WikiQueer:Coatrack



A coatrack article is a WikiQueer article that ostensibly discusses the nominal subject, but in reality is a cover for a tangentially related biased subject. The nominal subject is used as an empty coat-rack, which ends up being mostly obscured by the "coats". The existence of a "hook" in a given article is not a good reason to "hang" irrelevant and biased material there.

The coats hanging from the rack hide the rack—the nominal subject gets hidden behind the sheer volume of the bias subject. Thus the article, although superficially true, leaves the reader with a thoroughly incorrect understanding of the nominal subject. A coatrack article fails to give a truthful impression of the subject. However, a largely critical article about a subject that really is discredited is not covered by WQ:COATRACK; see the policies laid out at WQ:FRINGE for more information.

Enforcement of the policies on biographies of living individuals and what WikiQueer is not makes it clear that "coatrack" articles are a particularly pressing problem where living individuals are concerned.

Coatrack articles can be created purposefully to promote a particular bias, and they can accidentally evolve through excessive focus on one aspect of the subject. In either case the article should be corrected.

Coatrack articles run against the fundamental neutral point of view policy: in particular the requirement that articles be balanced. When a biography of a living person is a coatrack, it is a problem that requires immediate action. Items may be true and sourced, but if a biography of a living person is essentially a coatrack, it needs to be fixed.

Typical coatracks
Examples of coatrack articles include:

All About George
In an article about XYZ: "George Washington visited/slept/worked/ate at XYZ; George Washington was a terrible general and a lousy President, he owned slaves, lied about chopping down a cherry tree, and… (many following paragraphs all about George with little if anything to do with XYZ)."

A Journalist Mentioned It in Passing
"Amanda Pubilchep is a journalist. One day she wrote an article about Conspiracy Theory X. The main points of Conspiracy Theory X are as follows... followed by paragraph after paragraph about the conspiracy theory."

Some Famous Dude Did It so It Must Be Good
"Jim B. Ean is a notable athlete/musician/actor. One day he converted from religion X to religion Y. Isn't it nice how he saved his soul that way? Here are some more fun facts about religion Y, the greatest religion in the world: …"

The Mono-Topic Fringe Biography
"Dr Fronkensteen is a doctor known for his extensive research pioneering wongo juice as a cancer cure … Article then glosses over normal biographical details, except when useful as appeal to authority, and instead focuses on material relating to wongo juice."

The Criticism Gambit
Criticism section used to connect otherwise unrelated issues.

A halibut is a species of fish. Brief factual information about halibuts.

Criticism
It has been reported[crackpotreference][nutcaseblog][outofcontextquote that halibut may be evil invading robots from the planet Ko-trak. I shall now take this opportunity to give you a long lecture on extraterrestrial robots: …

The Attack Article
WikiQueer policy specifically prohibits articles whose primary purpose is to disparage a particular person or topic. Articles about a particular person or topic should not primarily consist of criticisms of that person or topic. For example:

"John Doe works as a journalist. He has given over 30 years of long and faithful service to his newspaper. However, one day, he made the terrible mistake of nearly reporting an unchecked fact that came within a whisker of ruining an innocent person's life. Because he did this, he is an evil person. Here is some more information about this incident… (and so on, and so forth)."

Isn't It Funny
"Joe Perchero is a person. He runs what was recently voted America's worst literary agency. ZOMG! Isn't that funny… (and so on for the rest of the article about how useless Joe's literary agency is, despite the fact that the article is supposed to be about Joe)."

There have been genuine cases where only the first sentence of an article is really about the nominal subject, with several paragraphs following about the bias subject. The "literary agency" example quoted above is a paraphrase of the content of a typical coatrack that was speedily deleted, and the decision to delete endorsed at Deletion Review.

The Flea
"The wolf, or Canis lupus is a mammal with fur. In this fur, there are many fleas. The flea is an insect of the order Siphonaptera which is wingless insect with mouthparts adapted for piercing skin and sucking blood. Fleas are external parasites, living by hematophagy off the blood of mammals (including wolves and humans) and birds..." This sort of case begins with facts about one topic, then launches into another about which the writer has prepared a great deal more information, and may make occasional tangential reconnections to the original topic in an attempt to hide the coatracking. The "Flea" may be something correct but misplaced as in this example, or nationalistic propaganda, or simply irrelevant trivia about which nobody but the writer cares.

