On 10/1/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 01/10/06, David Russell webmaster@davidarussell.co.uk wrote:
'Vanity articles. An article about a real person or corporation which appears to have been written by the subject, by one of its employees, or by a third party hired by the subject to write the article, regardless of the notability or otherwise of the subject.'
Looks relatively robust against the sincere variety of rules lawyer (I could be wrong) and seems to follow sensibly from the basic content policies.
The problem I would say is that it's really easy to confuse an article written by a third party for one written by the subject.
I've submitted a number of articles on freeware, for instance, and had them deleted as "vanity". I also know of a case where an article on a professor which was copied straight out of the Vanity Fair Magazine was listed on VfD as "vanity", and it received a significant majority of votes for deletion as "obvious vanity" at the time I went to Borders and noticed the plagiarism.
It seems to me that it's far to difficult to recognize which articles "have been written by the subject, by one of its employees, or by a third party hired by the subject to write the article" without having a large number of false positives or a large number of missed negatives.
I think it makes much more sense to let people remove those parts of articles they feel are not written from a neutral point of view, or are not verifiable. If it turns out there is nothing left, well, then an article might be a candidate for unilateral removal.
Anthony