Re: [WikiEN-l] Criticism sections on bios of living people

Erik Moeller wrote: I beg to differ. In many cases they are not at all necessary. In fact, they are often symptoms of the shoddy research, writing, and organization that has gone into so many of our most problematic biographies. I'm not at all saying that criticisms should be omitted, or a neutral point of view abandoned. But their consolidation into separate "Criticisms" sections is generally undesirable, I would say. Yes, but the reaction should really be put in context, not put in a "Criticisms" section. Doing the latter causes a number of problems: 1. If you put the action (or inaction) under a Criticisms section in order to address the reaction to it, it implies that the action (or inaction) is deserving of criticism. This is not a neutral presentation. 2. If you simply talk about the criticisms without first discussing what gave rise to them, you're almost certainly not giving the person's accomplishments enough credit. 3. For people who have been involved in a significant amount of controversy, putting all of this material in a criticisms section makes the article unbalanced. It may also generate disproportionate attention to the criticisms. Again, this is a failure to create a neutral article. 4. Discussing actions and discussing criticisms in separate sections typically creates a lot of redundancy. This exacerbates the bloat problem that emerges on many of our controversial topics when they get heavy editor attention. 5. Having a separate Criticisms section encourages people to dump anything they can find in there (much like a Trivia section encourages similar random additions). As a result, they fail to integrate their material into the article and often add stuff that isn't particularly suited for an encyclopedia anyway. The guidelines are perhaps adequate, because this is partly a cultural issue. But it's been clear for a while that we have serious systemic and cultural issues on articles dealing with living people. --Michael Snow