On Fri, 3 Jun 2011, Rob wrote: > We're just recording what has already been discussed in 132 reliable > sources. We're not "victimizing" him any more than we are victimizing > Silvio Berlusconi > (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlusconi#Sexual_scandals) or John > Edwards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Edwards_extramarital_affair) > or John Kerry > (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kerry_military_service_controversy) > or Anthony Weiner > (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Weiner#Twitter_controversy). > The Kerry example is especially pertinent as both it and the Santorum > article are an entire Wikipedia article about things that other people > made up about the subject of the article.
Part of it is a matter of degree. The article on the John Kerry controversy isn't the #2 search for "Kerry" on the Internet. Part of it is that we're talking about different types of things. The Kerry controversy is ultimately about factual claims, and therefore whether our article harms John Kerry depends on whether we give undue weight to those claims. This one isn't about factual claims; it's about creating an unpleasant association, so avoiding undue weight isn't enough to keep it from doing harm. And there aren't 132 reliable sources; there was a post on BLPN which analyzed the problems with a bunch of sources (several were self-published, for instance. Of course they had to be left in as part of a "compromise"), but there are so many "sources" that nobody could possibly check them all. Furthermore, the large number of sources is itself part of the abuse of the system--sources are often links and raise the page's Google rank, just like including big templates. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
