Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-11-30/Discussion report
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An anti-academic bias in Wikipedia is an undisputed fact, just like the attempts at deleting articles about them. Usually, the issues revolve around the interpretation of what notability means. Many users jump on this notability bandwagon and occasionally perform victory dances at AfDs (as if deleting WP:BLPs was something of an achievement). Long before the age of Wikipedia, most academics used to provide their publishers with their own short bios, to be included in footnotes with no need to question their truthfulness. Everything changed with the advent of open source format. The biographies of academics clashed with the notoriety of celebrity news, even though they don't fit the criteria of notability meant for media personalities.
We need to ask ourselves first: does the article tell facts or does it lie? If it is based in lies, it is useless and should be deleted. If it does provide facts and is poorly written it should be rewritten by someone with writing skills. That’s all. Many Wikipedians take themselves very seriously and feel the need to assert the importance of their own opinions by questioning the prominence of academics. Academics are expected to have articles written about them in the popular press, because the same method of Google citation system is used in Wikipedia for all public figures, to quote and to use as a source. For example, most Google searches rely on algorithms rather than libraries as reference points. The sources available online constitute an information database usually replicated by Wikipedia under the threat of original research. While paper encyclopedias use extrapolations, we try to avoid them.
Our arguments for deletion or preservation of articles about academics are therefore based on arbitrary, impossible to define criteria by academic standards. Instead of sending WP:BIOs to WP:AFDs we should strive to make sure that our articles are legible and based in real facts not fame, because Wikipedia's ultimate goal is to make sure that the facts are not misrepresented. --Poeticbent talk 00:25, 9 December 2009 (UTC)