User talk:Martin Hogbin/BPRfC

Comments can be placed here. Please feel free to copy text from the project page if it helps make your point. Martin Hogbin (talk) 08:46, 10 December 2013 (UTC)


 * What is your motivation for this? Binksternet (talk) 19:42, 10 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Exactly as described here.  The BP page contains more negative comment than the Nazi Party.  Do you think that is right? Martin Hogbin (talk) 20:10, 10 December 2013 (UTC)
 * I think there is a lot of negative information about BP that has not yet been put into the article, and I think this is not right, that the situation should be corrected. I think your comparison of BP's coverage to that of the Nazi Party is apples vs oranges. I think your comparison to coverage of other oil companies presupposes that all oil companies should get approximately the same amount of negative coverage. This supposition is not in line with Wikipedia's NPOV policy which encourages us to present the reader with a balance that reflects the sources. The sources are not kind to other oil companies but they really gang up on BP, showing, for instance, that BP's North American operations were many times more unsafe than all the other oil companies combined. To represent this kind of coverage in reliable sources, Wikipedia's coverage of BP would have to be many times more critical than the coverage of other oil companies. Of course, BP is a global company so this very negative coverage is somewhat mitigated by BP's performance in other parts of the world. This leaves us with a greatly negative average weight of coverage, however. Binksternet (talk) 20:32, 10 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Both BP and the Nazi Party are Wikipedia articles. The first refers to one of the most evil organisations that the world has ever known that was responsible for the terrible suffering of many millions of individuals.  I would be very easy to find countless very reliable sources giving emotive details of the bad deeds of the Nazis and to fill the article with them, but that is not our job; we are writing an encyclopedia.  BP, on the other hand, is an oil company. Although it has been viciously attacked by the media, I have yet to see a single reliable source that shows that overall BP has acted in a worse manner than other oil companies.  They made some bad decisions that might well have gone unnoticed had they not has some some extraordinary bad luck with the DWH disaster.  For that they get worse treatment than any other organisation that I can find in WP. You need to understand the difference between an encyclopedia and a tabloid newspaper.


 * I do not expect that a logical argument will persuade you to change your mind. You have already convinced yourself that BP are bad lot and you see the purpose of WP to be bringing this to the world's attention.  I can only hope that other editors will respond to this RfC and look at the article in a more neutral and logical manner.  If not it will be a sad day for WP.  Martin Hogbin (talk) 21:01, 10 December 2013 (UTC)


 * I bring you links to ABC News and Business Insider—major media outlets—but you berate me for not bringing a reliable source, for not knowing what is a tabloid. Sorry, but I don't need such ill-considered and clearly emotional advice. Perhaps you have not noticed that I've been writing good and excellent encyclopedia articles for six years now. My approach to the BP article is that of a veteran writer assessing it, and finding it falls short. The article could use more of that point of view, not more reactionary protectionism. Binksternet (talk) 21:28, 10 December 2013 (UTC)
 * The media are not reliable sources for determining the relative safety record of large oil companies. You will not see what is clearly placed in front of you, that, in WP, BP is treated worse than any other organisation, including those who may be thought of as representing the pinnacle of evil. I can only hope that other will see the plain facts. Martin Hogbin (talk) 10:24, 11 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Since the media are not reliable, let's ditch the lot and simply let BP tell its own story. Binksternet (talk) 14:14, 11 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Better still let us just use reliable sources. Martin Hogbin (talk) 14:17, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

You asked me to respond here to the question, How do you justify making 57% of an article criticism? As it turns out, you already asked me the same question in the discussion at Talk:BP, and I already answered it there. Frankly, I don't think it's a useful question. You think the proportion of what you're terming "criticism" is unjustified. I disagree, but I further think that, depending on how one defines the word, the "justification" either is self-evident or it isn't required in the first place. What's all this about, anyway? Do you feel sorry for BP? It's not human, you know—just a vast, impersonal corporation with one overriding objective. It has made its bed and now it has to lie in it, but this interferes with that one objective, so it's devoting an enormous amount of resources to efforts to rehabilitate its image. Of course, dealing with its Wikipedia article has to be a part of those efforts. Thankfully, the community is aware of those efforts and has dug its heels in. I haven't been a part of that—I really was completely uninvolved when I happened upon the RfC—but it makes me rather proud of Wikipedia and Wikipedians (which has not exactly been the case just lately). Rivertorch (talk) 17:32, 15 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Justification is required to write one article in an entirely different way from practically every other article in WP. I do not in any way feel sorry for BP but I am beginning to despair for WP. If the way we write articles is now to reflect the group opinion of editors rather than facts from reliable sources then we are no longer producing an encyclopedia but a what-we-all-think-about-things blog. Whatever kind of bed you think BP has made is irrelevant, we need reliable sources, not newspaper reports on disasters but independent and authoritative sources that say that BP is worse than other oil companies and other large corporations.  Whatever BP has done it cannot possibly have done more harm than Pol Pot, the Nazi Party, or Stalin yet the article reads as though BP were the greatest force for evil that the world has ever seen. Martin Hogbin (talk) 16:11, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
 * My stance is that you are choosing to ignore or downplay "facts from reliable sources", despite your plea that these should dominate. The "facts from reliable sources" which you do not want to see are the negative ones, the ones showing BP in a bad light. Binksternet (talk) 17:13, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
 * There are many negative facts about BP in reliable sources, more than are in the article but we have no need to state them all in the article. If we were to state all the very reliably documented negative facts about the Nazi Party it would take dozens of pages. Even with Microsoft, we could fill several pages with bad press if we put our minds to it.  In the BP we state a vastly greater proportion of the possible negative facts than we do in the examples that I give above.  Why do we do this?  In my opinion it is because some editors are trying to make the point that BP are a very bad company, far worse than any other oil company or a company of any kind.  Now if indeed this were the case I would be the first to support putting it in the article but it would need to be clearly stated by an independent and authoritative source that BP as a whole has acted over a significant part of its history in a worse way than other comparable companies.  No one has yet produced such a source. All we have is a large collection of media sources.  The media clearly have do not the capability of comparing the overall safety or environmental records of large companies, it is not their job.


 * I take it that you have seen this table which shows that BP is getting far more negative media coverage than any other article. Martin Hogbin (talk) 23:48, 1 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Your table means nothing to me. Your criteria for negative coverage is too wide. Regardless of what criteria you use, it is clear that there will be one Wikipedia article that has the most negative coverage. It might as well be BP, since so many strongly negative things have been written about the company in the last 20 years. If BP is truly the most negative article in Wikipedia, but everything is very well sourced, then I'm happy. I have no interest in comparing BP to Nazis and serial murderers. Binksternet (talk) 01:24, 2 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Since you seem fixated on comparing various articles, I wonder if another way you might approach this is to work on making BP competitors' articles more negative. I just took a peek at Royal Dutch Shell, and I do believe the Controversies section, particularly the Human rights subsection, could be expanded considerably. The shenanigans Shell has been up to in Nigeria have received a vast amount of coverage in reliable sources for many years, but one has to scroll way down in the article to see that the company is anything but goodness and light, and even then our coverage is skimpy. Rivertorch (talk) 16:31, 3 January 2014 (UTC)