[WikiEN-l] oopsie-- mainstream journalists trust Wikipedia again

[Andrew Gray]

On 05/10/2007, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> Andrew Gray wrote:
> > I've said it before, and I'll say it again - a good Wikipedia
> > biography of a living person should, basically, be a draft obituary.
> > Neutral tending to slightly sympathetic*,
>
> No, no asterisk, no "slightly" non-neutral. Just plain neutral, it's one
> of our foundation policies and not really negotiable. Obituaries turn
> into hagiographies far too often.

The original asterisk, incidentally - not sure if it got lost - was
"or, at least, polite where possible...". I was talking about our
editorial style, not our editorial content :-)

The way I see it, "sympathetic" and "neutral" are not incompatible;
neutral is what we choose to say  (and not say) about them, and
sympathetic is how we present it.

It is simply not possible to have no editorial slant whatsoever in a
written piece - at least, not without presenting biographies as
bulletpointed lists, and even then you've just removed the "style"
side of the equation and left the "content" one.

So, our articles are neutral - they cover all material with
appropriate weight, etc - but the editorial voice is, where
appropriate, broadly tending towards the sympathetic side to a small
degree. I don't see anything wrong with this - when dealing with
living people, it's often the only way to make the articles avoid
sounding like charge sheets!

This should not be construed as "make them hagiographies", of course -
editorial decorum and so on - but I don't think it's a fundamentally
damaging concept.
-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk