[WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions

[Carcharoth]

On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 6:15 AM, Sarah Ewart <sarahewart at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 3:46 PM, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Where was Robert Corell's article previously?  Perhaps my search was
>> inadequate but I didn't find it looking quickly...
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Corell

And no-one has yet created a redirect?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Corell

He also received the [[Brazilian Order of Scientific Merit]] (I got
that from "what links here", and then went looking for a source to
confirm that).

http://www.mct.gov.br/index.php/content/view/11199.html

And from here (IEEE Transactions on Geoscience Electronics, November 1968):

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=04043245

You can get his birth year (1934) and day (4 November) and other details.

But that is a lucky find. Most sources don't say when he was born, and
that is generally an indication that comprehensive biographical
material is scarce, which in turn implies that no-one else has yet
really written a comprehensive biography.

Which comes back to the point of whether Wikipedia should be the first
to do so (we can produce something similar to the mini-biographies
already out there, such as the four that The Cunctator found, which
are either institutional bios, or conference bios, but we can't go
beyond that until other sources do, which is generally towards the end
of someone's career, or at the point when obituaries are written).

It also looks like it was rescued in a rush, six errors in grammar or
composition:

"is prominent climate scientist"
"and he formerly as a"
"to ManyOne Networks, the and Chair"
"funding global change research"
The "sustainable development" header has stray formatting
"and international partnership"

I wonder how many years it would have been before someone copyedited
it to fix those problems? I guess we will never know now. But this
feeds into my point about whether such articles should be brought to a
minimum standard, instead of roughly referenced along with a lot of
others ones being worked on at the same time, and then the people
doing this rough-and-ready referencing moving on to other articles?

My standards would be to ensure minimum copyediting standards have
been met, that the birth year has been found and securely referenced,
and that a standalone biography (even if only a mini-biography from
who they work for, or a conference biography, or some form of press
release) is found and used as a reference.

Carcharoth