from Mr FrankNFuckYou himself goes wacky in another display of a Rocky Horror Reasoning Show.

quoth the gothharemmeister:

.... The "reliable sourcing" guidelines are guidelines at best also, and need a lot of work per subject area. You do realise that for Scientology there are plenty of cases where Usenet articles are suitable sources, because that's where the history of Scientology 1995-2000 actually happened? - David Gerard (talk) 12:36, 21 January 2008 (UTC)


Yes, folks, because Mr Gerard tilted at Scientology Windmills on AbuseNet for years, before graduating to the same thing but with java, Wikipedia talk pages, UseNet is a reliable source.

Nevermind that it does not meet any of WP's RS criteria.

It's because Gerard said so. You know, like me being a puppet, and an attack platform patron.

And he blocked RachelBrown because she had the nerve to claim that the Jewish Year Book was a reliable source.

Give credit where it's due - Gerard is 100% correct on this. Not only is Usenet a reliable source on a variety of different subjects, but so are other areas of the internet that Wikipedia moronically shys away from.

To not use Usenet as a reliable source on Scientology issues is not smart. But, then again, the Reliable Source guideline on Wikipedia has always left a lot to be desired.

Usenet is the mother of the cult of the amateur. If it is a source it is a primary source at best. One that needs to vetted and analyzed by actual scholars. Otherwise it is no more a reliable source than reading your neighbors's 15 year old daughters email. Much of what is wrong with WP has it's roots in Usenet. I thought you understood how an encyclopedia worked.

The insights that will be lost by not using Usenet as a source is nothing compared to utter vain drivel and nonsense you will keep out.

While I'm sure that reliable sources did quote Usenet on articles on Scientology, and those RS articles could be referenced as sources on WP, I don't see how your assertion holds water.

Do you understand what a reliable source is in the context of publishing Wikipedia? How is Usenet any different from Wikipedia Review in that regard?

Usenet is/was an electronic bulletin board where anyone could post anything. To directly reference it as a reliable source and be allowed to do so would render WP's attempts to adhere to its own distinctions on what sources have editorial oversight, etc, an even more chaotic mess than it even is.

But if anyone can show that Usenet meets WP's, or any other publisher's, criteria for a reliable source, than maybe all those nekkid shorting folks can post their Freedom of Information Act requests showing stocks that have been nekkid shorted up their wazzoos from the SEC to usenet, then quote from the links as a reliable source.

If someone posted an "article" (Usenet doesn't publish articles, it's a dumb relay service) from a Usenet group that itself references a real article from a reliable source (book, newspaper, etc), then you go and find the primary source and use it, not the bulletin board it was copied to.

I'm interested in hearing more from you Jeff on how an internet message board of anonymous contributors with no oversight can be a primary source for an encyclopedia. On the articles that I edited, even those with good intentions trying to post information they gleaned to be right as rain, such reasoning would not hold water to other WP editors' scrutiny.

No one should be saying that all Usenet sources should be created equal - they shouldn't. But to act as if Usenet was not a good Scientology resource in the mid-to-late 1990s or, to make it more current, blogs aren't a great source of political, social, or cultural information today, is to live in a relative stone age.

Face it - books don't always exist, the media often gets it wrong and/or gets it late. It's high time for a knowledge project to recognize that.



Easily - recognized as a primary source, it can be judged on its merits as such. Historians do it all the time with primary sources. The debate on a talk page about sources is a good one in this case - while there's next to no need to use Usenet for an article on the US Constitution (having a wealth of primary and secondary material available), a situation like Scientology, with its litigious nature and its somewhat fringe status, is perfect for Usenet sourcing, given the organization.

I was most definitely a rules-monger on WP when I was there, but if there's one rule that needed to be compeltely reworked, if not outright dumped, it was the reliable sourcing thing. Quite simply, what makes a reliable source for A does not make one for B, C, and D. Professionals know this already.

