On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 6:51 PM, Fred Bauder <[email protected]> wrote: >> Hi all, >> >> I'm not sure about the history of this article, but it it was recently >> brought to my attention via Facebook. >> >> My take on this article is that it is an abuse of Wikipedia's notability >> guidelines. The article goes out of its way to cite lots of sources, but >> I >> do not believe that being mentioned in the mainstream media is both a >> necessary and sufficient condition for notability. In this particular >> case >> it sounds like someone with a lot of name recognition used that name >> recognition to get media attention for their smear campaign. This media >> attention was then used to justify a Wikipedia article. This is an >> excellent >> reductio ad absurdum case that brings a boundary condition of our >> notability >> guidelines to light. It is, quite frankly, manufactured notability and >> IMO >> it does deserve an article. >> >> When you Google for Santorum's last name this Wikipedia article is the >> second result. This means that people who are looking for legitimate >> information about him are not going to find it right away - instead we >> are >> going to feed them information about a biased smear campaign rather than >> the >> former Senators BLP. >> >> Please discuss. >> >> -- >> Brian Mingus >> Graduate student >> Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab >> University of Colorado at Boulder > > Yeh, it's nuts. I thought it was a hoax at first. > > Fred
Oh no, not a hoax. Dan Savage is quite serious about it. Whatever it is, it's correct in reporting that it's existence had a negative effect on Santorum's political career, and it's arguably sufficiently notable to keep if it derailed a potential credible presidential run. -- -george william herbert [email protected] _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
