On 12/12/13, 11:16 PM, David Gerard wrote:
On 12 December 2013 12:25, Mark <[email protected]> wrote:
Between tendentious negative information and self-promoting positive
information, I worry that the overall quality level of our biographies of
living people ends up poor in a great many cases, especially cases outside
the top tier of biographies visible enough to draw significant third-party
editors (Barack Obama, Fidel Castro, that kind of thing). But it would be
better to understand the problem, if it is one, in more detail.
I don't think this is, though - when people are this unambiguously
famous, I think our biographies hold up in terms of content, even when
the prose flows badly.
Perhaps I worded this badly; I think I actually agree with you, and was
trying to say something similar. When people are famous enough that
their biographies draw significant third-party editing, I think we
actually *do* do an okay job. The prose of [[en:Barack Obama]] may not
be ideal, but it's clearly not a puff piece written by his press
secretary (on the one hand), nor a hit piece written by his political
opponents (on the other). It's all the rest of the biographies of living
people (which are a *lot*) where I worry our quality is poor. BLPs of
people below the top tier of fame seem to attract a disproportionate
amount of unfortunately motivated editing.
My main point is that I think we may have a big quality issue here, of
being (so far) simply unable to cover a class of articles to a
consistently high standard. Rather than a narrow issue of personal
attacks solvable by more diligent application of OTRS responses and the
like.
-Mark
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list
[email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe>
