Erik Moeller wrote:
On 5/6/06, A jokestress@gmail.com wrote:
- Are "criticism" sections valid in general, or do they just become a
repository for quibbles and an amplifier of relatively insignificant hatecruft about a person?
They are not only valid, in many cases they are necessary.
I beg to differ. In many cases they are not at all necessary. In fact, they are often symptoms of the shoddy research, writing, and organization that has gone into so many of our most problematic biographies.
Wikipedia is not Wikinfo, writing from a "sympathetic point of view". I hope that nobody would argue that we should have an article about [[Ann Coulter]], [[Michael Moore]], [[Uri Geller]], or [[Alexander Lukashenko]] that does not include criticism.
I'm not at all saying that criticisms should be omitted, or a neutral point of view abandoned. But their consolidation into separate "Criticisms" sections is generally undesirable, I would say.
Important public and political figures in particular may affect, through their action or inaction, an entire society. To not describe the reaction in encyclopedic terms, or worse, to only describe one side of the reaction, completely undermines the purpose of an encyclopedia.
Yes, but the reaction should really be put in context, not put in a "Criticisms" section. Doing the latter causes a number of problems:
1. If you put the action (or inaction) under a Criticisms section in order to address the reaction to it, it implies that the action (or inaction) is deserving of criticism. This is not a neutral presentation. 2. If you simply talk about the criticisms without first discussing what gave rise to them, you're almost certainly not giving the person's accomplishments enough credit. 3. For people who have been involved in a significant amount of controversy, putting all of this material in a criticisms section makes the article unbalanced. It may also generate disproportionate attention to the criticisms. Again, this is a failure to create a neutral article. 4. Discussing actions and discussing criticisms in separate sections typically creates a lot of redundancy. This exacerbates the bloat problem that emerges on many of our controversial topics when they get heavy editor attention. 5. Having a separate Criticisms section encourages people to dump anything they can find in there (much like a Trivia section encourages similar random additions). As a result, they fail to integrate their material into the article and often add stuff that isn't particularly suited for an encyclopedia anyway.
The existing guidelines strike me as sufficient to deal with the issue on a case by case basis.
The guidelines are perhaps adequate, because this is partly a cultural issue. But it's been clear for a while that we have serious systemic and cultural issues on articles dealing with living people.
--Michael Snow
"Michael Snow" wrote
- For people who have been involved in a significant amount of
controversy, putting all of this material in a criticisms section makes the article unbalanced. It may also generate disproportionate attention to the criticisms. Again, this is a failure to create a neutral article.
I think that's probably right. For example, any prominent politician is likely to have much citable criticism of his/her actions; and that should be dealt with topic by topic, as a general rule. But there are other types of case.
The existing guidelines strike me as sufficient to deal with the issue on a case by case basis.
Agree.
The guidelines are perhaps adequate, because this is partly a cultural issue. But it's been clear for a while that we have serious systemic and cultural issues on articles dealing with living people.
Yup. About all that currently can be said is that
- they make up at least 10% of enWP articles (perhaps 15% - any guesses?) - they mostly fall into a few main areas: politicians, sports, the arts and music, media and writers, academia, technology, business, religion, military.
We may well need to have guidelines sector-by-sector for these.
Charles
On 5/7/06, Michael Snow wikipedia@earthlink.net wrote:
I'm not at all saying that criticisms should be omitted, or a neutral point of view abandoned. But their consolidation into separate "Criticisms" sections is generally undesirable, I would say.
That's more of a question of style than substance, and I agree with most of your points. However, "Criticism" sections are definitely easier to write than a well-consolidated article. It takes a lot of skill to avoid an article that reads like a constant back and forth. When you have warring factions watching over the article like hawks, it gets even harder.
As for Anthony's point that we should focus on facts rather than reactions, I agree; however, the facts, the interpretation, and their relevance are all often in dispute. If you don't actually cite the people making the claims directly in those cases, policies like NPOV, verifiability, and "Original Research" will quickly be invoked by those who'd rather not like to see certain facts mentioned in the article at all. We turn opinions into facts by attributing them.
