On 3/21/07, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Steve Bennett wrote:
What the hell is going on here? Some of the sentences Jimbo removed: "In 2002 the owners of the Mega Society, a high IQ society, filed suit against Langan and his wife, Gina LoSasso, for unauthorized use of the society's trademarks and trade names.[29][30][31]"
This is original research?
Yes. To my knowledge, this has never been written up in any newspaper, magazine, or book. It was discovered by reading websites that I think we would all agree are not themselves reliable sources and by referencing official court documents. The case, what happened in it, the outcome, are all matters of interpretation involving original research, and indeed the question of whether or not this is important enough to include (raising questions of undue weight) is in this case original research.
I objected to the removal of two pieces of information: 1) About the history of the organisation, as claimed by the organisation itself. You don't offer any explanation for removing this. 2) The fact of the lawsuit taking place. I can see how the outcome could be subject to interpretation, but what's to interpret about "Party A sued Party B?"
Now, obviously this whole matter arose out of some kind of complaint, so we're working backwards. Had we not known that there would be a complaint, would we really have removed these statements? It's easy to come along afterwards and say "that's OR! we must remove it!" But if we went through Wikipedia removing every statement of that kind, there wouldn't be all that much.
This is my objection to what I called Jimbo's "drive by" style: someone calls his attention to a problem, and he says "this should never have been allowed". But the rest of us don't have this power of hindsight: we have to make decisions in advance of any complaint directed against the Foundation. And the policies, including WP:OR, just aren't that helpful. So the vast majority of the time we err on the side of informativeness: it's informative to say "X was a splinter group that broke off from Y, then Y's founder sued X's founder."[1]
[1] I've probably got this all wrong. Pity it's not written up somewhere in a freely available encyclopaedia.
I made no policy declarations. I responded to an ACTIVE WP:BLP
complaint by taking an action perfectly within policy
Policy that only serves to hit us over the head rather than guide us is not good policy. WP:OR is great for explaining what we did wrong. But it doesn't help us write a good encyclopaedia.
Steve