Jimmy Wales wrote:
(re: [[John Seigenthaler Sr.]])
I think the mistakes were blatantly obvious and if the person who wikied the article had had enough time, the article would have been: -tagged as a stub -placed into a category -edited down to uncontroversial claims
See, they wouldn't have been "blatantly obvious" to me either.
Any good editor _with enough time_ who looks at an article about a living person which makes claims as transparently outlandish as these will know to remove those claims and insist on a source. It would have taken 15 seconds of googling to see that the claims were in no way supported by any obvious source.
Newpages patrol typically doesn't take or have the time to do that. It's a firehose of slush-pile quality information. It's about a first cull.
The Seigenthaler article didn't pass _any_ basic quality standards.
It passed *basic* ones, which is how it survived Newpages patrol. Basic quality standards for Newpages means more or less that's it's shaped enough like something that might be a Wikipedia article not to shoot on sight.
What it would need is something like what someone else mooted, a biography patrol. Which is a damn fine idea, I think.
- d.