On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 6:51 PM, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
Hi all,
I'm not sure about the history of this article, but it it was recently brought to my attention via Facebook.
My take on this article is that it is an abuse of Wikipedia's notability guidelines. The article goes out of its way to cite lots of sources, but I do not believe that being mentioned in the mainstream media is both a necessary and sufficient condition for notability. In this particular case it sounds like someone with a lot of name recognition used that name recognition to get media attention for their smear campaign. This media attention was then used to justify a Wikipedia article. This is an excellent reductio ad absurdum case that brings a boundary condition of our notability guidelines to light. It is, quite frankly, manufactured notability and IMO it does deserve an article.
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.
Please discuss.
-- Brian Mingus Graduate student Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab University of Colorado at Boulder
Yeh, it's nuts. I thought it was a hoax at first.
Fred
Oh no, not a hoax. Dan Savage is quite serious about it.
Whatever it is, it's correct in reporting that it's existence had a negative effect on Santorum's political career, and it's arguably sufficiently notable to keep if it derailed a potential credible presidential run.