[WikiEN-l] Borderline notable bios (yes, again)

[Jimmy Wales]

/me waves at Andrew Orlowski, confident that this post will be
misrepresented in The Register tomorrow.

Delirium wrote:
> Deleting the articles is of course one way of making sure they contain 
> no low-quality content, but that seems less direct that simply removing 
> the low-quality content while keeping the verifiable content.  In Seth's 
> case, for example, it's undisputed that he formed the Censorware 
> Project, that he either coined or at least popularized the term 
> "censorware", and so on.  I see no reason that an article stating these 
> verifiable and notable facts should be deleted.  If it contains other 
> nonsense, then that nonsense should be removed, rather than used as an 
> excuse to delete the entire article.

Well, the article survived AfD, sensibly enough, even today I notice
that Seth has had to revert vandalism *personally*.  I just now
semi-protected it.

For a few weeks, the article contained this little bit of garbage:

"Finkelstein is, however, legendary for his willingness to mount
personal attacks against those who disagree with him.[citation needed]"

When I met Seth, he explained to me how this happened.  The vandal used
a classic trick... the double edit.  The first edit was the vandalism,
the second edit was innocent.  So if you checked the diffs incorrectly,
you would not see the attack paragraph.

Personal attack:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Seth_Finkelstein&diff=42851913&oldid=42493158

Innocent edit to cover it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Seth_Finkelstein&diff=42854644&oldid=42851913


Is this not sad?  That Seth Finkelstein has to personally monitor his
own entry in Wikipedia?  His situation is similar to that of Xeni
Jardin, for example, who has had to deal with a stalker/attackblog
altering her entry unfairly and then boasting about it on the blog!

Ok, yes, that is sad.  But it is not the saddest part, no.

The saddest part is this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Seth_Finkelstein&diff=56146142&oldid=53417848

A Wikipedian in good standing, with thousands of edits, reads this
obvious personal attack, and instead of *removing* it, chooses instead
to put a {{fact}} template around it.  Ouch.  We need to radically
improve our education of editors to understand that this is NOT THE
RIGHT ANSWER.

If you read something negative about someone, and there is no source,
then either find a _legitimate_ source (and make sure that WE do not
make the negative claim, but rather than we merely report neutrally on
what the claim is), or just remove it... and insist that anyone who
wants to put it back, do so with a legitimate source!

--Jimbo