On 7/9/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 7/9/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
And if you want to say "blog X said Y", then of course "blog X" is an excellent source for that. The question in both cases is more one of notability and relevance than one of reliability. What needs to stop is the blind worshipping of printed paper.
One problem with citing "blog X" when saying that "blog X said Y" is that the blog might very well not exist in a few years. A copy of a New York Times story, on the other hand, will certainly exist for many years.
The other problem is one of original research. Sure, blog X might have said Y, but if that's an important enough point to be made in an encyclopedia article, then someone else will have discussed it. As I see it the purpose of barring original research is not so much to bar unreliable facts as it is to bar original arguments.
It's to bar stuff like this, taken from the current [[George W. Bush]] article:
"The Commission found no credible evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of WMD. On December 14, 2005, while discussing the WMD issue, Bush stated that "It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong."[35] However, Bush would remain unwavered when asked if the war had been worth it, or would he have made the same decision if he had known more."
Anthony
And it is *exactly* transience problems like this that show that we need to be working more closely with the Internet Archive people (more closely that is than simply letting ourselves be spidered by 'em and letting'em d/l database dumps); I've suggested several times that when a valid ext. link is submitted, it be discreetly tagged with an IA link (assuming it exists), somewhat like how we're *supposed* to be validating ISBN links (http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2391; I really wonder about this bug- it should be pretty simple and useful, but you know the devs... got other fish to fry). Or at least a robot to go around adding links (http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1500288&gro...) if the original is gone.
I mean, c'mon, there's a lot of ways we could use them and they us; is the current low level of cooperation the best we can do? Wikicommons alone should be fairly valuable to them- they seem to be packrats for free content.
~Maru