User:KimDabelsteinPetersen/Editing Principles

Some principles that i didn't submit to ArbCom, since it became obvious that ArbCom would not consider content issues. (originally written around June 25, but put up today (Jul 21) since it seems to be relevant).


 * 1) BLP, despite the name, is a general policy, it applies equally to "regular" articles as it does to biographical ones.
 * 2) In general it can be said that if a paragraph in a "regular" article, wouldn't raise BLP concerns, then the same paragraph shouldn't do so in a biography, and vice versa.
 * 3) * This of course a gray zone, and will be subject to contextual differences. For instance where a section is leading a viewpoint, the paragraphs meaning can be subtly changed, despite the same literal meaning.
 * 4) Biographical articles sometimes contain material that isn't biographical in nature.
 * 5) * Should be fairly obvious
 * 6) Non-biographical material appearing in a biography is subject to "regular" requirements for sourcing, and not the more strict BLP requirements.
 * 7) Critique of a literary work by a living person, is per default not considered BLP material.
 * 8) * There has been a tendency to use a "BLP hammer", where everything associated with a living person, such as published papers. Where the critique gets personalized we may enter a grey-zone though.
 * 9) Tiny minority of fringe views may not have received attention in formal literature.
 * 10) * Fairly obvious. The further a view is from the mainstream, the more it will be ignored by the mainstream.
 * 11) Tiny minority or fringe viewpoints that are explained in biographical articles, is subject to normal requirements for presenting such view in an NPOV way. That means that such views have to be presented in a way so that the reader isn't in doubt that this is a minority/fringe view.
 * 12) * Such views are often presented in biographies of people who hold minority or fringe viewpoints, since the material often doesn't reach a point where it is acceptable by weight in "regular" articles.
 * 13) Articles and biographies are independent entities, and weight is determined by the prepondence and relative import of the literature concerning the article topic.
 * 14) * Should be obvious. You cannot put a "template" over a given topic area, and state that for instance a tiny minority/fringe view must have the same textual weighting between critique/praise as a similar mainstream one. It all depends on the material available.
 * 15) References are not created equal. Their reliability and weight are defined by the medium they appear in, the writer of them and the context where they are used within the text. No source can ever be considered as being completely reliable, and very few sources can be considered completely unreliable for everything.
 * 16) * This should be fairly standard - if not obvious. This is the reason that we haven't got whitelists and blacklists of reliable sources.

Singer vs. Lindzen (ArbCom evidence by JWB)
Superficially these look similar - but the difference lies in the detail.

In Singer's case its information about a report (not about Singer himself - which would be BLP), which already has had the red-flag (surprising fact) removed by having a regular article in ABC news who basically repeats the information. Here the ref Realclimate (RC) gives extra information, more in fact than the ABC one, by going into detail about why scientists considered the report this way. The RC reference gives extra information, and that is only possible because the information isn't about the person (but the report), and because Mann and Schmidt are highly regarded and cited, published experts on the specific topic of the report, and thus match the exception clause of SPS.

The context in the Lindzen case is rather different, here the extra reference doesn't add information, it is an "extra" reference. The information is already verifiable via a very reliable source: The Fred Guterl article in Newsweek. So why use the "extra" reference, and why am i stating that he is an expert source, when he isn't on Tobacco? Well, i didn't. I stated that he was an expert on what he was writing about (which was climate change in general), and that the claim by Alex Harvey that the opinion column was "gutter journalism" was far fetched. (Alex actually apologized for this - but redirected to assert that Brook got the information from Wikipedia (without evidence of this))

Now let me be very clear: The Brook article would never be a reliable source for this information if used as a standalone, it would in my opinion even be wrong to use it in the (very popular) form of "Brook stated that ....". Since it is about a person, and thus very much BLP material. But, it isn't used here as a source for the information, but instead to show weight/notability to the claim (ie. that others have remarked on this as well). Something which was in dispute at the time. The Newsweek article is the reliable source for the fact, not the Brooks Op-Ed, as JWB alludes.

In both of these cases there are long discussions on talk, and in at least the Singer case there is also BLP/N discussions. --Kim D. Petersen (talk) 16:22, 29 September 2010 (UTC)