On 10/1/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On 01/10/06, David Russell
<webmaster(a)davidarussell.co.uk> wrote:
'Vanity articles. An article about a real
person or corporation
which
appears to have been written by the subject, by one of its
employees, or
by a third party hired by the subject to write the article,
regardless
of the notability or otherwise of the subject.'
Looks relatively robust against the sincere variety of rules
lawyer (I
could be wrong) and seems to follow sensibly from the basic content
policies.
The problem I would say is that it's really easy to confuse an article
written by a third party for one written by the subject.
I've submitted a number of articles on freeware, for instance, and had
them deleted as "vanity". I also know of a case where an article on a
professor which was copied straight out of the Vanity Fair Magazine
was listed on VfD as "vanity", and it received a significant majority
of votes for deletion as "obvious vanity" at the time I went to
Borders and noticed the plagiarism.
It seems to me that it's far to difficult to recognize which articles
"have been written by the subject, by one of its employees, or by a
third party hired by the subject to write the article" without having
a large number of false positives or a large number of missed
negatives.
I think it makes much more sense to let people remove those parts of
articles they feel are not written from a neutral point of view, or
are not verifiable. If it turns out there is nothing left, well, then
an article might be a candidate for unilateral removal.
This sounds sensible to me.
We would benefit from a more sophisticated measure
of likely article quality, related to the number of
independent editors and frequency of edits. If we get
the formula right, it will apply to all articles. Vanity is only
one possible cause of NPOV.