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

[George Herbert]

On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 6:51 PM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net> wrote:
>> 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

Oh no, not a hoax.  Dan Savage is quite serious about it.

Whatever it is, it's correct in reporting that it's existence had a
negative effect on Santorum's political career, and it's arguably
sufficiently notable to keep if it derailed a potential credible
presidential run.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com