[WikiEN-l] Sourcing "popular culture" items

Thu Nov 9 18:52:35 UTC 2006

On 11/9/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com wrote:
> > Low priority, for me, except in cases of defamation. But it also
> > depends on other things. [[Bob Dylan]] should have everything nailed
> > down with sources. The latest boy band - not so clear.
>
> 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.
>
> The text is very much non-NPOV, and I have not yet done a check, but if
> I had to guess, it is a straight ripoff from another website.
>

Not bad. The text was introduced by an IP and taken from here:

http://starmometer.com/2006/09/20/jellica-jelli-marie-mateo-philippine-idol-top-12/

Green archer's text was probably original.

> This is a classic example of fancruft of the worst sort.  There is
> virtually no chance that this article will ever improve, unless Ms.
> Mateo becomes actually famous.  (This could happen!  And if it did, we
> could have a good article about her.)
>

You sure they don't have gosip mags in the Philippines? Could be
asking the people from tl.wikipedia. They appear to be doing quite
well  (has anyone checked if there any previous encyclopedias in the
Filipino language?)

> As it stands, I don't think there is much that can be done about this
> article other than deletion.
>

Merge and redirect would be one course of action now the copyvios have
been vaporised.

-- 
geni