On 5/8/05, Rick <giantsrick13(a)yahoo.com> wrote: Hi Rick, I'm not sure I should post here much more on this, because people must be getting fed up, but in brief (and because it's you): The newsgroup *was* the best source of information about their Kook of the Millenium award. I was only concerned about actually naming the award winner because that person is a private individual who seems to be upset about the whole thing. There are other award winners (Kook of the Month or whatever) who are public figures: Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, and so on, and it seems fine to name them (though a bit silly). But I felt a line was crossed when Wikipedia named a private individual who didn't want to be named in an article about a subject with no encyclopedic merit, where we lose nothing by removing his name. That's all. It was an argument-from-kindness, which obviously didn't go down well. It raises the larger issue of whether Usenet should ever be used as a source in Wikipedia when it concerns individuals, or topics other than the workings of Usenet itself, and my argument was that the name of the award winner in this case counted as a non-Usenet topic. If you're going to argue that individuals, once named and described in a certain way on Usenet, become Usenet topics, where Usenet may be used as a source, then anyone could create a WP article called "Opinions about Jews on Usenet," or "Anti-Islam newsgroups" and could proceed to repeat all the anti-Semitic or anti-Islam slurs you routinely find in certain newsgroups, perhaps even naming individuals and repeating what was said about them. And why stop at naming them? If the newsgroup gives out their home and work addresses, maybe we could do that too, and claim only to be quoting Usenet, which the article, after all, is about. Do you see my point? Slippery slope. Another editor discussing this elsewhere used the phrase "garbage in, garbage out." Sarah