On 12/12/13, 11:16 PM, David Gerard wrote:
On 12 December 2013 12:25, Mark delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Between tendentious negative information and self-promoting positive information, I worry that the overall quality level of our biographies of living people ends up poor in a great many cases, especially cases outside the top tier of biographies visible enough to draw significant third-party editors (Barack Obama, Fidel Castro, that kind of thing). But it would be better to understand the problem, if it is one, in more detail.
I don't think this is, though - when people are this unambiguously famous, I think our biographies hold up in terms of content, even when the prose flows badly.
Perhaps I worded this badly; I think I actually agree with you, and was trying to say something similar. When people are famous enough that their biographies draw significant third-party editing, I think we actually *do* do an okay job. The prose of [[en:Barack Obama]] may not be ideal, but it's clearly not a puff piece written by his press secretary (on the one hand), nor a hit piece written by his political opponents (on the other). It's all the rest of the biographies of living people (which are a *lot*) where I worry our quality is poor. BLPs of people below the top tier of fame seem to attract a disproportionate amount of unfortunately motivated editing.
My main point is that I think we may have a big quality issue here, of being (so far) simply unable to cover a class of articles to a consistently high standard. Rather than a narrow issue of personal attacks solvable by more diligent application of OTRS responses and the like.
-Mark