[WikiEN-l] Pakistani politicians and systemic bias

[charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com]

geni wrote

> On 15/11/2007, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com
> <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> > Another Pakistani last night, this time a religious scholar. Speedy tag mostly because it >was all upper case, claiming "patent nonsense". (Patent illiteracy.) As soon as I took that >down, a PROD went up claiming nothing there to salvage.

> Have you checked to see if it is a copyvio? such articles tend to be
> so POV that we would be better off starting from scratch in any case.

Not a copyvio in any obvious way - I think when the spelling of English is improvised, you can guess that there might possibly be an Urdu original, but not one in English. 

We are talking about [[Syed Faiz-ul Hassan Shah]], which obviously still has problems. On-topic, because one of the sons went into politics; and the systemic bias thing is quite subtle here, for a couple of reasons. First, in the sphere of Pakistani politics it is the more Western-facing politicians who get the coverage (e.g. Imran Khan, on teh front page of The Independent today); we are quite likely to neglect the more Islamic politicians, and that is just bad for our coverage. Secondly, it becomes clear working with the incoming material from the subcontinent that there are the constant issues (POV, verifiability, and WP:NOT indiscriminate family history). But, OTOH, what people write is very much a reflection of what actually matters on the ground. If we simply cut that off at the knees, WP  will be the worse for it.

Charles

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