[WikiEN-l] Sourcing "popular culture" items

Thu Nov 9 16:58:33 UTC 2006

> Lower priority than defamation, to be sure.  But I think this is a 
large 
> and growing problem.
> 
> Here is a typical example:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeli_Mateo
> 
> This is someone who *lost* on Philippine Idol, the Philippines 
version 
> of "Pop Idol" or "American Idol".  The entire bio has no references, 
the 
> photo is almost certainly a copyvio (I would delete it now, but I 
want 
> people to take a quick look at it first).  "Greenarcher" claims to 
have 
> created it, but unless he is the official photographer for the show, 
> this seems quite unlikely.
>
> As it stands, I don't think there is much that can be done about this 
> article other than deletion.

Because a verifiable stub isn't worth it?  I mean, seriously.  There's 
little I dislike more about the current Wikipedia line of thinking like 
this one, where we predict that an article can't possibly be expanded, 
and then decide to remove the article based on that.  Never mind how 
well known the person is, forget that there's almost certainly local 
papers and sources that we may not be able to read right at the moment, 
but certainly have the information to flesh this out.  No, we'll just 
dismiss it as "fancruft" (a word I never thought I'd hear you use) and 
go along on our merry way.

Yikes.

-Jeff

-- 

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