I'm sorry, but using text in a WP article with a www link direclty to a post on "alt.whatever..." as its source is not something anyone should be doing.

If you could give WR a specific example of how you can do that without breaking WP:OR rules with a straight face and not a slanted agenda for desperately seeking sources, I'm all ears.

Tom Cruise declares himself El Ron's Heir to being Scientology Pope on usenet? Fine. Let the New York Times publish an article on that occurrence, and let WP'ians edit the NYT material into WP on that happening.

But a WP'ian editing in a "I read it on Usenet" sourced section on WP is no better than the nutjob who sat in front of his Telly watching Jim Cramer's Mad Money, then proceeding to describe his first-person experience of the special effects that Krusty Cramer shot off during his show, into the applicable WP article.

I know you want information to be free, Jeff, and I enjoyed reading your battle on WP, I really don't see how such a well educated person as yourself could justify the use of a bulletin board that anyone can edit as a primary source for anything.

I remember reading archives of the Naked Short Selling article on WP where people had personally sent off to the SEC (stock regulators) for documents on stock trading statistics. Then when they posted links to those official documents on WP, it was reverted as Original Research, even though the information was on SEC letterhead, etc.

You see, WP editors, and usenet contributors, and WR, are not reliable sources. They may be middlemen for reliable sources, as WP strives to be, but someone has to provide some sort of accreditation, oversight, and blessing in the middle. Regardless of what value one thinks those middlemen provide. I've actually found the middlemen on topics that I edited on WP, deemed reliable sources, are corrupt themselves, but that's another issue trailing off of this one that leads to more questions than answers.

You've got to a least draw a line in the first line of defense against unreliable sourcing: at least get your sources from something that claims to be oversighted, controlled publisher of information.

If you asked Larry and Sergei if their Usenet archives should be directly quoted by anyone as a factual and reliable source for anything, they wouldn't be giving you any positive response. Proper Stanford education and all that.

That's the problem. Historians use primary sources, yes. They are trained to do so. The vast majority of Wikipedians are not in any way equipped to deal with primary sources. That's why we have all these policies about "reliable secondary sources"; your average Joe doesn't know how to use other types of sources, and your average Joe is what most users are like.

Frankly, speaking as someone with a history degree and a level of "training" - the idea that you need "training" is bogus on its head. Reliability, more often than not, comes from corroboration, not from training, and one recognizes the legitimacy of a source by track record and by that same level of corroboration.

To put it another way, if training was all one needed, you wouldn't see "Scholars for 9/11 Truth" or fawning biographies on certain historical world leaders. It goes beyond that.

The collaborative model, in essence, does an even better job than a singular historian can in this specific instance. Example: right now, I'm compiling information for a biography I'm writing. Much of the information I'm forced to use is primary in nature because of the topic matter. How will I know how to use it properly? Not my history training, but through a) seeing similar usage in other areas, and then B) my level of trust of the source. If you have four or five editors working on a section in Scientology, and a Usenet source exists for something, the proper way to go about it is to take the source on its merit - not that it was posted on Usenet, but that the forum is typically reliable on the matter at hand, that the person posting the information is reliable on the matter at hand, etc.

To shut down Usenet because "it's a primary source" (not always true, but that's a different discussion) or because people "aren't equipped" is a horrid fault. It's a fault for those who are "trained" and can no longer use otherwise reliable sources, and a fault for the greater compilation of knowledge, where Wikipedia is attempting to set it up as one of the premier sources of knowledge and is actively denying good information because of an arbitrary, nonsensical, one-size-fits-all holdover from the early days.

The trouble is that Wikipedia contributors don't always display the judgment needed to use these primary sources in a principled manner. Under the current structure, any rule you set up that will allow good use of primary sources will also allow bad use, and, as Glass bead game observes, the ratio of good to bad is unsatisfying. The same holds true for original research - another thing historians do all the time.

