Wikipedia:Citing self-published blogs

Purpose The purpose of this page is to discuss proposed guidelines for citing blogs in articles. The issue is a complex one and the aim is to come to a reasonable concensus regarding the citation of blogs in articles and to explain the scope and limitations of such a practice. To that end this page was born of this discussion and shall hopefully continue the groundwork laid there.

Proposed Points

Blogs as op-eds: The point has been raised that blogs can be seen as opinion columns from the newspaper. Their content is not presented as facts of anything other than the writer's view on a given subject. This allows you to cite the blog in an article as such: "According to John Smith author of "John's Daily Tech Blog" he feels that Harry's new virus scanner does a very poor job". This doesn't allow you to make statements like "Some say Harry's new virus scanner is poor."

Verifibility: Being able to reasonable verify who wrote the blog is necessary to being able to source it as an opinion. This ensures that we can determine if this person's opinion is encyclopedic in nature and relevant to the topic at hand.

Scope of relevance: This is the idea that in addition to require that someone be some kind of professional related to the subject matter, there professional position will give their opinion a broader scope. An example of this would be a janitor at company X. While the janitor's opinion on a new company policy that requires that employees shorten bathroom breaks from 15 minutes to 3 minutes may be relevant, his opinion on a new product designed by his companies competitors may not be that relevant, as opposed to say the CEO of company X. These guidelines are a work in progress and by no means set.

• The individual is an verifiable employee of the company that is the subject of the blog.
• The individual is a verifiable employee in a management position of the company or the industry that the company belongs to that is the subject of the blog.
• The individual is a verifiable top level manager in a company and the blog content relates to the company, the industry its a part of, or a related industry.

This is an expansion of WP:V in regards to the policy requiring that authors of self-published sources be either professional researchers or journalists who have been published by credible third parties.

All bloging mediums are equal: If an individual meets the criteria, the site or method from by which they choose to blog should not matter. Bill Gates' opinion on Linux would be equally valuable whether he posted it blog style to a part of the Microsoft website or whether he made it known he had a livejournal and posted the same thing there.