User talk:Tarc

santorum
Since you have a Wikipedia account I take it you're familiar with Wikipedia's rules on verifiability. However, Wiktionary is not Wikipedia, and attestation policies are different on Wiktionary. On Wiktionary it is perfectly acceptable to use a blog or personal website as a verification of a term or sense. After all, languages and their words are not used just by 'notable sources'; they are used by everyday people as well and we document their language too. However, we also require that sources are durably archived, which ensures that people who want to look up the sources for terms will be able to do so in, say, ten years' time. Usenet is considered durably archived for our purposes, since copies of Usenet posts are archived by a wide variety of parties, while personal websites or blogs alone are not (unless there is some guarantee that they are). —CodeCat 13:58, 7 January 2012 (UTC)


 * So if I go find somewhere where Usenet feeds still exists, get with a few friends where we start a thread about "pulling an obama", where "obama" is defined as "the mixture of cocaine and semen you get when you blow your dealer in the back of a limo", I can go add that to the obama entry here? Tarc 15:53, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
 * In that specific case no, because you can't "pull a mixture of cocaine and semen", so the citation doesn't support the definition given. But if you can find citations that meet the criteria for inclusion, then that sense could indeed be added. Rare terms usually pass on the third point, which reads: Usage in permanently recorded media, conveying meaning, in at least three independent instances spanning at least a year. As you can imagine, not just any randomly made-up word meets that criterium, but despite the initial misgivings of the Wiktionary community, santorum was found to fit those criteria, as it could be shown to be in actual use for more than a year, with three uses independent of each other, in a permanently recorded medium, and conveying a meaning as opposed to merely mentioning it. —CodeCat 16:44, 7 January 2012 (UTC)