Jimmy Wales wrote:
But the two examples he puts forward are, quite
frankly, a horrific
embarassment. [[Bill Gates]] and [[Jane Fonda]] are nearly unreadable crap.
Why? What can we do about it?
This is a common problem we have, especially with biographies of living
people. They tend to develop by people adding various facts piecemeal,
without any attempt to think about how to organize an encyclopedia
article about the subject. At most they manage to accomplish a rough
chronological sequence, heavily weighted to recent events of course.
Unless somebody comes along to synthesize the material, it will remain
incoherent. So the solution, it would seem, is to encourage editors to
tackle an article in its entirety, or find more people willing to do so.
This is one reason the featured article process is so important, because
it's really this kind of treatment that is the key to featured status.
Biographies generally are also very vulnerable to a form of POV-pushing
I call death-by-anecdote, and both of the examples Carr picked suffer
from it. The rambling recitation of chronological facts encourages
people to add all manner of trivial incidents, ephemeral news that does
not contribute to any greater understanding of the subject. Often
editors will key on mentioning every inconsequential matter they can
find to put the subject in a negative light (or alternatively to engage
in hagiography). Attempts to "NPOV" this produce a back and forth in
which the discussion of some trifle grows out of all proportion to its
significance.
--Michael Snow