On Fri, 20 Oct 2006 18:00:58 -0600, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
If you want to propose being equally "ruthless" for fictional characters I want to see a reason that's just as strong.
Sure. They are the number one source of original research, banned by policy, and these articles have misled countless editors into believing that (a) "I read it on teh internets" is adequate sourcing and (b) we should tailor policy on verifiability, original research and neutrality to ensure that these articles are not impacted.
All of which is already covered by the same policies policy in both fictional character and living-person-biography. The only thing that BLP does is make the enforcement of our original research and verification policies more _urgent_ on living-person-biography articles, it doesn't put any additional constraints on the material that can be found within.
If you look into the debates on these policies you will see that for popular culture articles there is a large body of opinion which holds that if there are no reliable sources for an article then we should allow, by policy, the use of whatever sources we can find, reliable or not.
The articles are held to the same content standards already, it's the urgency in applying those standards that I'm questioning here. Why is it just as urgent to deal with OR on fictional character articles as it is to deal with OR on living person articles?
I disagree that they are held to the same standards. I can find you a treeware biography of Leonard Cheshire, I cannot find a treeware biography of Garfield. I know which is the more significant, by any rational definition. Guess which gets the most coverage?
Guy (JzG)