Wikipedia:Mediation Cabal/Cases/2009-06-30/Abbywinters.com

Where is the dispute?
Abbywinters.com Talk:Abbywinters.com

Who is involved?

 * User:Adell_1150
 * User:Law
 * User:Iamcuriousblue

What is the dispute?
User:Adell_1150 (me) added a sentence to the section in this article about a recent police raid on Abbywinters.com. The sentence contains references to some blogs; some of these blogs have a large(ish) number of comments discussing the raid. The included sentence merely notes these blogs existence, and (so far as I'm aware) no fact in the article relies on anything in the blog comments.

User:Law has several times deleted this sentence on the grounds that: chatter is not a reliable source. nor are forums

My belief is that including these links is valid so long as we don't rely on them for facts, but instead merely note their existence. For example, I found a Wikipedia article on Stormfront, a pro-Nazi discussion board, including a link to the board itself; having that on Wikipedia doesn't require (I hope) that that anything in Stormfront be taken as authoritative or unbiased. Noting the existence of these discussions about AbbyWinters seems to be useful because the site generates an unusual degree of pro- and anti- discussion for what is a relatively small site.

User:Iamcuriousblue: (The sentence that is under dispute: "The raid and its implications have since become an active discussion topic on web forums and blogs").

I'm only peripherally involved and have not taken part in the edit war in question. However, even though I believe the police raid on G Media is notable and highly relevant to the article, like Law, I do not believe that the fact that it has generated internet discussion to rise to the standard of WP:NOTABILITY.

I'll also add that I do not consider the discussion thread to be in any sense a reliable source – the discussions in question make all manner of claims about the business practices of Garion Hall and G Media, but the nature of the sources do not remotely rise to the level of WP:VERIFY. Even though none of these assertions have been added to the article, a consequence of using these sources in the citation may be to have later editors start adding these unverified assertions to the article once they've seen them in an already-cited source.

What would you like to change about this?
User:Adell_1150 would like to include the sentence. User:Law would like to delete it. We'd both like to avoid the article being locked due to a revert war.

How do you think we can help?
We'd like a ruling on whether it's valid to include these links on that basis.

Administrative notes
If anyone has this page watchlisted, could you they please reply within 3 days? Thanks. Xavexgoem (talk) 17:28, 25 October 2009 (UTC)