Steve Summit wrote: Most of them were speedy kept. For whatever reason, we speedy deleted this instance, which puts the whole operation in question. This is when we start looking incredibly dumb as an organization when we delete articles about subjects that obviously exist, are obviously well know, and are actually verifiable, but because we can't bring ourselves to trust a source that isn't available in dead tree form somewhere, we won't have the article. Doesn't make a lot of sense. -Jeff -- If you can read this, I'm not at home.

Tony Jacobs wrote: No one's saying that we should accept original research. However, to act as if there's nothing verifiable or reliable about GNAA reeks of short-sightedness. Until we start accepting that *some* self-published and blog-like sources are actually reliable when it comes to covering certain things (like web memes or independent bands), we're going to look incredibly naive. Was there non-trivial coverage in independent sources? Yes. Was there any in something that Wikipedia thinks is "reliable" or "verifiable?" No. The problem is Wikipedia's situation with the latter, and it goes far, far beyond silly troll organizations. -Jeff -- Name: Jeff Raymond E-mail: jeff.raymond(a)internationalhouseofbacon.com WWW: http://www.internationalhouseofbacon.com IM: badlydrawnjeff Quote: "As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else." - Sen. Rick Santorum on the war in Iraq.

Any organization that benefits from publicity is advanced by having a Wikipedia article; such a "rule" sounds dangerous, even if carefully worded. Your contention, that a rule is being stretched here, only really makes sense if one has already accepted your second contention, that WP:RS is broken. I think I understand that perspective, but I tend to adopt a different one. I don't see WP:RS (and WP:V) as broken, so much as defining our scope. I guess if one thinks the floor should be three feet lower, the current floor would seem broken, but I like the height it's at now. There are other sources for information that doesn't meet our inclusion standards - Wikipedia isn't trying to be all sources, nor should it. I guess the floor metaphor is oversimple. It's more like our floor is multi-level, and people are arguing over whether there are holes in it that should be filled in, or whether those holes *are* the floor. I say fill 'em in and let the underground be documented by those who document the underground; they exist. Tony/GTBacchus _________________________________________________________________ View Athlete’s Collections with Live Search http://sportmaps.live.com/index.html?source=hmemailtaglinenov06&FORM=MG…

On 11/28/06, The Cunctator <cunctator(a)gmail.com> wrote: We are not going to delete [[Copyright]]. -- geni

On Tue, Nov 28, 2006, Jimmy Wales wrote: The Scotsman article is a legitimate source. LastMeasure and LMOS are GNAA-branded products that are referenced in other places on Wikipedia (except that someone apparently decided that because there should be no GNAA article, there should also be no article mentioning the GNAA and seems to be removing the references; an article about shock sites that does not mention LastMeasure is laughable). Maybe there were other legitimate sources, or content that can be sourced, but the article and its talk pages are now gone, and we have to trust your word on this? Did you write this in a hurry, or are you really unquestionably claiming that? I'd be happy to know what knowledge base you were accessing. -- Sam.

What definition of "notable" are you using? The only definition of that word that matters at Wikipedia is: "A topic is notable if it has been the subject of multiple, non-trivial published works whose sources are independent of the subject itself." That's not true of GNAA, ergo they're not "notable", which simply means that it's impossible to write a properly verifiable article about them. We don't want to keep an unverfiable article around, no matter how much "consensus" may hoot and holler for it, so we delete it. People who want to know about GNAA can still look them up at ED, which has no problem covering topics that we eschew. Tony/GTBacchus _________________________________________________________________ All-in-one security and maintenance for your PC.  Get a free 90-day trial! http://clk.atdmt.com/MSN/go/msnnkwlo0050000002msn/direct/01/?href=http://cl…

I didn't mean to come across quite so stridently there, Steve. I've been knee deep in discussions over at the notability guideline; some of that may have spilled your way. Sorry about that. I don't want to re-open the AfD discussion either. I will offer my thought in response to your closing point: I'm glad the project has the courage to assert our commitment to high standards of sourcing. I'd rather we have a well-sourced article for eveything for which that's possible, and remain silent on topics for which sourcing isn't possible. If we keep the bar high, it will encourage other wikis to provide good coverage of topics we pass over. That's not a bad thing. Wikipedia can do better by finding its niche and doing what it does well than by trying to be all things to all people. Tony/GTB _________________________________________________________________ MSN Shopping has everything on your holiday list. Get expert picks by style, age, and price. Try it! http://shopping.msn.com/content/shp/?ctId=8000,ptnrid=176,ptnrdata=200601&a…

Really, the *entire* article was unverifiable? That is very hard to believe. Why were those sources called into question if it wasn't the dead tree thing cited in an earlier email? Mgm

On 11/28/06, Tony Jacobs <gtjacobs(a)hotmail.com> wrote: Which is ridiculous, because blogs are a medium, not a particular source. Banning all blogs as sources is absurd. A much better policy, one which respects the reader rather than treating him like a child, is to source the articles properly. If the source is a blog, the reader can supply his judgment in how much credence to give the source. Similarly with say, the New York Times, CNN, or the Washington Times, or Pravda.

