zero 0000 wrote
One of the common problems in articles related to current events seems to slip between the cracks of the main policies like V, RS and NPOV. If I'm wrong and there are policy or guideline pages already, please tell me where to look.
Policies are necessary, but not sufficient. NPOV in a sense is supposed to be a 'sufficient' master policy. Verifiability is nothing like sufficient.
The problem is as follows. Whenever a controversial event happens, there are (literally) hundreds of journalists and commentators having their say about it in hundreds of places. What happens next is that some editor, or group of like-minded editors, starts adding extracts from these commentaries one after another until the article has pages of quotations all saying more or less the same thing. These extracts may individually satisfy the requirements of V and RS, so they can't be deleted on those grounds. There is also a straightforward way to fix the NPOV problem, namely to add a long list of similar extracts from commentaries giving the other point of view. But that just makes the article look even more horrible.
Unbalancing the article clearly goes against NPOV.
So I think there should be a policy that can be used to keep quoted commentaries within reasonable bounds. It would say that common threads of opinion should be succinctly summarised with citation of some examples - say what the choir is singing but don't try to quote each of the members of the choir.
Our 'house style' is to do that, surely. Repetitive material can be tightened up, paraphrased, and generally made into a lean, taut piece. There is a greater consensus for that than one might think. (Smart partisans understand that saying something once well, rather than twice badly, works here. Not talk radio, are we?)
Charles
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