[WikiEN-l] A Mormon Persective from the Deseret News

[Tom Morris]

On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 02:59, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net> wrote:
> 10 controversial Wikipedia topics:
>
> http://www.deseretnews.com/top/97/10-controversial-Wikipedia-topics.html
>

This is really goofy. Having lots of footnotes doesn't make something
controversial. It makes it well-sourced. Sometimes the reason an
article is well-sourced is because it is controversial and the way to
resolve controversy it to have a lot of footnotes, and sometimes it
means there is one of those wonderful people who just enjoy adding
lots of footnotes.

Take today's FA, [[Star Trek: The Motion Picture]] has 174 footnotes.

According to the criteria given by this article, Star Trek: The Motion
Picture is a more controversial article than Abortion or Global
Warming.

The stupid thing is, if you actually wanted to know how controversial
an article is, there are plenty of ways to measure it: amount of
vandalism, number of times it has been protected or semi-protected,
how long the talk page is, how many reverts there have been, how many
times admins have had to get involved to sort out 3RR violations,
whether it's been the subject of mediation or ArbCom. It's all there
if you click on the talk page...

-- 
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>

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