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

[Fred Bauder]

> 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

Yeh, it's nuts. I thought it was a hoax at first.

Fred