slimvirgin(a)gmail.com wrote:
On 5/6/05, Sean Barrett <sean(a)epoptic.org>
wrote:
Just for the record, where is the policy stating
that Usenet /cannot/ be
used? I'm not being sarcastic; I genuinely don't know.
The relevant policies state that Wikipedia sources must be published
sources, and that the publishers must be, in some sense, reputable,
authoritative, and credible. These terms are impossible to define, but
they boil down to relying on publishing houses that have some form of
fact-checking procedure, or peer-review if it's an academic subject.
Sometimes the degree of fact-checking will be minimal, but there
should be some infrastructure within which information is checked,
complaints are responded to, and obviously authors are usually not
anonymous.
None of these things applies to Usenet. It is pretty much the
definition of a source that should not be used (except in very limited
circumstances as primary-source material). See [[Wikipedia:No original
research]] for more details.
Are you looking at the same page as I am? It notes that for
non-academic subjects, "it is impossible to pin down a clear
definition of 'reputable'", proposes a series of litmus tests to
try, and suggests one's intuition as a fallback. The page also
mentions that a "mix of primary and secondary sources is preferred".
In practice I agree, the main value of old Usenet postings is
as a primary source, for instance, technologies were often
announced and discussed by the principals involved. (Noteworthy
examples include Berners-Lee's announcement of the World Wide
Web itself, and Linus' announcment of Linux on comp.os.minix,
which is linked from our Linux article in fact.)
Stan