[WikiEN-l] BLP, medical information, and media controversy

[Charles Matthews]

Thomas Dalton wrote:
> 2009/9/21 Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>:
>   
>> The distinction to be made is between information about a person, and
>> popularly reported claims about the person.  It needs to be made clear
>> that reporting about a controversy is not identical to reporting about
>> the person.  It's disingenuous to pretend that a very public controversy
>> doesn't exist. Rather than suppressing anything about the controversy we
>> would do better to find the appropriate language for discussing it
>> neutrally.
>>
>> It's much easier to permeate a community with a series of doctrinaire
>> rules than with a grasp of the underlying principles.
>>     
>
> The key point with that, in general, is "undue weight" - it is easy to
> give too much weight to a controversy. In this case, though, the
> controversy is so high profile and it is pretty much the only thing
> the public know about this person that the due weight is very high.
>   
But if the only substance to the controversy is rumour, and speculative 
discussion of rumours, we don't need either BLP or NPOV to work to 
exclude it or cut it back to a bare statement. So I agree with geni. I 
have never heard of this idea of giving weight to public conceptions or 
misconceptions. (Time to check up on how many urban myths we have. I'm 
glad to see that [[tulip mania]], a topic constantly referenced in the 
newspapers at the present, does sound the cautious note: "Many modern 
scholars believe that the mania was not as extraordinary as Mackay 
described, with some arguing that the price changes may not have 
constituted a bubble." That one has been running since the 1840s.  
Pretty much the only thing the public know about tulips in the 17th 
century is that it was a bubble.)

Charles



Charles

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania#cite_note-5>