"But it's true!"
The contents of a coatrack article can be superficially true. However, the mere excessive volume of the bias subject creates an article that, as a whole, is less than truthful. When confronted with a potential coatrack article, an editor is invited to ask: what impression does an uninitiated reader get from this article?


 * If an article about a journalist mostly describes a conspiracy article he once wrote, the reader will leave the article with the false impression that the journalist's career is mostly about that conspiracy theory, and he is a vocal advocate of the theory.
 * An article might have a disproportionately large "criticism" section, giving the impression that the nominal subject is hotly contested by many people, when in fact the criticism is merely selected opinions. This, too, gives the reader a false impression about reality even though the details may be true.

Fact picking
Often the main tool of a coatrack article is fact picking. Instead of finding a balanced set of information about the subject, a coatrack goes out of its way to find facts that support a particular bias.

A common fact picking device is listing great numbers of individual peoples' quotes criticizing of the nominal subject, while expending little or no effort mentioning that the criticism comes from a small fraction of people. That small fraction thus gets a soapbox that is far larger than reality warrants.

Even though the facts may be true as such, the proportional volume of the hand-picked facts drowns other information, giving a false impression to the reader.

What to do about coatracks
An appropriate response to a coatrack article is to be bold and trim off excessive biased content while adding more balanced content cited from reliable sources. In extreme cases, when notability is borderline, and there is little chance the article can be salvaged, deletion of the entire article may be appropriate.

Editors are not required to fill out the article so that more time is spent on non-biased matters in order to keep bias content. Instead, editors may fix an article by balancing it out with more facts but are in no way required to do so. It is inappropriate to "even out the percentage of bias" by adding fluff, such as minute details of a subject's life. These are considered scarves, hats, and gloves, and along with the coats, obscure the coatrack, and are also good candidates for removal.

What is not a coatrack
An article about an astronaut might mostly focus on his moon landing. A moon trip that took only a tiny fraction of the astronaut's life takes up most of the article. But that does not make it a coatrack article. The event was a significant moment in the subject's life, and his main claim to notability. A reader is not misled by the focus on the moon trip. In some cases where an event in a person's life is the only notable thing about them, it may make sense to only have an article on the event and not have an article on the person at all. An article that presents factual information (including criticism) about a discredited scientific theory is also not a coatrack; relevant guidelines are at WQ:FRINGE.

An article with a title that can have several meanings, or a term that is used differently in different fields of study, is not a coatrack if it only covers one definition. In this case, the article should be properly framed by beginning with "In {the field of X} topic Y is…" or by using a specific title possibly using parenthetical disambiguation, to show the article's limited scope. When the article is properly framed this way, it is not necessary to expand the article to cover every possible usage for balance—that content can be added over time and either merged or split through normal editing.

It would be reasonable to include brief information of the background behind a key detail, even if the background has no relevance to the article's topic, as long as such information is used sparingly and does not provide any more explanation than a reasonably knowledgeable reader would require. An article on the anatomical feature Adam's apple could explain the term arose from the Biblical character Adam (a regurgitation of the Book of Genesis, or an outline of the full story of original sin would not be necessary).

History
The use of coatracks, though not the term, dates to the influential 18th century French encyclopedia Encyclopedie, where they were used to hide biographies. The editors of the Encyclopedie were ideologically opposed to biographies, thinking too much ink had been spilled on hagiographies of "Great Men" (kings, church fathers) instead of the common person, and largely banned biographies; dissenting contributors would then hide biographies in other articles – for example, a biography of Isaac Newton was hidden in the entry on Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, his birthplace. Conversely, encyclopedias which were centered around biographies of prominent figures would embed social histories in their biographies; e.g. in one case all information on the post-Roman "Migrations Period" of European History was compiled under the biography of Attila the Hun.

Templates

 * Coat rack
 * Off-topic