Talk:China Foreign Affairs University

message: But I did address the "original research" objection, above. My story is clearly OR. Its claims do not belong in WP. I'm only saying that the fact of the existence of this inside story of CFAU belongs in WP (as a reference in the CFAU article's External Links section).
Of course, in the general case, this method could be used to get WP to point to all sorts of trash that the OR policy is reasonably intended to exclude. I don't believe there is a WP policy that directly addresses when references like this are appropriate. My arguments above can be considered "original reasoning."
I think WP should formulate a general policy, because this kind of situation is likely to arise often. To abstract the issue: We have a somewhat important topic, but it's not notable or newsworthy enough to have gotten space in a "reputable publication." Yet a substantial quantity of plausible (though not authoritative) information is readily available (if you know about it).
Now consider these modern trends: 
* An exploding number of information sources (yes, those usually but not always contemptible blogs). 
*A steady decline in the integrity of "reputable publications" — academic publications increasingly corrupted by commercial forces (see e.g. my Abusing Kids for Money); newspapers continually retrenching as aging readers die off or go blind, unreplaced.
* Increasingly tight control by important institutions (government and corporations) over revelations of highly newsworthy information about themselves.
Is this a world where an information resource like WP should be puritanical about excluding all reference to knowledge not vetted by a "reputable publication"?
Note that money is a great advantage in getting into "reputable publications." Corporations will generally be able to get their propaganda in there.
Note also that books, generally, are clearly not "reputable publications" (though they can be, given a reputable author), so this issue involves not only blogs and personal websites.
Consider also one of the great potential advantages of WP: a compendium of knowledge that includes a previously unthinkable number of obscure topics. This advantage would be greatly curtailed by an over-scrupulous rejection of knowledge not vetted by "reputable publications."
I fully appreciate that there are oceans of garbage always striving for exposure anywhere it can be had. Some judgment is necessary. (Some principles from the Reliable sources article would be applicable.) Again, this comment is only about WP references to external works, not about WP content. (And references to opposing/challenging works should normally be welcome.)
The advantage of a rule about "reputable publications" is that it can be more or less objectively adjudicated. I realize that what I'm proposing for references is more complicated, the line less well defined. But in many cases, with some common sense, the criterion I spelled out earlier — Is it helpful to a wikipedia user seeking knowledge about the article's subject? — would point to a fairly straightforward determination.
—Urielw 15:59, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Response to RfC II (with refreshed indent) 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on China Foreign Affairs University. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20120113235900/http://www.cfau.edu.cn/cfauEN/index.html to http://www.cfau.edu.cn/cfauEN/index.html
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Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 03:26, 5 August 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified