On 6/9/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner(a)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