User:Chiswick Chap/sandbox

There have been similar sockpuppetry attacks on one Middle-earth character after another, e.g. Lúthien and Beren (6 April), Gil-galad (6 April), Bilbo Baggins (6 April), Elrond (6 April), Legolas (4 April), Gandalf (31 March and 4 April), Aragorn (3 April), Merry Brandybuck (2 April), Pippin Took (2 April), Gimli (1 April), Frodo Baggins (1 April), Samwise Gamgee (1 April) and so on. There is already evidence that the socks move to unprotected/second line characters after protections are applied; it may make most sense to protect the whole set for an extended period.

Wikipedia talk:Reliable sources/Perennial sources

Val Hennessy is a notable journalist who has written for The Guardian, The Observer, New Society, You Magazine, Spare Rib, City Limits, and London Evening Standard. Oh, and The Daily Mail.

So, if she had written her book review of Clarissa Dickson Wright's] A History of English Food in any journal other than the one she was currently writing for, we'd have had no difficulty including a description of her work in an article. But it seems that the prohibition on the Daily Mail is so strong that even a notable journalist, writing her personal opinion of a book she had read, is somehow contaminated by the paper vehicle in which it is contained.

Here is what I wrote, some years ago:

"Val Hennessy, reviewing the book for The Daily Mail, wrote that "she jolly well knows her stuff", having "boldly guzzled where no timid foodie has guzzled before. Among the unusual and sometimes "disgusting" foods that Dickson Wright has tasted on our behalf are "oily, fishy" seal; salted sheep; "rather unpleasant" ancient-style cheese made blue with a dirty horse harness; "fishy" and "stringy" swan; and lampreys, which were "So delicious I can see why Henry I died of eating a surfeit of them". She found, writes Hennessy, that a Stilton cheese crawling with maggots was "too pungent", but rook breast meat was "not unpalatable" if you remove the "backbone". Hennessy enjoys the stories of Henry the Eighth's seven-hour banquet, complete with live blackbirds escaping from a pie "presumably making a most horrible mess", and how Charles Fox was so fat his table at the club had a belly-sized half-circle cut from it."

The URL, for anyone who'd like to look, is http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-2051440/Is-ANYTHING-Clarissa-wont-eat--A-HISTORY-OF-ENGLISH-FOOD-BY-CLARISSA-DICKSON-WRIGHT.html

It is hard to see how anything here would have been different if Hennessy had written this for The Spectator or even for The Guardian; the review is amused, delighted with Dickson Wright's indulgence in food, and nothing to do with any views or tabloid unreliability or lack of fact-checking that there might be in the rest of the newspaper. In short, the "general" prohibition on using anything that happened to be printed in the newspaper seems to me to be missing the point: we don't want anything that's unreliable or untruthful, but a journalist reviewing a book and both stating her own opinion and quoting from the book does not fall into that category.

I suggest that materials like book or music reviews in tabloid newspapers, if the reviews are of obviously good quality, should be allowed. We're doing ourselves no favours by blocking everything without thinking.