considered, per WP:WEB, to make the thing more notable than a hundred blogs with thousands of readers, because he's a "reliable source."
Erik, the important point about newspapers is that all but the tiniest have processes in place to detect errors, and particularly legal problems, prior to publication. We can only hope they use the processes correctly; if they don't, that's not our fault. But Wikipedia has no such process, which is why we rely on what we call "reliable sources" who do.
Sarah