[WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions

[The Cunctator]

Sometimes I don't understand people. Carcharoth goes to the trouble of
finding his birth date, learning he received the Brazilian Order of Merit,
and lists out some copy errors, but then doesn't fix the page?

I mean, what's the point?

On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 6:17 AM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com>wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 6:15 AM, Sarah Ewart <sarahewart at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 3:46 PM, George Herbert <
> george.herbert at gmail.com>wrote:
> >
> >> Where was Robert Corell's article previously?  Perhaps my search was
> >> inadequate but I didn't find it looking quickly...
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Corell
>
> And no-one has yet created a redirect?
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Corell
>
> He also received the [[Brazilian Order of Scientific Merit]] (I got
> that from "what links here", and then went looking for a source to
> confirm that).
>
> http://www.mct.gov.br/index.php/content/view/11199.html
>
> And from here (IEEE Transactions on Geoscience Electronics, November 1968):
>
> http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=04043245
>
> You can get his birth year (1934) and day (4 November) and other details.
>
> But that is a lucky find. Most sources don't say when he was born, and
> that is generally an indication that comprehensive biographical
> material is scarce, which in turn implies that no-one else has yet
> really written a comprehensive biography.
>
> Which comes back to the point of whether Wikipedia should be the first
> to do so (we can produce something similar to the mini-biographies
> already out there, such as the four that The Cunctator found, which
> are either institutional bios, or conference bios, but we can't go
> beyond that until other sources do, which is generally towards the end
> of someone's career, or at the point when obituaries are written).
>
> It also looks like it was rescued in a rush, six errors in grammar or
> composition:
>
> "is prominent climate scientist"
> "and he formerly as a"
> "to ManyOne Networks, the and Chair"
> "funding global change research"
> The "sustainable development" header has stray formatting
> "and international partnership"
>
> I wonder how many years it would have been before someone copyedited
> it to fix those problems? I guess we will never know now. But this
> feeds into my point about whether such articles should be brought to a
> minimum standard, instead of roughly referenced along with a lot of
> others ones being worked on at the same time, and then the people
> doing this rough-and-ready referencing moving on to other articles?
>
> My standards would be to ensure minimum copyediting standards have
> been met, that the birth year has been found and securely referenced,
> and that a standalone biography (even if only a mini-biography from
> who they work for, or a conference biography, or some form of press
> release) is found and used as a reference.
>
> Carcharoth
>
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