[WikiEN-l] Abuse of your services

Fri May 6 20:38:53 UTC 2005

slimvirgin at gmail.com (slimvirgin at gmail.com) [050507 05:57]:
> On 5/6/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> > slimvirgin at gmail.com (slimvirgin at gmail.com) [050507 05:25]:

> > > Right. If he's named as a kook (or anything) somewhere vaguely
> > > reputable, we can use it. But we can't allow Usenet to determine who
> > > is or isn't notable.

> > On that basis, we wouldn't have articles about Usenet at all. We do,
> > therefore your assertion that Usenet notability is not notability at all
> > ever is evidently not the case.

> I'm struggling to understand why people can't see the difference here
> between using something as a primary and a secondary source. We can
> use Usenet as a source of information about itself, and about its
> awards. What we can't do is use it as a secondary source of
> information about someone or something else. Even if it's true that

Perhaps because you appear to be alternating between the general case and
this specific case and it isn't clear from each message which is the
current context. In the general case, of course Usenet content is to be
salted appropriately; in specific cases, we use editorial judgement. Case
by case.

In this specific case, not including Wollmann's name would be ridiculous.
In addition, if he had not made his name a curse through assiduous effort
on Usenet (spamming, personal attacks, abuse of ISP abuse processes to an
actually remarkable degree) and outside Usenet (fraudulent behaviour, the
attacks and abuse of complaint processes) to such a notable degree that
people needed to document it searchably, there would be no negative
consequences of bringing up his name at all. You do appear to be ignoring
this.

Usenet is not a fixed and relied-upon source like a peer-reviewed journal,
but in the *vast* majority of cases, people are who they say they are and
made their posts. (Modulo anomalies like the [[sporgery]] on
[[alt.religion.scientology]].)

We have lots of sources of dubious reliability on Wikipedia; we sort them
out using (a) editorial judgement and (b) not insulting the intelligence of
the reader and assuming they're too stupid to judge a source.

- d.