On 5/8/05, Rick <giantsrick13(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
Sarah, I'm still at a loss to understand your
argument, and I'm not saying that to be difficult, I
honestly don't understand your objections. In this
particular case, we are discussing a Usenet newsgroup.
This newsgroup "awarded" this guy with their "Kook of
the Millenium" award. Would this newsgroup not be the
best source for information on to whom they they gave
the award?
RickK
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