[WikiEN-l] Re: So what do we do about this?

Thu Oct 20 16:41:06 UTC 2005

And if the "guy on the internet" is notable enough to warrant citation
as an interesting/informed opinion, then that's great. (i.e. the
Howard Dean example)

But if one is assigning a POV to a non-notable figure, then that's not
a good use of blogs as a source.

If Jimbo wrote something on his user page about Wikipedia, we could
cite it in the article on Wikipedia. If I wrote something on my user
page about Wikipedia, it doesn't belong in any article. Why? Because,
in regards to this topic, I'm not at all notable. (Something which
implies nothing negative, in my opinion) Allowing excessively
non-notable opinions into articles goes down an unpleasant slippery
slope: why require citation at all? "[[User:Fastfission]], of
Wikipedia, thinks that Einstein was totally wrong in his math, though
no physicists share that opinion." Instead of NPOV, you end up with
Particularist POV -- a thousand POVs, none of which are notable. Which
isn't the goal of NPOV, I'm fairly sure.

FF

On 10/19/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Alphax wrote:
>
> >What about if the author has blogged about (some current event) that
> >they witnessed or attended?
> >
> >
> That still seems like a shaky source.  That's basically saying, "some
> guy on the internet claims he saw this happen".  If I "blogged" about
> witnessing an event on my Wikipedia User page, could we cite that as a
> source?
>
> -Mark
>
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