I'm not convinced that this particular neologism will have the staying power of the one immortalising Sir Thomas Crapper http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crapper 8 letters, three syllables doth not a four letter word make, and the term itself is somewhat more obscure. I suspect that unless further flames are added to the fire, such as it provoking a sea change in Wikipedia policy, it will fade into obscurity. WereSpielChequers On 3 June 2011 01:11, Rob <gamaliel8(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Over a hundred years after Thomas Crapper plied his trade as a plumber his name and especially the first four letters of it are still in daily use. But I would be surprised if in twenty years time santorum is still used in the sense Dan Savage intended, and I hope that at some point in the future Wikipedia will come to the view that notability can sometimes be transient. Of course there is the possibility that this neologism has more staying power than I thought, but in any event Mr Santorum is better off with articles like http://www.rollcall.com/issues/56_84/-203455-1.html and a neutrally written Wikipedia article explaining that his name was used for this neologism as an attack on him rather than just leaving it to sites that explain the word without the context of why it was coined. As for the Google rank, I don't know how search engines will work in years to come, but I would be surprised if they didn't consider such things as when a webpage was last updated. WSC On 3 June 2011 16:28, Ken Arromdee <arromdee(a)rahul.net> wrote:

On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 11:26 AM, Ken Arromdee <arromdee(a)rahul.net> 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.

On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 6:37 PM, Ken Arromdee <arromdee(a)rahul.net> wrote: And whenever people mention this, they conveniently forget to mention that the #1 result is Dan Savage's website. We didn't put it out there and we aren't perpetuating it. Wikipedia entries are typically near the top of *any* search result. Sometimes when I create an article on a historical figure it shoots to the top of the results with a day or less, even above pages that have been around for years, edu sites, archives, etc. I don't understand this kind of hairsplitting. Documenting fabrications is acceptable, but only the right kind of fabrications? Aren't, say, the "factual claims" of Birthers about creating "unpleasant associations" with Obama? The last thing we need in Wikipedia is more systemic bias, and this is what that hairsplitting would lead to. That post you mentioned cherry picked a few sources out of the 132. 14 in that post were from The Stranger, the newspaper where Dan Savage's columns originate. The published writing of one of the two principal players in this matter is absolutely a reliable source for this article, as it's been long-established that people are an RS for their own views. The other 20 don't meet the gold standard, but neither are they worthy of being immediately dismissed without discussion. But even if we throw all of them out, that still leaves 98 reliable sources that are not in dispute: major newspapers, academic books, etc. Nitpicking them isn't enough, you just dismiss them out of hand with scare quotes and then try to use that fact against it. Shouldn't an article be well-sourced? If you don't think they've been properly "checked", then post on BLPN and we'll both get some people together to check them. That's what we do here, it's part of the editing process. And adding reliable sources isn't good anymore, it's doubleplusungood "abuse"? This way lies madness if we try to apply this to the encyclopedia. If you want to discuss actual gaming of the system, we can, but let's not label proper editing and reliable sourcing as "abuse". The most frustrating thing about this discussion is the way that editors of long standing feel free to slur everyone that disagrees with them. As the conflict moves from talk page to noticeboard to mailing list and back again (start an RFC already and let's centralize this nonsense!) these editors have attacked normal editing as "abuse" and slurred other editors as rabid anti-Santorum partisans and gay activists. I really thought we were better than this.

I've just tested two searches in google. "Rick Santorum" had our article on the person in second place and our article on the neologism in third place. For "Santorum" we again had the second and third spots, but the order was reversed. In both cases Google gave prime place to a website about the neologism, that website is not part of wikimedia. If I was Rick Santorum I'd be asking Google why both queries gave the number one hit they they gave, but that surely is between him and Google. As for Kerry, the first Wikipedia hit is for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County_Kerry and there are several other people places and things called Kerry in the first few pages. On that search I didn't spot either a negative page about him, or our article about the controversy, so I don't know which comes higher in Google ranking for Kerry. But for "kerry swift boat" the first two hits are both Wikipedia. In my experience Wikipedia articles often come top or close to it in Google searches, and if I was Rick Santorum I would be hoping that the Wikipedia article on the neologism one day overtook the article that currently comes up top in a "Santorum" or "Rick Santorum" search. WSC On 4 June 2011 09:31, James Farrar <james.farrar(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, 4 Jun 2011, WereSpielChequers wrote: Anyone searching for that is specifically searching for the controversy, not just searching for Kerry. If the santorum article only showed up when searching for "santorum sexual slang" there wouldn't be any problem. ... because the Wikipedia article is better than another page that's even worse. Talk about damning with faint praise. He might prefer the Wikipedia article over the other one, because even if it harms him, it doesn't harm him as much as the other one. Trying merely to be less harmful than other web pages is an abominably low standard. We can do better than that.

