Jimmy Wales

And so, you know, some of the things have to do with, and this is a common debate that goes on in Wikipedia, is what we call undue weight.

So I'll give an example here.

There was an article I stumbled across many years ago about the mayor.

No, he wasn't a mayor.

He was a city council member of, I think it was Peoria, Illinois, but some small town in the Midwest.

And the entry, you know, he's been on the city council for 30 years or whatever.

He's a pretty, I mean, frankly, pretty boring guy and seems like a good local city politician.

But in this very short biography, there was a whole paragraph, a long paragraph about his son being arrested for DUI.

And it was clearly undue weight.

It's like, what has this got to do with this guy if it even deserves a mention?

It wasn't even clear...

Had he done anything hypocritical?

Had he done himself anything wrong?

Even was his son, his son got a DUI.

That's never great, but it happens to people and it doesn't seem like a massive scandal for your dad.

So of course, I just took that out immediately.

This is a long, long time ago.

And that's the sort of thing where, you know, we have to really think about in a biography and about controversies to say, is this a real controversy?

So in general, like one of the things we tend to say is like any section, so if there's a biography and there's a section called controversies, that's actually poor practice.

Because it just invites people to say, oh, I want to work on this entry.