[WikiEN-l] Otto Middleton (a morality tale)

[Andreas Kolbe]

--- On Fri, 13/5/11, Mark <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> From: Mark <delirium at hackish.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Otto Middleton (a morality tale)
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Date: Friday, 13 May, 2011, 8:28
> On 5/13/11 7:57 AM, Andreas Kolbe
> wrote:
> > The job of WP:V is to make sure that assertions in
> Wikipedia are 
> > verifiable;
> > it's not to ensure that verifiable stuff cannot be
> deleted.
> Hmm, I suppose I disagree, but then I'm a fairly strong
> inclusionist; if 
> it's verifiable, it belongs in Wikipedia, cited to the
> source that 
> verifies it. But I don't think that's incompatible with
> adopting a 
> stronger line on WP:RS. The main problem here imo is that a
> certain 
> class of sources (newspapers writing about celebrity
> rumors) does *not* 
> actually reliably verify anything, therefore we shouldn't
> treat them as 
> a reliable source that does.
> 
> Are there any cases where editors should have discretion to
> delete 
> *actually* solidly verifiable information, like some piece
> of physics 
> information sourced to multiple well-respected physics
> review articles?


I've certainly seen credible arguments made that specific articles would 
benefit from trimming. Again, this is partly a reflection of where Wikipedia is 
today, as opposed to 5 or 7 years ago. Where there was an almost blank canvas 
then, Wikipedia today has many articles that have attracted flotsam and jetsam, 
while still missing the essential stuff that an encyclopedia should have. It
made sense then to safeguard every bit of sourced information, but not 
necessarily today, when you already have a 12,000-word article on a minor topic.

Examples: 

There is a thread on Jimbo's talk page right now, about [[Jacques Derrida]]:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&oldid=428878178#Derrida_and_Wikipedia_.28reprinted_from_the_Jacques_Derrida_talk_page.29

One of the problems seems to be undue weight on trivia, while the essential 
stuff is missing. 

Here is what a scholar wrote to me some while ago about the Jehovah's 
Witnesses article:

---o0o---

> To take an example of a topic with which I'm familiar - Jehovah's
> Witnesses - I would really need to start all over again, and I don't know
> whether it's OK to delete an entire article and rewrite another one, even
> if I had the time. It's a bit like the joke about the motorist who asked
> for directions, only to be told, 'If I were you, I wouldn't be starting
> from here!'
>
> The JW article begins with an assortment of unrelated bits of information,
> it fails to locate the Witnesses within their historical religious
> origins, it says it was updated in December 2010 yet ignores important
> recent academic material. The citations may look impressive, but they are
> patchy, and sometimes the sources state the exact opposite of what the
> text conveys. So what does one do?

---o0o---

If you include everything that is verifiable, you may end up with 100,000
words, and a poorly structured article that nobody will ever read.

Coatrack articles are another example where removing sourced information
may be necessary. They're also the type of article where undue content is 
typically defended using a WP:V or WP:RS argument. I've seen BLPs of notable
people that discussed at length whether the person was gay/Jewish or not,
and no one had much interest in writing about what made the person notable
in the first place.

A.