Pauloluisimo

Piers Morgan and Arsenal

Hi Pauloluisimo, I removed your contribution concerning Piers Morgan and Arsenal because it essentially seemed to be pushing a point of view ("his loyalty and knowledge to the AFC cause seems to be constantly undermined", "his loyalty remains in question") rather than reporting significant facts.

Of course, as you say the paragraph was not unsourced - there is the Daily Mail article which you linked to - but I would suggest that the fact that someone made a mistake or contradicted himself in a newspaper article is not in itself all that significant!

In other words, once your opinion of questionable loyalty is taken out as Wikipedia policy demands it should be, there isn't much left in the paragraph to justify inclusion in an encyclopedia.

I hope that explains it for you. By the way, if you want to continue this discussion it might be best to do it on the Talk:Piers_Morgan page rather than our private user pages, so that any other interested editors can add their opinions. Barnabypage (talk) 17:07, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Hi again Pauloluismo, thanks for getting back to me on this topic. I guess there are two slightly different points to be made here:

1. Comments such as "his loyalty remains in question" are your speculation or observation, and as the relevant guideline states, "Wikipedia does not publish original research or original thought. This includes unpublished facts, arguments, speculation, and ideas." (See WP:OR.) In other words, to support the inclusion of this point in the Wikipedia article, you would need to find a reputable third-party publication - maybe a newspaper profile of Morgan, for example - raising doubts as to his loyalty.

2. Another guideline (WP:NNC) states: "Treat each aspect with a weight appropriate to its significance to the subject...Keep in mind that an encyclopedia article is a summary of accepted knowledge regarding its subject, not a complete exposition of all possible details." And I am not sure that Morgan's support (or non-support!) of AFC is really all that relevant to an encyclopedic entry on his life and career. If he were primarily known as a football commentator that might be a different matter, but information about the football team he follows (or doesn't) seems to me to be trivia on the level of favourite colour, favourite food etc.

Dealing with issue 1 (finding a good third-party source) would go some way toward dealing with issue 2 as well, because if a reputable publication has taken the time to report that Morgan's support for AFC is questionable, that does enhance the significance of the point.

However, you should also take a look at WP:BLP to see why we need to be extra-careful with this kind of comment in an article on a living person. Barnabypage (talk) 15:38, 15 January 2009 (UTC)