[WikiEN-l] Abuse of your services

Fri May 6 21:37:46 UTC 2005

slimvirgin at gmail.com wrote:

>On 5/6/05, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
>
>>slimvirgin at gmail.com wrote:
>>
>>>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
>>>John Smith won the KOM award, we shouldn't include Smith's name,
>>>because to do so is to use Usenet as a *source of information
>>>regarding a subject other than itself*. 
>>>
>>>
>>Whoa, that's getting pretty epistemiologically twisty... "A person
>>named 'J-o-h-n S-m-i-t-h' was mentioned as KotM on Usenet, but we
>>make no claim as to who that designates in real life".
>>
>
>That's not what I meant. I was using the name John Smith only as an
>example. My argument about Edmond is that we shouldn't name him at
>all, not that we should give him a pseudonym.
>
No, I was just echoing your use of "John Smith" as a generic example.

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... :-)

Stan