There's already an article Anders Behring Breivik, the alleged shooter in that Norwegian terrorist thing that's going on today. (There's an article for that too: 2011 Norway attacks.)

Typical Wikipediot nonsense, of course, but I heard about the article existing from Google Plus, so I just had to open a thread here.

There is something to be said for the power of crowdsourcing events like this. Not really in an encyclopedia, though.

Cool to see our dear little Silver doing sterling duty as protector of bollocks in various forums.

I thought Wikipedia is not a newspaper?

Guy who assassinated a U.S. president -- 18,715 bytes.

Guy in the news -- 8,270 bytes, and growing.

And added to literally dozens of articles - especially articles about people whom he said he liked or whom he quoted, even if they never had heard of him ever until after the event. BLP violations galore!

Update:

Guy who assassinated a U.S. president -- 18,748 bytes.

Guy in the news -- 80,383 bytes, and growing.

Kohser, you're purposefully picking a presidential assassin that nobody cares about (and a president nobody cares about). Oh, i'm sure someone who wanted to get it to FA and make it ten times as long could, but it would require historical books and off-internet work to do so.

Now, if you're talking about a real presidential assassin, then fine. And he's currently at 100,639 bytes. That's a better comparison.

Furthermore, you have to add in the fact that news sources available today are much easier to access, more extensive, and go out of their way to discover minute details about a person.

Compare that to events that happened 40 or 100 years ago, and it is much more difficult to find sources on what happened that go into a lot of detail that isn't just a repetition of a standard biography.

Not to mention that those assassin's probably would have a significantly higher number of bytes, if not a whole separate article on the subject, if they had published a manifesto.

Manifesto-writing guy who stirred up quite a fuss chosen at random:

Ted Kaczynski (T-H-L-K-D)

and he's at 78,774 bytes.

I dunno if that means anything.

Lots of his stirring happened quite a long time ago, but he was apprehended and tried during the 'Internet Years.'

The thing with the Unabomber is that his activities were spread out over such a long time period that there will be a lot on him during the whole period. So he's not as good of an example. I'm of the opinion that if a major presidential assassination happened currently, it would be just as long of an article, if not longer.

It's really down to the coverage more than anything else and the amount of detail that the coverage goes into.

News organizations go out of their way to be snoopier nowadays (not that they weren't snoopy back in the day).

Guy active only in the Nineties and (nameless decade) and whacked earlier this year. Notable for one big event, manifesto-writer: Osama bin Laden (T-H-L-K-D)
and he's at 127,445 bytes.

Maybe that's not fair.

How about Seung-Hui Cho (T-H-L-K-D)?
one event, also a massacre, modern times, manifesto-writer.
He's at 88,901 bytes.

Yeah, the thing is, while it may be a bit US-centric for me to say this, events that happen in or to the US tend to get more coverage. In general, that seems to be true.

And, for once, we're getting good coverage about a person that is not happening in the US and...Kohser is complaining about the coverage existing.

What I have been saying for awhile now...and routinely cock-blocked by the ARSeholes unfortunately...is that the bar for reliable sourcing has remained the same for years now, while the media has exploded into covering everything, everywhere, all the time.

This is leading to a glut of worthless articles scraped from the headlines of the day, because there's so many talking heads/sheep that will discuss just about everything now. The media has been fully TMZ-ized.

This is a quiet pastime, like badminton.

I do think you moved the net, however, so I shall retire.

See you on the handball courts.

You have your head firmly stuff up your arse on that. Its down to the fucking crap that 24 hour news pours out, the chatter box that uses fuckwitted, no nothing cunts, that are dragged into new studios and given space between the adverts in which to bullshit. None of the masturbating douche bags has a fucking clue. And even if, perchance, one of them did, the plagiarising copy and paste brigade on wikipedia would manage to mangle it into nonsense.

You just proved Mr Kohs' point. Heaven forbid that people use books to write about history.

After following your link, I am convinced that you are making an unconscionable personal attack on Chip Berlet. This sort of thing will not be tolerated at the Review.

My point is that all articles on such a biography should be around the same length and I am fairly certain that Mr. Garfield's assassin can have an article that long. It's just that doing as such requires someone who has access to the proper information on him. That person hasn't come along yet.

What are you talking about? Risker lost her virginity to President Garfield on a desk in the Oval Office.



Did someone say...Snoopy? (And, please, watch this one!)

That was both offensive and hilarious. I was waiting for someone to make a comment about snoopy.

There is a vast difference between good coverage and what is produced by the content driven mass media. Mass media has a need to produce more and more content, in many cases with little regard to actual newsworthiness. An encyclopedia should record what is historically significant. That you cannot tell the difference is one of your great failings.

So you're saying that you know right now what is historically significant about him?

If it weren't for the whole "BLP as slander/attack/agenda-tool/vandalism-target" issue, it would probably be fine to just let these things get deleted down the road a bit when history gives a bit of perspective.

You seriously don't think the largest spree killing in Norway's history (presumably) isn't historically important?

What is the meaning of the guideline, "Wikipedia is not a newspaper"?

That doesn't even answer my question at all.

My comment to you was more general than this article, however I agree that this event is certainly important, that the perpetrator once worked "in the customer service department of an unnamed company" is rather less so.

Do you understand that an encyclopedia ought to have a different aim from the mass media, and therefore should not necessarily regurgitate everything published by the mass media?

Yes, I do, and I think all the information that is dubbed unimportant to his biography will be filtered out over time.

LOL.

Show us one article about an important news event in 2006 that has significantly declined in size since 2008. Just one.

It depends on what kind of drop you're talking about. I mean, when separate articles are made on a subject within a biography, most of the information in that section will be removed. For example, Evo Morales was up to 53,000 bytes last August. That was dropped to 35,000 after the Presidency information was cut. It has since crept up to 49,000 again because he entered a second term, but it did drop a significant amount.


Oh, here's a good example: George Preca. He was canonized back in 2006 and his article got up to 19,000 bytes by 2007 with a ton of irrelevant information. Then, an IP address of all things came in and cleaned it up and it's down to 7,000 bytes now.

That article was 11,300 bytes within the first 3 minutes of its existence. That doesn't represent a "news"-based creation by the mob. Try again.

You're going to have to clarify then what exactly i'm supposed to be looking for.

Some clue.

A person or event with more than 1,000 hits in a Google News Archive search, plus at least 5,000 Wikipedia page views in the most recent 30-day period. Something like this.

I suppose that Silver Seren is talking about edits like this one, that cut lots of peripheral info from an article.

However, after a few years, the article seems to just get as detailed and long and filled with peripheral content as it was before the cut.

Look, I'm not one to complain about the length of Wikipedia articles. I just think it's unfair to defend the "not a newspaper" rule and to claim that most over-stuffed articles will eventually get culled down, because I don't think either position is viable in practice.