Phil Sandifer wrote:
On Nov 9, 2006, at 12:09 PM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
I did not say that. The point is, it is NOT
verifiable. It is
likely a
copyvio, and the amount of information known about this woman from
reliable third party sources is about as close to zero as you can get.
1) Are third party sources required here? The classic definition of
NOR said that primary sources could be used so long as they were not
used for "novel" claims. Surely the basics of this article are thus
verifiable via the primary source of the show: her status as a
contestant, when she lost, and a good chunk of her bio were all no
doubt covered.
Perhaps, although caution is warranted here. The bios of people on such
shows are PR puffery at its worst. Only the most basic facts can be
considered true, I think.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe is a good article about the
phenomena with respect to wrestling, where the intermingling of reality
and storyline is well known.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_McGee is a friend of mine, and her
story should set off alarm bells for anyone writing about "reality
television". The mixing of fact and fiction is substantial in these
shows, and generally speaking, the websites of such shows should be
regarded in much the same way as websites of fictional shows. The
people appearing on the shows are characters in a storyline.
2) Does this cause problems with systemic bias,
whereby American,
Canadian, and British popular culture will all be far easier to write
about than other countries due to the prevalence of English-language
fandoms that generate sources?
This is an interesting but separate question. Will a high quality
encyclopedia always be biased towards things that have high quality
sources? Yes, I hope so. :)
But, I think there is no reason to think that fandoms don't exist
equally well in all cultures.
3) Is the problem with the article that it is a crappy
article that
is not worth developing from its current state, or that at present
the topic cannot be written about? I can see the former, but I'm
honestly skeptical about the latter. And in the case of the former,
perhaps we need to start coming up with solutions other than
deletion. Something like, perhaps, deletion and replacement with a
template along the lines of "This topic may well be notable, but past
efforts to write articles on it have failed to meet basic standards
of quality. Please help Wikipedia by starting a well-sourced, NPOV
article on this topic."
I think there are cases of both.... topics where *in theory* we could
have a good article, but due to the limited number of quality
wikipedians, and the incredible number of POV fancrufters who want to
write hagiography, we as a practical matter can't... AND topcis where,
even in theory, we can't write a good bio, because there is frankly not
enough information of any kind which can be trusted.
This one probably falls just barely in the camp of "We could easily have
a stub, but nothing more, because we only know about 3 facts about this
person which can be verified. Her name. That she appeared on this
show. That she did not win. Most of the rest of it is impossible to
properly source.
As one of the people cautious about this, I
(unsurprisingly) object
to that claim. I think most of our popular culture articles are
complete crap, to be sure. Well over 50% require some version of the
{{cleanup fiction-as-fact}} tag, there's insane resistance within a
given subject to paring back fancruft, and a complete lack of
understanding of the idea that Wikipedia is a general encyclopedia,
and that X, Y, and Z aspects of the article might be better suited to
a fan encyclopedia. But the problems with these articles are too
often attributed to the topics (non-notable, unverifiable, etc)
instead of to the editors who fundamentally misunderstand the purpose
of the articles.
I would tend to agree with this, and if I said anything which suggested
differently, I take it back. :)
Non-notable is a value judgment which I find to be problematic in many
ways, although with WP:BIO, I think it is increasingly useful as a way
to keep people from writing really problematic articles. Non-verifiable
generally can be relied upon to do the heavy lifting for us.
But there is an interaction. If someone fundamentally misunderstands
the purpose of the articles, and they try to write something about
George W. Bush, we can deal with it. If they try to write about obscure
reality television characters, we can't very well deal with it... we end
up with copyvios and fancruft hagiography.
The important question, to my mind, is this: how can
we give good
editors the tools they need to write good popular culture articles
while actively discouraging and reducing crap articles?
Yes.
--Jimbo