[Wikimedia-l] Resolution: Media about living people

[Nathan]

On Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 5:16 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 12 December 2013 12:25, Mark <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
> > Undue or unsourced negative information about living people is one
> aspect of
> > that, and what most of the formal BLP-related policy, and the process
> around
> > things like OTRS, is intended to address. The flipside is undue or
> unsourced
> > *positive* information about living people: in comparison to biographies
> > about non-living people, BLPs draw a huge proportion of puffed-up, COI,
> and
> > sometimes outright paid editing.
>
>
> Yes, I think hagiography is a problem on en:wp.
>
>
> > Between tendentious negative information and self-promoting positive
> > information, I worry that the overall quality level of our biographies of
> > living people ends up poor in a great many cases, especially cases
> outside
> > the top tier of biographies visible enough to draw significant
> third-party
> > editors (Barack Obama, Fidel Castro, that kind of thing). But it would be
> > better to understand the problem, if it is one, in more detail.
>
>
> I don't think this is, though - when people are this unambiguously
> famous, I think our biographies hold up in terms of content, even when
> the prose flows badly.
>
> How would we measure this?
>
>
And how would you have any confidence in the results being representative?
A sample that relies on some set of tags and categories to identify
articles is going to miss those without those indicators, which could
theoretically be a pretty large portion... And it's that group where you'll
likely find the highest proportion of shit content, the result of
obscurity.