On Mon, 5 Dec 2011, Steve Summit wrote: > Even if Demi Moore is > perfectly reliable on the truth surrounding her birth name, > common sense tells you that a 140-character tweet (or two) is not > the sort of place where you can make nuanced distinctions between > "I was born Demi, which is to say, that's what everyone always > called me, even though it says 'Demetria' on my birth certificate" > versus "I was born Demi, and it even says that on my birth > certificate, but my parents always said it was short for > 'Demetria', and I always believed that, and told the story in a > People Magazine interview, too, and I only just recently learned > the truth."
The trouble with this reasoning is that BLP subjects who are not specifically experienced with Wikipedia won't make statements with lawyer-like precision. If you reject the BLP subject's own statement on the grounds that there could be some nuance which makes it say other than what it seems to say, you end up with an excuse that pretty much lets you ignore all BLP subjects whenever you want. Furthermore, I can hypothesize that People Magazine left out a similar nuance. Of course they are not limited by the length of tweets, but it is routine for the news media (especially gossip-type media like People) to paraphrase, summarize, reword, etc. in ways that ignore nuances. The People interview doesn't say "birth certificate" either, after all, so by the "maybe they missed a nuance" argument it could still mean Demi is on her birth certificate. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