On Tue, 28 Nov 2006 17:54:05 -0500, "The Cunctator" <cunctator(a)gmail.com> wrote: But if the *only* sources are blogs we clearly have a problem. Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

On 11/29/06, The Cunctator <cunctator(a)gmail.com> wrote: Doesn't the "No Original Research" policy say that sources need to be "reliable" sources? I think a blog would be fine, if the author was generally acknowledged to be a reliable reporter on the subject matter. Of course, under such a rule we might have to leave out certain popular newspapers as sources considering their track record of getting things wrong. Anthony

On 11/29/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote: This would apply to [[Wookiepedia]], maybe? What about sections? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncyclopedia#Main_Page_holidays is most likely not covered by any reliable third party sources at all, let alone ones off the Internet. That section I'd advocate dropping, actually, while [[Wookiepedia]] I'd probably advocate keeping. Anthony

Removing it is good with the reasons you gave. We don't need lists of in-jokes. There's still quite a few on [[4chan]], but luckily we've directed a lot of traffic to external sites that, er, specialize in that. Ryan On 11/29/06, niht-hræfn <nihthraefn(a)gmail.com> wrote:

I would, too, but a lot of them can't be sourced (fleeting nature of imageboard content, etc., etc.). --Ryan On 11/29/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 11/29/06, Sam Hocevar <sam(a)zoy.org> wrote: OK, I just looked at the version from 26 September 2006 (which is on the Citizendium pilot wiki). The description given above of the sources seems accurate. Can you point us to which source doesn't fit that description. Reading the article, if all of it is true then the organization does seem notable to me, and it seems to me there *must* be some reliable third party sources out there. That said, I don't know of any, so I have to agree with the deletion with the understanding that a valid deletion doesn't preclude someone writing a good article from reliable third party sources in the future. Anthony

This is a discussion about wikipedia, however, and not wikinews. There are some subjects that an encyclopedia can not and should not touch because there is simply no real research on the subjects yet. Some number of years from now we'll know if the GNAA was actually notable from the serious research done on the subject. This same research, if it exists, will enable us to write a proper article on the subject. There are millions of subjects which do have solid backing research for us to write about so surely there can be no argument that we'll run out of things to do unless we abandon verifyability... And likewise there are plenty of great sources for rumor and opinion on the internet which aren't wikipedia, so if we do not write about X our readers will not be starved for information about X. (And if they are, that's a sign that you're missing a great oppurtunity to open your own, possibily wiki based, site on the matter) Wikipedia is not and should not be an attempt to replace the entire internet. We already have the entire internet and with no solid demands on verifilibility, neutrality, or copyright non-encoumberance we often find its utility limited... And without criteria for inclusion, we often do find it hard to find the good content on the internet amid a sea of spam and garbage... Google search has a brilant multibillion dollar company behind it trying to make sure its search results are good, and now adays they often fail. Although some of our articles to use print sources that don't exist on the internet.. It's far more common that our articles entirely contain material which could be found elsewhere on the internet. Why is it that pepople still find Wikipedia useful then? Because of all the things Wikipedia is not, at lest as much as because of all the things Wikipedia is. On 11/28/06, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Wikipedia isn't consistent.. We shouldn't let the fact the thousands of things are done wrong be an excuse for doing things incorrectly. We accept open submission so if we allow the existance of examples in wikipedia to drive our standards we will, in effect, have no standards. I'm sure that would make some people, people editing for their own self-interests, happy but it would not be good. Thankfully this point is already obvious to most... On 11/28/06, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Because we can never know if something done in wikipedia is done right or done wrong on the on the basis of it being 'done', you are not at all excused from arguing your position from first principles... Just as you would be with no examples to support you. So while examples can be useful for clarities sake, they often cause confusion about your argument... And as such they should be avoided. In any case no specific examples were cited here, rather it was asserted that something was being done wrong on the basis of there being many counter examples. I was only pointing out that that particular method of argument isn't likely to be too useful. We've seen arguments in this thread that GNAA ought to have been kept which are worth consideration, but "there are lots of examples in pop culture" just isn't one of them. On 11/29/06, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote:

On 11/29/06, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote: With the number of those games sold there are cities that are less notable than Kanto Gym Leaders -- geni

On 11/29/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG &lt;guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net&gt; wrote: In particular to the editors working on those articles. I was wondering if it would be a positive step to strongly encourage the popular culture articles to move towards at least citing the (potentially unreliable) primary pop culture source for various factoids (for example, "Character did X" <ref episode XYZ>). Whether we treat those topics as having any reliable sources or not (by normal WP standards), referencing the primary source extensively would set a good example. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

I actually went through a process similar to this some weeks back, in order to get a claim rather relevant to [[The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi]] cited as far as the episode in which the claim was made. It wasn't the most pleasant thing to have to go , but it seems to work well enough. Ryan On 11/29/06, Steve Block &lt;steve.block(a)myrealbox.com&gt; wrote:

On 11/30/06, Matt R &lt;matt_crypto(a)yahoo.co.uk&gt; wrote: I feel that if I go to Wikipedia to look up something relatively notable, and Wikipedia's response is "We don't have an article on that", then Wikipedia has failed me. If Wikipedia's response is "GNAA's website is X, and we couldn't verify any information beyond that, but here are some blogs", then it has performed much better. Steve

On 11/28/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) &lt;alphasigmax(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I don't know where he went to school, but "Warlord of the West" was Dan Kline at (somethingorother).trw.com in the 1991 timeframe. The newsgroup came out of UC Berkeley. It was locally newgrouped by as far as I recall uncredited parties (probably Shannon Appel or one of the local BIFFsters), spread to other nearby commercial and educational institutions, and then if I recall right I sent the first global newgroup for it on a dare in early 1991, though I never was closely involved with the group. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

I was pretty sure that would happen if and when the article was deleted. --Ryan On 11/28/06, David Ashby &lt;humble.fool(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

On Wed, 29 Nov 2006 09:25:43 +0200, Bogdan Giusca &lt;liste(a)dapyx.com&gt; wrote: I'm on it... :o) Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG