From: wikien-l-bounces@Wikipedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-bounces@Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Guy Chapman aka JzG
...who has to close this mess: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/R obert_Baden-Powell%27s_sexual_orientation
A whole article devoted to speculation in a couple of books on the sexuality of the founder of Scouting, apparently because nobody could agree how little of it should go in the main article.
The word count given to such speculation between the two articles, is, according to my rough and ready count, more or less equivalent to the combined count for his military career AND the founding of the Scout Movement. Can we say "undue weight"?
I was looking up some recent historical figure yesterday - can't remember who - and the second para of the article was devoted to speculation about his homosexuality. I thought that was really weird. I'm not uncomfortable with famous people being homosexual, but I'm just not sure that we need to give such prominence and weight. It's almost as if such people are being used as posthumous pin-up boys for modern day homosexual folk, when the reality is that we are writing biographical articles about the careers and achievements of these people, not about who poked whom. This information should go at the bottom, maybe in a trivia section.
Peter (Skyring)