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

[George Herbert]

On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 5:27 PM, Brian J Mingus
<brian.mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 5:52 PM, Rob <gamaliel8 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 7:44 PM, Brian J Mingus
>> <brian.mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:
>> > I believe you will have a hard time justifying your claim that my comment
>> is
>> > false (not to mention that it is a slur). It should be easy to show that
>> the
>> > article is curated by at least one, and probably several, biased
>> > anti-Santorum contributors.
>>
>> The onus is on you to prove that such a broad slur on other Wikipedia
>> editors is true.  Even if we accept this as truth, the solution to
>> such problems is typically the eyes of more editors and not deletion.
>
>
> This strikes me as indirection. If someone claims that an article is biased
> then they are also claiming that the process governing its creation is
> biased. Such a claim is not a slur, it is a purported statement of fact.
> However, you would say that the claim is invalid because to claim that an
> article is biased is to necessarily not assume good faith. Following your
> line of indirection, it isn't possible to claim that an article is biased
> because you would necessary violate the principle of good faith, ie,
> implicitly or explicitly claiming that particular editors are biased. I
> believe you would rather follow this line of reasoning because it directs
> attention away from the real issues at hand.

I do not read the article as anti-Santorum or biased.

If it were anti-Santorum and biased, this discussion would likely have
taken place on the article talk page, with specific examples of
paragraphs, sentences, sections, quotes, source selection etc. which
were improper or unbalanced.

The actual discussion has included essentially none of this.

It's somewhat of a jump of faith to extrapolate from this that there's
nothing wrong at the detail level with the article, but that claim
could be made and defended credibly.

The claims of things wrong with it that are being made are, in
Wikipedia terms, novel interpretations.  BOLD allows us to take wider
views, but it does not allow one to merely assert a particular wider
view to be absolute and unchallengeable truth.

Yes, several people here believe that it's a problem.  No, not
everyone does.  No, you do not appear to have a consensus on your
side, much less a majority.

Under those conditions, BOLD fails, and we revert to the details and
to standard interpretations.  About which no detailed problems have
been asserted so far...


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