On 3/4/06, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
I wrote:
Those interested in verifiability, and in particular whether "insufficiently verified" information can be rightfully removed, might be interested in a controversy bubbling over at the [[Jeffrey Vernon Merkey]] page. That page contains information critical of Merkey which was derived from the [[Linux Kernel Mailing List]]...
Never mind; the issue is a bit more subtle than I appreciated at first. It's not that unflattering things were said about Merkey on the mailing list. It's that Merkey *did* unflattering things on the mailing list, things that have been amply documented elsewhere. (I remember reading about them at the time.)
See [[Wikipedia:Verifiability/Proposed revision]] for one that boils things down.
I think it's a good idea for the question of "what's an acceptable source" to be distinct to the rule of verifiability. The latter is central to Wikipedia; the former is a much more contentious and fuzzy issue.
People need to understand that primary sources are always acceptable. E.g. if you're referring to a mailing list archive to discuss the mailing list archive, or (for example) the text of someone's post to a mailing list, that's totally fine and what historians and journalists of computer history do all the time.