[WikiEN-l] Criticism sections on bios of living people

[charles matthews]

"Michael Snow" wrote

> 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.

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