--- On Mon, 23/5/11, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
From: Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com
On 23 May 2011 02:24, Brian J Mingusbrian.mingus@colorado.edu
wrote:
When you Google for Santorum's last name this
Wikipedia article is the
second result. This means that people who are
looking for legitimate
information about him are not going to find it
right away - instead we are
going to feed them information about a biased
smear campaign rather than the
former Senators BLP.
Google's search results are entirely their business.
Yes, I agree with that comment. As Google are aware, people try to game their "algorithm"; and their business model requires them to take action on that. Not our problem at all.
The business of neologisms on WP was actually put into "How Wikipedia Works" (Chapter 7, "A Deletion Case Study"). At that time the example to hand was of the buzzword type, and the question was apparently whether WP's duty was to keep people informed of new jargon, or to be more distanced and only include a new term when it was clearly well established.
To be a bit more nuanced about this instance: if there is a dimension in that article of a BLP, certain things follow at least at the margin about use of sources. And NPOV clearly requires that a successful campaign to "discredit" someone is reported in those terms. Here there is a fine line between "mockery" and "smear", and saying the latter by default omits the element of satire. In other words, there are people who take US domestic politics very seriously, and media stories very seriously (I think enWP tends to take the media as a whole too seriously, BTW, which is the media's estimation of itself) , and regard Google now as part of the media, and so come to the sort of conclusion that Brian does.
OTOH we have our mission, and our policies, and should do our job. I'm prepared to take the flak if our pages contribute to information (i.e. report within NPOV) on a "biased smear campaign" (or satirical googlebombing, whatever you prefer); as long as our article is not biased, and is not campaigning. Bear in mind that the COI is supposed to limit the use of enWP for activism of certain kinds. We do have the policies to prevent misuse of our pages.
Charles
We discussed this a couple of days ago at our meet-up. I agree with some of the other comments made here that this blurs and crosses the line between reporting and participation.
I have no sympathy for Santorum or his views. But based on past experience, I also have little confidence that the main author's motivation in expanding the article is anything other than political. They've created puff pieces on politicians before (as well as hatchet jobs), in the service of outside political agendas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Dickson (later deleted as a puff piece of a non-notable politician, but only after the election, in which he was said to have done surprisingly well)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jose_Peralta
Andreas