Does anybody know who Richard Overton is? He has made some high-quality comments on The Independent article:
QUOTE
Richard Overton 21 hours ago in reply to Home Buyers' Strike
Well I don't know about these particular clean ups, but the general problem with wikipedia is that those adding content have little to no responsibility for what they write. Now I don't know about David Ross but I'm sure as hell didn't need to know that his wife was a former lap dancer, who he is sleeping with now, and I am totally sure that in 10 or 15 years time it won't matter one iota to any one. Yet there it will be in the wiki biography fought over as if it were the formulae for the elixir of life itself.
QUOTE
Richard Overton 3 hours ago in reply to Greg Molineux
This is typical of the irresponsibility of wikipedia culture that I'm addressing. "It was published somewhere, in some obscure article like this for example, therefore it should be read by everyone that ever googles up the name".
There is meant to be a policy of not adding undue negative content about a person to the articles, yet irresponsible users of the site disregard that policy whenever they think they can get away with it, often they are aided and abetted by admins who don't particularly like the person or the people that they associate with. So here we are with a justification for the addition based on "could be worse". This is just one example out of the four BLPs mentioned in the article, the site is full of this nonsense.
Take a BLP on some fringe science writer, it isn't enough for the site to rubbish the pseudo-science they have to rubbish the person too, by finding every thing unfavourable said about him/her by critics, and anyone that has ever said anything nice about the person will also have an article written about then full of negative content.
Currently there is the Strauss-Khan scandal, into which users are wanting to name his former wives, their current names, and the names of their children, their religion, and ethnicity. The same for that of the women at the centre of all this too.
We could use more thoughtful contributors like him on WR.