My main point is that living persons are just as deserving of criticism as dead ones. Unlike the dead ones, they have feelings we can hurt, so it makes sense to be extra careful about what we say and how we say it. The case of Tron on de.wikipedia.org, however, showed that even dead people may have lawyers.
Erik
Erik Moeller wrote:
My main point is that living persons are just as deserving of criticism as dead ones. Unlike the dead ones, they have feelings we can hurt, so it makes sense to be extra careful about what we say and how we say it. The case of Tron on de.wikipedia.org, however, showed that even dead people may have lawyers.
But I think we have many cases where the issue does not even rise close to the level of involving lawyers but we still have a problem.
In this case, we have what I think can only be described as a stalker/hate site being elevated by Wikipedia into a status of "criticism" when the criticism in question does not appear to be about substantive matters for the most part, but rather primarily about getting attention through lurid and false innuendo.
And I think we have a culture of trying to include all information, from whatever source. What this means is that if you find someone in Wikipedia about whom we have no "criticism" section, you can probably launch a hatefilled, incoherent blog of rants ... including personal criticism of physical appearance, sexuality, family history, etc., and it could end up the center of a wikipedia "criticism" section... despite having no objective merit.
On 5/7/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
As for Anthony's point that we should focus on facts rather than reactions, I agree; however, the facts, the interpretation, and their relevance are all often in dispute. If you don't actually cite the people making the claims directly in those cases, policies like NPOV, verifiability, and "Original Research" will quickly be invoked by those who'd rather not like to see certain facts mentioned in the article at all. We turn opinions into facts by attributing them.
True. But at the same time, while I'm sure one could find 100 quotes from celebrities who have called Howard Stern "disgusting", I'm not sure any of them deserve mention in his Wikipedia article - maybe in Wikiquote (*).
That said, I'm not sure where to draw the line. I guess I'm saying that quoting a pure opinion, where that opinion doesn't naturally lead in to some pertinent fact, tends to be extraneous. But I'd have to think about that more.
(*) Maybe putting them all in Wikiquote and then mentioning that many celebrities have called him "disgusting", pointing to Wikiquote as the source, might make sense.
Anthony
On 5/8/06, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
True. But at the same time, while I'm sure one could find 100 quotes from celebrities who have called Howard Stern "disgusting", I'm not sure any of them deserve mention in his Wikipedia article - maybe in Wikiquote (*).
I think the normal way this would be handled is you would just say "has been called disgusting by a large number of celebrities"[1], and in the footnote, you would say "For example, Winona Ryder [ur], ...." and just give a couple.
Steve
On 5/8/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/8/06, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
True. But at the same time, while I'm sure one could find 100 quotes from celebrities who have called Howard Stern "disgusting", I'm not sure any of them deserve mention in his Wikipedia article - maybe in Wikiquote (*).
I think the normal way this would be handled is you would just say "has been called disgusting by a large number of celebrities"[1], and in the footnote, you would say "For example, Winona Ryder [ur], ...." and just give a couple.
Steve
But what would that add to the article, other than a bit of length?
Anthony
On 5/9/06, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
I think the normal way this would be handled is you would just say "has been called disgusting by a large number of celebrities"[1], and in the footnote, you would say "For example, Winona Ryder [ur], ...." and just give a couple.
Steve
But what would that add to the article, other than a bit of length?
The info seems relevant to me. Not all celebrities get called "disgusting" by other celebrities.
Steve
Michael Snow wrote:
Erik Moeller wrote:
On 5/6/06, A jokestress@gmail.com wrote:
- Are "criticism" sections valid in general, or do they just become a
repository for quibbles and an amplifier of relatively insignificant hatecruft about a person?
They are not only valid, in many cases they are necessary.
I beg to differ. In many cases they are not at all necessary. In fact, they are often symptoms of the shoddy research, writing, and organization that has gone into so many of our most problematic biographies.
I think you are both right. In many cases they are necessary, and in many cases they are not necessary. :)
And I agree with the view expressed by others that often, they are a symptom of bad writing. That is, it isn't that we should not include the criticisms, but that the information should be properly incorporated throughout the article rather than having a troll magnet section of random criticisms.
The guidelines are perhaps adequate, because this is partly a cultural issue. But it's been clear for a while that we have serious systemic and cultural issues on articles dealing with living people.
Indeed.