A couple of questions here, because they're issues that are important elsewhere in popular culture sourcing...
On Nov 9, 2006, at 12:09 PM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
I did not say that. The point is, it is NOT verifiable. It is likely a copyvio, and the amount of information known about this woman from reliable third party sources is about as close to zero as you can get.
1) Are third party sources required here? The classic definition of NOR said that primary sources could be used so long as they were not used for "novel" claims. Surely the basics of this article are thus verifiable via the primary source of the show: her status as a contestant, when she lost, and a good chunk of her bio were all no doubt covered.
2) Does this cause problems with systemic bias, whereby American, Canadian, and British popular culture will all be far easier to write about than other countries due to the prevalence of English-language fandoms that generate sources?
3) Is the problem with the article that it is a crappy article that is not worth developing from its current state, or that at present the topic cannot be written about? I can see the former, but I'm honestly skeptical about the latter. And in the case of the former, perhaps we need to start coming up with solutions other than deletion. Something like, perhaps, deletion and replacement with a template along the lines of "This topic may well be notable, but past efforts to write articles on it have failed to meet basic standards of quality. Please help Wikipedia by starting a well-sourced, NPOV article on this topic."
In the meantime, we have an article that is most likely a copyvio, and in any event contains a number of totally unverifiable sources. And any movement to do something about this sort of nonsense is met with the view that people are out to censor pop culture or something like that.
As one of the people cautious about this, I (unsurprisingly) object to that claim. I think most of our popular culture articles are complete crap, to be sure. Well over 50% require some version of the {{cleanup fiction-as-fact}} tag, there's insane resistance within a given subject to paring back fancruft, and a complete lack of understanding of the idea that Wikipedia is a general encyclopedia, and that X, Y, and Z aspects of the article might be better suited to a fan encyclopedia. But the problems with these articles are too often attributed to the topics (non-notable, unverifiable, etc) instead of to the editors who fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of the articles.
The question then becomes how we can help editors who want to write good articles on these topics (and there are many) without letting articles like this one run amok. The answer has, it seems to me, manifestly shown itself NOT to be draconian sourcing policy that defies the common sense of anyone familiar with the topic and aggressive deletion.
The important question, to my mind, is this: how can we give good editors the tools they need to write good popular culture articles while actively discouraging and reducing crap articles?
Best, Phil Sandifer sandifer@english.ufl.edu
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