On Thu, 5 May 2005, Delirium wrote:
Geoff Burling wrote:
Usenet is often little more than idle gossip
traded by computer users
waiting for their programs to compile -- & I challenge anyone to offer a
simple rule to determine which posts are unsuitable for citation, & which
are. (I suspect that any such argument will simply be a reprise of the
recent discussion over which pictures are suitable for children, except
that Wikipedia has no way to turn off Usenet citations.)
That sounds like a notability argument, which is another matter
entirely. There are plenty of non-notable things not worth a mention in
Wikipedia. However, I'm not sure the alt.usenet.kooks "KOTM award" is
one of them---I had heard of it before coming to Wikipedia, and it's
somewhat well-known in the net-culture world. Not quite the [[IgNobel
Awards]] --- another set of "anti-awards" --- but not entirely
unheard-of either.
That was not my intent: by saying "idle gossip traded by computer users
waiting for their programs to compile" I was trying to emphasize the fact
many -- if not most -- Usenet users did not take their posting seriously,
thus if a Wikipedian documents an assertion with only a cite from a
Usenet post, it is the same as saying "It must be true; I read it on the
Internet" -- a comment that allows me to elicit peals of laughter from
librarians for some reason.
Because Usenet, Slashdot, blogs & similar fora allow anyone to post
about anything -- they do. Discussion threads can lead all over the place,
& a thoughtful contribution can be followed by an off-topic vulgar insult.
If a Wikipedian cites something that she/he saw on Usenet, how can the
user be sure that the original statement was made by a qualified expert &
not just another opinionated & uninformed loudmouth?
Stan perhaps made my point better later in this thread:
Another way to think about this is how you would write
up policy.
Would you declare "Usenet is not credible"? Some of the postings
to it are authentic and authoritative though, so you'd have to
introduce some way to distinguish. "No naming of non-notable
people?" Then you're just in the never-ending argument about
notability. "Have a sense of decency?" Nice, but too subjective
for WP editors to use, given how many of them seem to fall
outside the three-sigma range for human behavior... :-)
The easiest test for reliability of any information posted on Usenet is
to quote it at second hand -- from a book, magazine or website that has
quoted it. In other words, someone else has bet their own reputation on
the specific post as being credible. And in my experience, everything
that is credible on Usenet eventually appears in another place. Which
leads to another test: if a post gets explicit confirmation outside of
Usenet, the post should be cited _if_ it is integral to the article.
An example would be a link to the original Usenet post about the
Pentium bug, which IIRC was first announced on Usenet -- but had been
confirmed by countless other reports.
But if the material only exists in a Usenet post, then the post should
not be cited.
Geoff