On 4/26/07, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
Why is "criticisms of Uri Geller" (or whoever) a valid encyclopedic subject? Would we accept an article called "instances of undiluted praise of Uri Geller"?
It has always been policy that NPOV does not imply giving equal weight to all opinions, no matter how uninformed. What do people who have studied Geller's work in detail and published about it in reputable publications say?
If the predominant view on a given subject by those who know something about it is negative, then I see no problem with a section titled "Criticism". In Geller's case, his own rebuttals and lawsuits, as well as the surprisingly large number of intelligent people who are fooled by stage tricks posing as special powers, would make such a title one-sided. But the actual relevant top level section in the article is called "Criticism and controversy", which seems fair.
The view that positive & negative views should always be incorporated into a neat biographical narrative is unrealistic in practice. Often, it is a specific pattern of behavior in a person that is the subject of intense debate and criticism. Typically, that pattern of behavior occurs at a certain point in time of the person's life. Incorporating the criticism in a linear fashion means, then, that the narrative is suddenly broken by a back & forth of arguments. It may be preferable to have a simplified narrative, and to isolate the pattern of behavior that is being criticized into its own section.
I therefore do not think we can make an a priori assumption that anything called "Criticism" in a BLP or indeed any article is inherently POV, at least not from my understanding of the purpose of NPOV. There are, in my view, a few things we can avoid though:
* splitting away the criticisms to a separate page to hide them from view -- this should never be done selectively, only if the overall article gets too large * affording extraordinary amounts of space to criticisms that have never been the subject of serious debate among people who study the topic (one blogger, one isolated publication, a single newspaper column) * researching only the side of things we happen to agree with.
We cannot avoid that contributors write about what they know & care about, but in a BLP we should at the very least add POV tags if criticism sections are clearly based on one-sided research and out of proportion. This, by the way, is a shift in policy -- we used to say that starting a stub with a lot of one-sided provocative information is a good idea to get people to start writing about a topic. ;-)