[WikiEN-l] Blog Entries (Bauer fork)

[Travis Mason-Bushman]

On 3/27/07 11:19 PM, "Ken Arromdee" <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:

>> If the claims are that
>> important, surely they will be picked up, verified and repeated by
>> newspapers or other media?
> 
> That might be true if it's actually about a member of parliament, but there
> are claims that can have limited audiences, and yet be "important" in the
> sense that they are still encyclopediac subjects.  It may be that nobody
> picks up the claim because nobody picks up most claims related to the topic,
> rather than because this claim is particularly unimportant.

Or, perhaps, we could consider that if there are no indisputably reliable
sources about a living person, we should not have an encyclopedia article on
that person until such reliable sources are available. Or is that too
difficult a concept to grasp?

Loosening our "reliable sources" criteria is all well and good when
considering something like Pokemon or Star Wars characters, but we're
talking about the lives and reputations of real people, and I am vehemently
opposed to weakening the criteria for biographical sources.

What we write appears on one of the most popular Internet sites in the
world, and there is a moral and ethical imperative for us to be responsible
and prudent when talking about real people. Yes, that means accepting only
sources which are clearly reliable to support information of a negative
nature. 

-Travis Mason-Bushman