[WikiEN-l] BLP extension suggestion

[Ken Arromdee]

On Fri, 3 Jun 2011, Rob wrote:
> We're just recording what has already been discussed in 132 reliable
> sources.  We're not "victimizing" him any more than we are victimizing
> Silvio Berlusconi
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlusconi#Sexual_scandals) or John
> Edwards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Edwards_extramarital_affair)
> or John Kerry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kerry_military_service_controversy)
> or Anthony Weiner
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Weiner#Twitter_controversy).
> The Kerry example is especially pertinent as both it and the Santorum
> article are an entire Wikipedia article about things that other people
> made up about the subject of the article.

Part of it is a matter of degree.  The article on the John Kerry controversy
isn't the #2 search for "Kerry" on the Internet.

Part of it is that we're talking about different types of things.  The Kerry
controversy is ultimately about factual claims, and therefore whether our
article harms John Kerry depends on whether we give undue weight to those
claims.  This one isn't about factual claims; it's about creating an
unpleasant association, so avoiding undue weight isn't enough to keep it
from doing harm.

And there aren't 132 reliable sources; there was a post on BLPN which
analyzed the problems with a bunch of sources (several were self-published,
for instance.  Of course they had to be left in as part of a "compromise"),
but there are so many "sources" that nobody could possibly check them all.
Furthermore, the large number of sources is itself part of the abuse of the
system--sources are often links and raise the page's Google rank, just like
including big templates.