[WikiEN-l] An example of a bad biography

[Delirium]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 1:16 PM,  <WJhonson at aol.com> wrote:
>   
>> Saying that things in BLPs "hurts people" only furthers the idea that that
>>  is what we're avoiding.  It's a simplistic approach to a complex  issue.
>>     
> [snip]
>
> You're correct that the goal is to be neutral and that neutrality
> sometimes makes people unhappy.... But neutrality goes beyond being
> simply factual: having a big high profile article about some trivial
> gaff that would be soon forgotten without WP's help is not neutrality.
>  Neutrality is more nuanced that the impression people put off when
> they make the "they screwed up, it's their problem" argument.   ...
> and in this and many many other cases, there really isn't an argument
> the the subject screwed up and somehow deserves the embarrassment of
> having the truth told.
>   
But this is again a generic policy; we even have one of those 
impenetrable bits of jargon for it, [[WP:UNDUE]]. We have flamewars 
about it all the time, ranging from whose views on global warming are 
worth including in the main article, to which criticisms of Islam are 
notable. Sure, with biographies of living people (as well as several 
other classes of articles, such as those on imminent elections, and 
maybe even criticisms of Islam) it may be *more important* to follow 
this policy as promptly as possible than with articles about long-dead 
people or untimely subjects almost nobody cares about. But that's just a 
general preference to fix The Articles That Matter More sooner, not some 
unique way of writing BLPs.

On the union-leader-attack page though, I would agree that some 
mechanism to deal with repeated obviously-bad reverts from multiple or 
changing IP addresses would be ideal. I wasted a good bit of time 
keeping both pro- and con- crap and blogcruft out of [[Erwin McManus]], 
some page I found on recentchanges patrol about some guy I've never 
heard of and don't care about at all, but who appears to have a strong 
following and strong opposition. Posting in the obvious places (some BLP 
page; Wikiproject Christianity; I forget where else) elicited not much 
of a response, and protecting the page myself elicited an admonition 
that I shouldn't have protected a page I was "edit warring" on.

-Mark