On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 1:09 PM, Ken Arromdee <arromdee(a)rahul.net> wrote: If you don't think the Birther claims work on an emotional level, then you haven't been paying attention to them. All such conspiracy claims work on an emotional level, as their adherents have proven impervious to the intervention of logic and facts. You're trying to make a distinction between two kinds of "claims" that does not exist. How do we incorporate that kind of hairsplitting into policy? And if we managed to do so, it would create a systemic bias, favoring one kind of targeted fabrication over another.

On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 6:51 PM, David Levy <lifeisunfair(a)gmail.com> wrote: The trouble is, the article is overwritten. This is not a phenomenon restricted to this article, it is common in many "political" or "activist" articles, where some editors try to use *every* source out there to write an article several pages long (sometimes in an attempt to avoid arguments about what to include and what not to include, at other times maybe just by being carried away, or simply by not wanting or knowing how to exercise judgment on what to include and when less is more). I repeat, a shorter article (if done to high standards) would be *just as balanced* and would send the message that this is not a topic that really needs lots written about it. One of the fundamental elements of editorial judgment is to decide what to leave out and how to *summarise* parts of the topic rather than drawing in everything that has been written about the topic. You see many FA-level articles where the main writer has read numerous sources and made a judgment (based on the proportions of coverage given by the main source) on where and how to summarize. That needs doing here. Carcharoth

If you try making the article more succinct, Carcharoth, you may well find editors reverting  you and claiming that you are "deleting reliably sourced material" and censoring what you  don't like. What policy would you cite in response? In a way that is a new problem. Most of our policies are arguably still biased against  such deletions, reflecting a time when many articles were stubs and we were glad to have  any material at all. We have no policy or guideline arguing for succinctness (except  the COATRACK essay perhaps). People are traditionally free to write as much as they  like about anything that has taken their fancy. We have an incredibly detailed article on  toilet paper orientation and other obscure subjects that would never make it into a regular  encyclopedia. "Due weight" only applies to subtopics within an article, not to notable topics  as such.  If the bulk of something is cut in an article, you just go and create a sub-article, pointing to  the 100 sources that have written about it, and create an 8,000-word article about "tail",  while "dog" remains at 500 words. The trouble is, this in-depth coverage of obscure topics is also part of what people like  about Wikipedia. That it can be and is abused for activism, just by sheer weight of  coverage, is obvious. I just don't see an easy solution. We have no policy that an editor  must not use every last source available, and I don't think instituting one is feasible.  A.  --- On Sat, 4/6/11, Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com> wrote:From: Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] BLP extension suggestion To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Date: Saturday, 4 June, 2011, 23:57 On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 6:51 PM, David Levy <lifeisunfair(a)gmail.com> wrote: The trouble is, the article is overwritten. This is not a phenomenon restricted to this article, it is common in many "political" or "activist" articles, where some editors try to use *every* source out there to write an article several pages long (sometimes in an attempt to avoid arguments about what to include and what not to include, at other times maybe just by being carried away, or simply by not wanting or knowing how to exercise judgment on what to include and when less is more). I repeat, a shorter article (if done to high standards) would be *just as balanced* and would send the message that this is not a topic that really needs lots written about it. One of the fundamental elements of editorial judgment is to decide what to leave out and how to *summarise* parts of the topic rather than drawing in everything that has been written about the topic. You see many FA-level articles where the main writer has read numerous sources and made a judgment (based on the proportions of coverage given by the main source) on where and how to summarize. That needs doing here.