If the rules are ever loosened, there needs to be some expert policy in place…but Wikipedia is in no position to manage that, either: empowered hacks would be dubbed experts and granted more ownership rights than they already enjoy, while those who are actually experts might not be accepted as such by those who find them personally distasteful or disagree with their points of view - any process resembling community procedures being inherently likely to produce the same results as RfA's.

I don't know much about your editing history, having seen you mainly in project-level discussions, but I can see why someone who creates a lot of articles about relatively current events would find these rules horribly restrictive. Having mostly visited established articles related to politics or religion, getting rid of any less-than-stellar source is the only way to keep things sane.

So you're just not going to draw a line anywhere on sourcing information? How bout I go over to the local Institution for the Very Very Nervous (many of whom are probably WP admins) and quote them on WP as sources?

Let's have a case study. What's a Usenet primary source that can be used, and one that can't. And the reasoning behind it.

On a side note, I wonder how professional writers, like the sort holding up Hollywood by its short ones right now, would feel about their pirated scripts on usenet being used as a reference for fanboy articles on WP.

I'd just like to know how a Wikipedian is going to be allowed to draw the line between information and myths, conspiracy theories from tinhatters, how many Gerbils movie stars might have up their colons at any one time, etc. Consensus? Hmmmm. So when multiple editors decide that this "information" has been verified by some sort of purportedly unbiased, professional, third party and so it can be included - wait, that's what reliable sourcing is about. Nevermind.

I don't believe that. A formal education in the process of critically examining historical records is not a pre-requisite for writing a great historical piece anywhere, but it f-ing helps....

I refuse to believe that your education hasn't vastly enhanced your ability to evaluate and select material.

Besides that, there's the stipulation that the person must be reasonable…but anyone can edit, and Wikipedia is known to draw opinionated contributors as well as ignorant ones. As long as there's no entry requirement, the rules have to be tight enough to ensure that the problems they introduce are kept within manageable bounds.

I don't know if it's possible with such a broad base of subjects. My experience is that it isn't.



In the sense that I know where sources are found, and thus are able to put them in context due to more information? Okay, sure. But it's not anything I couldn't also do as an amaeur. Being a professional in these cases by no means creates some sort of ability to do these things properly. For instance:



Yet in academia, with some sort of "entry requirement," we see the same types of cranks and ignorance. The idea of professionalism does not necessarily confirm reliability, which is ironic given the topic at hand.

Where's it say that?



http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...ser:RachelBrown


20:39, 30 May 2007 Dmcdevit (Talk | contribs) blocked "RachelBrown (Talk | contribs)" () with an expiry time of indefinite ‎ (Per ArbCom: abusive sockpuppetry, see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...puppets_banned)
20:40, 25 December 2005 David Gerard (Talk | contribs) blocked "RachelBrown (Talk | contribs)" with an expiry time of 1 week ‎ (gross sockpuppetry)

There's a lot of history here. Try reading User:Zordrac/Poetlister and

http://nonbovine-ruminations.blogspot.com/...08/regrets.html.

Scientology "critic" hubris. You might as well say news.admin.* groups are a history of spam.

The thing about alt.religion.scientology is, its hard to tell the "anti-" kooks from the "pro-" kooks. Been that way for years - the two sides are rapt in mutual fascination, and mirror each other's rhetoric and tactics without acknowledgement. So, while the real history of scientology was happening in courtrooms, tax offices, and indoctrination centers, ARS has attempted to form a record. Only its not a very good record - there's a huge amount of wilfully inaccurate and partisan posting there.

For me, the question is - has much of that unreliable material made it to WP as "fact" already?

Mimetic rivalry, driven by mutual contempt and mutually incompatible belief systems, yielding shreklisch drama.

Run over to Making Light, the blog that serves as a hub for SFF authors and editors who've been around for a while, and you will see that they think that excluding Usenet means that we lose a large set of very reliable sources for that genre.

Your first error is that there is "no oversight". As anyone who lived through that period can tell you, a lot of groups had a great deal of oversight.