[WikiEN-l] Abuse of your services

Fri May 6 23:24:36 UTC 2005

slimvirgin at gmail.com stated for the record:

> On 5/6/05, Sean Barrett <sean at 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.

So, to summarize, there is no policy stating that Usenet is forbidden as 
a source.  Some people (you, for instance) do not consider it to be 
reputable source, but nothing forbids some other people (me, for 
instance) from disagreeing.  And, most importantly, there is no policy 
permitting anti-Usenetters to delete Usenet-based material /just 
because/ it originated on Usenet.

Certainly, Usenet contains a mindboggling level of garbage.  It also 
contains real facts.  Material from a group like 
alt.politics.usa.constitution should be scrutinized much more strictly 
than that from a group like sci.space.moderated, but in the end, Usenet 
is just as usable as a source as any Web site, popular magazine, or book 
from a library.

-- 
  Sean Barrett     | When you smell an odorless gas,
  sean at epoptic.com | it is probably carbon monoxide.