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

[Brian J Mingus]

On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 11:47 AM, George Herbert
<george.herbert at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 10:28 AM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net>
> wrote:
> >> On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 8:53 AM, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net>
> wrote:
> >>>[...]
> >>> You can't neutrally discuss how a person is compared to shit.  Not in
> >>> any
> >>> real-world sense.
> >>
> >> I don't agree for a moment that we can't neutrally discuss how a
> >> person is compared to shit.  We can and in my opinion we have and do.
> >>
> >> This is not a more sensitive topic than numerous genocides, racism,
> >> sexism, etc.
> >>
> >> Santorum has handled the situation more maturely than several people
> >> on the list here.  He is clearly not pleased, but neither is he making
> >> any attempt to suppress the incident.
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> -george william herbert
> >> george.herbert at gmail.com
> >
> > He has no responsibility for using the resources of a non-profit
> > corporation for political purposes. We do.
>
> We are not using the resources for political purposes.  The article is
> NPOV and does not show Santorum in a negative light.
>

George,

Your arguments fail to account for the fact that the article is curated by
biased anti-Santorum contributors, that the article is covered in too much
depth to be neutral, and that the article is being as a launchpad for the
campaign against Santorum. As I described in my OP, the use of this article
has revealed a boundary condition in our notability guidelines.

I believe that what many people find distasteful about this article is that
it is a *reductio ad absurdum *case that sets the following precedent for
others to follow on Wikipedia:

- Person A dislikes Person B. Both persons have name recognition.
- Person A creates an offensive definition for Person B's last name.
- Person A documents said definition in Wikipedia.
- Person A uses Wikipedia's intrinsically high Google ranking, in
conjunction with in-bound link-spamming to said article, to *cause* it to
appear high in Google's rankings.
- When people search for Person B's last name they find a discussion of the
smear campaign rather than the BLP.
- Wikipedia is now the lauchpad for a smear campaign, and this launchpad's
existence is justified by Wikipedian's because documenting the previous five
steps is considered encyclopedic according to the guidelines.

Suffice it to say that *many* people do not want to see Wikipedia abused in
this manner. Additionally, some people, such as myself, find the existence
of this article to be *morally wrong.*

I find the following counter-arguments unsatisfying:

- We have no control over Google. This is actually not true for a number of
reasons, some of which have already been elucidated.

- The article is NPOV, factual, cites sources and notable, therefore it
should exist. This is unsatisfying because it exists only because of
anti-Santorum pro-Savage contributors. If it were not for them the article
would not have > 100 sources, would not be so long, and would not be of such
"high quality". These several factors have been put there precisely in order
to increase its relevance in Google results. This point is not contested to
my knowledge. In other words, the quality of the article is not consistent
with the historicity, or notability, of the topic.

If you can reply to these points in sum, I think we might make some
progress. I believe that you should at least agree that the article should
be no more than 2-3 paragraphs in length, with a small handful of citations
to truly authoritative, and perhaps even academic, discussions of the
subject.

- Brian