Risker wrote:
On 29/04/2008, Thomas Dalton wrote:
That's not a bad biography, it's childish vandalism that happened to be missed. Stable versions should help with that in the not too distant future. I don't really see how such articles harm the subject
- they're obviously vandalised and any reasonable reader will
disregard them (perhaps we should try and cater to unreasonable readers, but I'm not sure we realistically can).
No, it's a bad biography. It's exactly the type of biography we don't need. This guy is president of a single local of a union. That is the only thing that makes him the least bit notable; and his name is only in the news right now because his local is in labour negotiations. This time next month, nobody will be interested in him -except of course for the same people who have been trashing him thus far.
To say that the president of a large local union is only marginally notable is a wilfully deceptive POV. It's exactly the kind of behaviour that creates such a high degree of anxiety around deletion processes. Bad biography because of childish vandalism, and bad biography because a personal POV that would suppress biographies of certain classes of people such as union leaders are two entirely different criteria.
These biographies of people with very marginal notability are magnets for vandalism. It's a waste of good editor time to expect people to monitor them and clean up vandalism in them; yet, failing to actively monitor them (or messing up when we actually do look at them) leads to the article Jimmy mentions at the beginning.
Being a vandal magnet is an extremely weak criterion for deleting an article. It punishes someone's efforts, not on the basis of what is done, but on a totally speculative basis of what others might do.
Ec