Talk:Sydney Writers' Festival

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Student newspaper, and undue weight edit

Latest comment: 14 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

I have just removed the following from the article, and wanted to explain why:

In 2008 festival organisers prevented students from tbe University of Technology Sydney from distributing Festival News, a newspaper for the festival produced by journalism students. The organisers objected to content criticising the New South Wales government, a major sponsor of the event. Post script on the above issue concerning the Festival News: The Dean of UTS' Humanities faculty (of which the Journalism Program is a part) issued an apology for the controversy and said that no attempt was made by the festival to censor the publication. The apology could formerly be read on the festival website, but has since been removed. According to an article by UTS Head of Journalism Professor Wendy Bacon, university staff and student journalists had heard nothing of this apology before it went online. Professor Bacon maintained that "the words in the apology corresponded neither to the available documentary evidence or [the students'] own direct experience."

As I see it, the problems with the above are:

It is largely tangential to the subject of the article, which is the Festival itself. The above content essentially claims that "a student newspaper, issued in one particular year and detailing some of the contributions to the Festival in that year only, was censored by an unrelated organisation because it contained unrelated criticism, although the unrelated organisation denies that the censorship occurred. Shortly afterward, someone posted on a blog with some more details." Fascinating stuff, but not really related to the Writers' Festival. If this should go anywhere, it should be in an article on "Festival News", or Wendy Bacon, or even UTS.
It is unverified and not notable. the only reference is a blog post by Wendy Bacon and blogs, even fairly prominent ones like Crikey, are not reliable sources.
It is undue weight to a minor controversy denied by the supposed villian of the piece. The removed material is as long as the entire article on the subject. If the article was ten screens long and included every piece of minutiae about every year's Festival, there might be a place for this here. As it is, it overwhelms the rest of the content.

Other opinions welcome. Euryalus (talk) 01:09, 29 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

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