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A coatrack article
If this page is going to be a list of criticisms of Brown, it might as well contain some valid ones. [[User:Scriabin|Scriabin]] 17:03, 26 March 2007 (EDT)
If this page is going to be a list of criticisms of Brown, it might as well contain some valid ones. [[User:Scriabin|Scriabin]] 17:03, 26 March 2007 (EDT)
== A coatrack article ==
Let's see: Conservapedia has a very short ''but factual'' stub on [[Harvard University]]; nothing at all on [[Yale University]], [[Princeton University]], [[University of Pennsylvania]], [[Columbia University]], [[Dartmouth College]], or [[Cornell University]].
How odd, then, that there should be an article on Brown, ''ten times as long'' as the article on Harvard, appears shortly after an allegation that someone on the Brown campus vandalized Conservapedia... and that three of the article's four paragraphs just happen to be unflattering:
*a drunken party that sent some students to the hospital (a regrettable but routine event at every college; it doesn't even rise to the level of notability unless someone ''dies'' of alcohol poison, as happened at MIT);
*someone vandalizing Conservapedia (and if that gets you on Conservapedia's front page I'm sure all the other colleges will soon be having contests to see who else can achieve this);
*a story about the origins of the Brown fortune in the slave trade. (Yes, and the cod hanging in the Massachusetts State House commemorates the role of Massachusetts in providing cost-effective slave chow for Caribbean sugar plantations).
This is what has been called a "coatrack article." The usual defense is "but it's factual." Yes, but the only purpose of the article is to be a coatrack onto which to selectively hang facts that support a tendentious thesis: in this case, I suppose, something profound like "Brown sux! Conservapedia rulz!"
This all seems rather like the "gossip" that, Conservapedia charges, "pervades" Wikipedia. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith]] 21:11, 26 March 2007 (EDT)