On 23/08/2011 19:54, Ken Arromdee wrote: > On Tue, 23 Aug 2011, Charles Matthews wrote: >> But "bias" of the kind he works with is a really unhelpful concept for >> us, in practice: especially when trivialised by being "metricated". > > What other way is there to claim bias than being "metricated"? Is he > just > supposed to give his subjective opinion, or just complain that a > particular > thing is being left out of the article? > > You know, "bias" might mean that there is an editorial policy. This is what we usually mean when talking loosely about newspapers, for example: that they deliberately place themselves in positions on political spectra. (I don't think that left-right is the unique way to look at it - for example The Economist is surely a free-market publication but it had little time for Dubya.) Or it might mean types of self-censorship (the French press ignoring politicians' sex lives) or the opposite (tabloid prurience).
We would find all these things problematic in our own articles, and they are all qualitative. The tabloid thing is to slur together "the public interest" with "things the public are interested in". For BLPs we try not to do that; while being uncensored we are supposed to cater for "the general reader" while not including excessive amounts of material that is of interest only to those concerned to boost or dent reputations. To answer the point made: what is "excess" in these cases isn't a matter of numerical rule of thumb. There is a perfectly good test, allied to one of the criteria used for COI: exactly who would be interested in the stuff? That does involve drawing the line, for example, between US politics mavens and the rest of us, but that is worth doing (and those who are too close shouldn't be doing it, cf. COI again). The historians have to get this right at some higher level, and the point at issue is really whether our failure in some cases to anticipate their criteria is "bias" or just honest mistakes. Charles _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
