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

[Andrew Gray]

On 12/07/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> There is a problem with two relatively tiny groups of people that should
> be at least mentioned here.
>
> First, there are the Wikipedia lovers who insist that everything about
> Wikipedia is super duper important and who love to fill Wikipedia with
> Wikipedia fan cruft *and* to work really hard to look up negative
> information about anyone who has ever been hostile to Wikipedia. ...

"It's true so we should have it in and who are you to say otherwise
and you're just deleting information and... they *asked* for deletion?
OMG CENSORSHIP"

This is a slightly hyperbolic paraphrase, but a true one. People get
insanely twitchy if they think something is removed by request; they
*asked* us to remove it? that means they don't want people to know it!
it must be important! we must fight to keep it!

I've encountered this quite a few times. It seems to be a cultural
thing - I don't think I'd be wrong to guess it's a much more common
attitude among Americans than Europeans, and among a certain type of
them. There's not much we can do except be tactful and occasionally
wield the Big Stick Of Editorial Common Sense.

"No, the names of his four-year-old twin daughters are not notable.
Yes, they're verifiable if you go and... oh, you did go and look up
the county registers did you? That's nice. But it's not important. It
causes the guy undue distress, and our readers don't need to know it."

I mean, trivia stuff. I've seen a few requests on OTRS from people
saying things like "I guess you have an article on me, and that's
fair, but can you take out the fact that I was born on September 2nd
and just have it say 1958?" Or the seemingly inexhaustible list of
minor porn starlets who, quite justifiably, write to us and say "your
article on me has my real name! take it out! I'm scared!"... Articles
are filling up with information that is, at best, borderline trivia
(and at worst actively stupid), and we have a (default?) culture that
seems to encourage adding it.

There are times that I think adopting the rule jp.wiki has on
biographies would be a damn good idea...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk