[WikiEN-l] I'm disappointed in Wikipedia.

[John Lee]

On 6/9/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Jun 9, 2007, at 9:52 AM, John Lee wrote:
>
> > As I anticipated, the only reason the article was deleted was a
> > lack of
> > sources. That's perfectly fine.
> >
> > What's not perfectly fine is how lazy people are when it comes to
> > looking
> > for sources. I often see quotations tagged with {{fact}} that have
> > sources
> > readily available on Google (I just select a random phrase from the
> > quote,
> > plug it in, and the search results nearly always yield something
> > useful).
> >
> > Likewise, http://www.google.com/search?q=Glurge yields more than
> > enough
> > sources on the phrase's etymology (though that's more for
> > Wiktionary) and
> > background. Is it really that hard to Google something?
>
> Though in this case I have trouble finding many sources that meet
> stringent standards of reliability. 644 unique appearances on Google,
> though.
>
> For me, this points to another problem with stringent standards of
> reliability. Yeah, we only have 644 independent sources on Google,
> none of which may be the most reliable of things. But we're dealing
> here with a neologism, and any source that uses the word, regardless
> of some ontological notion of reliability, is giving us significant
> information. Of course, the most stringent NOR monkeys will still cry
> foul over this.
>
> This is, for me, the really disheartening thing about the deletion
> debate. If people had approached the subject as reasonable, thinking
> editors there would be a really interesting discussion of how best to
> source this article. But people approach it as robots and we get
> "Delete, neologism."


Stringent standards, eh? Deciding the reliability of sources is far from an
objective thing, but I think one would have to be insane to reject all the
sources that Google search turns up. wiseGeek, for example, seems decent
enough. It's a shame that wordSpy seems to be self-published, but it does
cite some real reliable sources that we could examine (unfortunately, that
would require work in meatspace; Googling those sources turned up zilch).

In any event, there's sufficient evidence that this is a notable neologism
with real sources about it out there; even if there are none that we can
cite [[m:immediatism|immediately]], it's enough to keep the article in my
book. I'm no inclusionist, and I love sources as much as the next guy, but I
hate Taylorisation, and this seems to be a classic case of robotic
application of the rules to wedge cases.

Johnleemk