[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia article on [[Santorum (neologism)]]

[Brian J Mingus]

Hi all,

I'm not sure about the history of this article, but it it was recently
brought to my attention via Facebook.

My take on this article is that it is an abuse of Wikipedia's notability
guidelines. The article goes out of its way to cite lots of sources, but I
do not believe that being mentioned in the mainstream media is both a
necessary and sufficient condition for notability. In this particular case
it sounds like someone with a lot of name recognition used that name
recognition to get media attention for their smear campaign. This media
attention was then used to justify a Wikipedia article. This is an excellent
reductio ad absurdum case that brings a boundary condition of our notability
guidelines to light. It is, quite frankly, manufactured notability and IMO
it does deserve an article.

When you Google for Santorum's last name this Wikipedia article is the
second result. This means that people who are looking for legitimate
information about him are not going to find it right away - instead we are
going to feed them information about a biased smear campaign rather than the
former Senators BLP.

Please discuss.

-- 
Brian Mingus
Graduate student
Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab
University of Colorado at Boulder