[WikiEN-l] An example of a bad biography

[Ray Saintonge]

Risker wrote:
> On 29/04/2008, Thomas Dalton wrote:
>   
>> That's not a bad biography, it's childish vandalism that happened to
>> be missed. Stable versions should help with that in the not too
>> distant future. I don't really see how such articles harm the subject
>> - they're obviously vandalised and any reasonable reader will
>> disregard them (perhaps we should try and cater to unreasonable
>> readers, but I'm not sure we realistically can).
>>     
> No, it's a bad biography.  It's exactly the type of biography we don't need.
> This guy is president of a single local of a union. That is the only thing
> that makes him the least bit notable; and his name is only in the news right
> now because his local is in labour negotiations.  This time next month,
> nobody will be interested in him -except of course for the same people who
> have been trashing him thus far.
>   
To say that the president of a large local union is only marginally 
notable is a wilfully deceptive POV.  It's exactly the kind of behaviour 
that creates such a high degree of anxiety around deletion processes.  
Bad biography because of childish vandalism, and bad biography because a 
personal POV that would suppress biographies of certain classes of 
people such as union leaders are two entirely different criteria.
> These biographies of people with very marginal notability are magnets for
> vandalism. It's a waste of good editor time to expect people to monitor them
> and clean up vandalism in them; yet, failing to actively monitor them (or
> messing up when we actually do look at them) leads to the article Jimmy
> mentions at the beginning.

Being a vandal magnet is an extremely weak criterion for deleting an 
article.  It punishes someone's efforts, not on the basis of what is 
done, but on a totally speculative basis of what others might do.

Ec