On 10/21/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
On Fri, 20 Oct 2006 18:00:58 -0600, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote: If you look into the debates on these policies you will see that for popular culture articles there is a large body of opinion which holds that if there are no reliable sources for an article then we should allow, by policy, the use of whatever sources we can find, reliable or not.
I disagree with this characterisation of the argument. I'm not going to argue that some people might put it like that or think of it like that, but many Wikipedians hold, instead, that characterising sources as 'reliable' or 'unreliable' based only on their means of publication, for instance, is poor policy, and we should not have blanket policy defining this.
I disagree that they are held to the same standards. I can find you a treeware biography of Leonard Cheshire, I cannot find a treeware biography of Garfield. I know which is the more significant, by any rational definition. Guess which gets the most coverage?
More coverage is not anything to do with standards, IMO; simply that more people feel qualified to write about Garfield than about Leonard Cheshire. It's a manifestation of systemic bias, not a case of intentional bias. I suspect if a Leonard Cheshire fanboy, if such existed, spewed huge amounts of trivia and unsourced crap onto that article it'd probably take just as long for it to be sorted out as on a popular culture article, since AFAIR Cheshire is dead and thus not covered by BLP.
In my opinion, that we have extensive articles on 'trivial' subjects does not mean that we are disparaging 'serious' subjects.
-Matt