[WikiEN-l] change RS/BLP etc to not say 'blogs' (was Blog Entries (Bauer fork))

[Philip Sandifer]

On Mar 28, 2007, at 11:57 AM, jayjg wrote:

> Blogs are *by definition* public diaries, almost always maintained by
> individuals as expressions of their personal views. In contrast,
> websites in general are often maintained by news organizations, other
> publications, corporations, universities, non-profit organizations,
> etc. The number of general websites having some sort of editorial
> oversight is vastly higher than the number of blogs having some sort
> of editorial oversight.

Editorial oversight is not the holy grail or magic bullet, though.

An example. I work on a peer reviewed online journal, ImageTexT. We  
publish good stuff.

Let us now imagine two circumstances.

1) ImageTexT publishes an article by a graduate student repudiating a  
major book of comics scholarship.
2) The author of that major book posts on his blog repudiating his  
own book.

Which source is the better one for us to use?

#2. No question. No doubt. Because #2 is an unquestionable  
significant event.

The remote possibility of a change to the blog is, well, remote. And  
if the author of the blog decides to retract their words WE CHANGE  
THE ARTICLE. It's easy for us to do that. It's easy for us to have  
articles that are based on the most up-to-date information available.

Really, this is ridiculous. Yes, given the choice between a blog and  
a print newspaper source that give the exact same information, we  
should pick the latter. But the use of blogs as sources where  
authorship is verified and the author is an important figure in the  
field is straightforward. Anyone trying to raise controversy about  
this is serving only to drag us into a morass of nitpicking and white  
line distinctions that is fundamentally alien to the process of  
writing a good encyclopedia.

-Phil