On 10/21/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote:
On Fri, 20 Oct 2006 18:00:58 -0600, Bryan Derksen
<bryan.derksen(a)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