[WikiEN-l] Unreliable sources, or no sources at all?

[Andrew Gray]

On 22/03/2008, bobolozo <bobolozo at yahoo.com> wrote:

>  large numbers of these.  A search on *.tripod.com, for
>  example, gives 10,000+ links, many of which are being
>  used as references. africanelections.tripod.com alone
>  is linked to
>  484 articles, and is being presented as a source in
>  multiple templates.

At a glance, that site appears to be an excellent example of why
simply mass-delinking Geocities and Tripod is a bad move - yes, it's a
self-published resource, but it's a fairly serious and well-intended
one; it seems to be on Tripod because the author finds that
convenient.

A vast amount of the stuff on these sites is fluff, and I agree
entirely it's a good idea to use the hosting as a bit of advisory
information when you're looking at a link. But simply insisting on a
blanket ban on *hosting sites* - not even on individual websites! - as
inherently unreliable is... not helpful.

If he'd gone off and got some more discreet web hosting and put the
site up as "africanelectoralresults.org", well, we wouldn't be
proposing this. But the inherent reliability of the site wouldn't have
changed one bit.

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