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

[Charles Matthews]

On 23/05/2011 03:56, geni wrote:
> On 23 May 2011 02:24, Brian J Mingus<brian.mingus at colorado.edu>  wrote:
>> 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.
> Google's search results are entirely their business.
>
Yes, I agree with that comment. As Google are aware, people try to game 
their "algorithm"; and their business model requires them to take action 
on that. Not our problem at all.

The business of neologisms on WP was actually put into "How Wikipedia 
Works" (Chapter 7, "A Deletion Case Study"). At that time the example to 
hand was of the buzzword type, and the question was apparently whether 
WP's duty was to keep people informed of new jargon, or to be more 
distanced and only include a new term when it was clearly well established.

To be a bit more nuanced about this instance: if there is a dimension in 
that article of a BLP, certain things follow at least at the margin 
about use of sources. And NPOV clearly requires that a successful 
campaign to "discredit" someone is reported in those terms. Here there 
is a fine line between "mockery" and "smear", and saying the latter by 
default omits the element of satire. In other words, there are people 
who take US domestic politics very seriously, and media stories very 
seriously (I think enWP tends to take the media as a whole too 
seriously, BTW, which is the media's estimation of itself) , and regard 
Google now as part of the media, and so come to the sort of conclusion 
that Brian does.

OTOH we have our mission, and our policies, and should do our job. I'm 
prepared to take the flak if our pages contribute to information  (i.e. 
report within NPOV) on a "biased smear campaign" (or satirical 
googlebombing, whatever you prefer); as long as our article is not 
biased, and is not campaigning. Bear in mind that the COI is supposed to 
limit the use of enWP for activism of certain kinds. We do have the 
policies to prevent misuse of our pages.

Charles

Charles