Yury Tarasievich wrote: > Ray Saintonge wrote: > >> Thomas Dalton wrote: >> >>>> But the fact is, Who's who is/was also based on user-submitted >>>> autobiographies. The editors made a list of people who "should" >>>> be in there, and sent invitations with a form where the person >>>> could fill in details about family, education, career, >>>> publications, awards, and hobbies. I'm not sure how the editors >>>> fact checked the entries. Perhaps the risk of public shame was >>>> enough to keep people from lying. >>>> >>> What makes you think people didn't lie? >>> >> What makes you think they did? >> > Because people tend to sort of do this thing, in > such circumstances -- tone up the positives, > tone down the negatives. I was translating the > entries for the equivalent of the mentioned > biographical dictionaries once. Another example > is how like everybody's bio in post-Soviets of > 1990s sort of suddenly lost any relation to the > Communist party. > > Failing to tell the *whole* truth by selective omissions is not the same as a lie, which would be to make claims that are knowingly false. If the 1985 and 1995 editions of a biographical dictionary treat a person's Communist Party association differently that doesn't change the fact that both of those editions were in fact published You can compare the two editions, and note any differences.
Sure, *some* people will tend to do this sort of thing, but that is not the same as accusing all biographies there of being full of lies. Ec _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
