On May 24, 2006, at 7:48 AM, Steve Bennett wrote:
It seems fairly clear to me that there is some inconsistency applied to issues such as these on Wikipedia.
- For "bad" people, Jewishness must be proven beyond all doubt,
and must not go in the lead. I couldn't actually find any examples of Jewish criminals - there doesn't seem to be a "Category:Jewish criminals" for instance. 2) For "good" people, Jewishness must merely be asserted, and should be applied as a category. Occasionally it goes in the lead ([[John von Neumann]]), other times as "born into a Jewish family" ([[Alan Greenspan]]), other times it's not even mentioned except for the category. There are around 15 "Jewish Xs" categories, some with subcategories like Jewish-American scientists.
Hey, check out our verifiability policy. If we can't verify that someone is Jewish or comes from a Jewish family, it shouldn't be in the article either way.
That said, mentioning that a famous scientist or economist is Jewish isn't offensive, so it's not enforced as strongly there for understandable reasons.