Today I posted a very long article about the controversy (ca. Aug. 2006-
Aug. 2011) about the article currently named "Campaign about 'santorum'
neologism<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_for_%22santorum%22_neolo…m>".
I expect at least a couple followers of this list will find their username
mentioned in the blog post linked here <http://bit.ly/santorum-wiki-problem>
.
Overall, my goal was to show how Wikipedia dealt with an extraordinarily
challenging dispute about subject—what to call it, and what it should
say—while balancing BLP and COATRACK, as well as (early on) NOTE and other
policy-based differences.
My take is that Wikipedia, for all its faults, dealt with it very well. The
debate turned on several questions about what the very nature of what
Wikipedia is all about, and how the community worked to resolve a very
difficult case.
I'm sure I've made some mistakes, as one may in trying to summarize 5 years
and 200,000+ words of debate about a highly contentious subject, but I'd
love to get any feedback from contributors here about both the long-term
prospects for this article / topic as well as anything I've described in the
3,700-word post linked above.
I hope this is the right forum for this message, and I'd certainly be
interested in writing a follow-up if there's anything worthwhile to add.
Otherwise, comments on the post itself are more than welcome.
Cheers,
Bill