[WikiEN-l] Stupidity toward experts

[Andrew Gray]

On 17/05/07, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:
> What is much more promising is that a great many eds, have endorsed
> the view that the internet is in some cases a reliable source,

I posted this elsewhere, but I think it's worth reprinting:

First, Usenet is a perfectly good *medium* to cite things through; as
far as such things go, it's sort of like the letters page of a
newspaper. You can confidently quote someone's letter to the Times
without fretting too much they didn't write it - it's conceivably
possible it was faked, since the paper is a bit lax about checking
these days, but it's not really plausible unless you have some actual
reason to be suspicious (or if it's from the old days when people
still used pseudonyms and you had to infer authorship - an analogy can
go too far and still work...)

So when citing Usenet posts, the thing to determine if it's reliable
is entirely down to context, authorship, etc. (As to whether the
actual content is authoritatively correct, even more dependent on
authorship and that good old editorial gut feeling)

But Usenet is, in and of itself, a bad *source* in the sense of a
publication; it's a vast mass of original material arguing with itself
with no control. You can't really confidently say "The general opinion
on Usenet is that..." or "There has been much debate over..." except
in quite restricted situations; too prone to misinterpretation (wilful
or not) and misrepresentation.

I suspect the latter is why someone came up with the idea that "Usenet
is not a source"; unfortunately, they failed to understand that an
unreliable source can be a reliaiblity-neutral (as it were) medium.
I've been arguing this one for a year and not getting very far...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk