Things I don’t understand ||

Compare and contrast Wikipedia’s biographies of famous people with those done by professionals.

Today’s biography: Campaigning journalist Paul Foot, as written up in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Foot, Paul Mackintosh (1937–2004), journalist, was born on 8 November 1937 in Haifa, Palestine, the son of Hugh Mackintosh Foot (1907–1990), later Baron Caradon, governor of Jamaica and Cyprus, and at the time an administrative officer in the Palestinian government, and his wife, (Florence) Sylvia (d. 1985), daughter of Arthur White Millar Tod, director of the Steam Navigation Company of Baghdad. The Foots were a famous west-country family deeply rooted in radical Liberal tradition; Paul’s grandfather Isaac Foot was a Liberal MP and Methodist. Three of Foot’s uncles were politicians. Michael Foot became leader of the Labour Party, Dingle Foot was solicitor-general under Harold Wilson, and John Foot was a Liberal life peer (as Baron Foot). Paul was educated at Shrewsbury School, which was to provide the founding spirits of the satirical magazine Private Eye, Christopher Booker, Willie Rushton, and Foot’s lifelong friend Richard Ingrams. ‘At Shrewsbury I was on Ingrams’ coat tails’, recalled Foot, who freely admitted to hero worship (Thompson, 43–4). National service followed and when, in 1958, at the end of his stint as a subaltern, he went to University College, Oxford, to read jurisprudence the first person he came across was Ingrams.

In the late 1950s Oxford University’s premier magazine, Isis, had been taken over by the ‘new left’ under the editorship of Dennis Potter, later to become one of Britain’s most accomplished television playwrights. Foot, who had not yet made the journey from his family’s traditional Liberal beliefs to the far left, invited him to speak to the University Liberal Club, of which he was president. Potter’s speech was remarkable for the observation that when he saw a Rolls-Royce he spat at it (Ingrams, My Friend Footy, 22). Foot’s radical juices began to race and, together with Ingrams, they took over Parson’s Pleasure magazine. It did not last long and was reborn, with the help of Rushton, Booker, and John Wells, as Mesopotamia. This was the embryonic Private Eye. Foot went on to be a short-lived editor of Isis but the magazine was banned by the university proctors after he introduced critical reviews of lectures. He attacked the fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley and resigned when Isis’s owners decided to apologize. In his last term he became president of the Oxford Union, where he honed his considerable oratorical powers, as well as fulfilling half his father’s bidding, contained in a telegram that greeted his arrival in Oxford: ‘Get a first and be president of the Union’ (ibid., 12). A life of protest and campaigning against injustice and intolerance had begun.

Now compare with Wikipedia’s biography of Paul Foot :

Paul Mackintosh Foot (8 November 1937 in Palestine – 18 July 2004 at Stansted Airport) was a British investigative journalist, political campaigner, author, and long-time member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). He was the son of Hugh Foot (who was the last Governor of Cyprus and, as Lord Caradon, was the UK Ambassador at the United Nations from 1964 to 1970). He was the nephew of Michael Foot, former leader of the Labour Party, and was educated at Shrewsbury School and at University College, Oxford.

Education

Contemporaries at Shrewsbury included Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton and several other friends who would later become involved in Private Eye.

Anthony Chenevix-Trench was his Housemaster at Shrewsbury between 1950 and 1955, a time when corporal punishment in all schools was commonplace. In adult life, Foot exposed the ritual beatings that Chevenix-Trench had given. As Nick Cohen wrote in Foot’s obituary in The Observer:

“

Even by the standards of England’s public schools, Anthony Chenevix-Trench, his housemaster at Shrewsbury, was a flagellomaniac. Foot recalled: ‘He would offer his culprit an alternative: four strokes with the cane, which hurt; or six with the strap, with trousers down, which didn’t. Sensible boys always chose the strap, despite the humiliation, and Trench, quite unable to control his glee, led the way to an upstairs room, which he locked, before hauling down the miscreant’s trousers, lying him face down on a couch and lashing out with a belt.[1]

”

Exposing him in Private Eye was one of Foot’s happiest days in journalism. He received hundreds of congratulatory letters from the child abuser’s old pupils, many of whom were then prominent in British life.

After his national service in Jamaica, Foot was reunited with Ingrams at Oxford and wrote for Isis, one of the student publications at the University.

Read both biographies and then tell me which is the better, fuller account with more information about the person, a better writing style and which one is filled with trivia.

Time to read: 15 minutes.

GO!

I received this in the mailbox from Encyclopedia Britannica

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A Sample of Encyclopædia Britannica’s Distinguished Contributors

Sigmund Freud The term psychoanalysis does not appear (or at least is not indexed) in the Encyclopædia Britannica until well into the 20th century. The first treatment of psychoanalysis as a subject unto itself appeared in the Thirteenth Edition, written by leading authority Sigmund Freud. Read “Psychoanalysis” by Sigmund Freud

Harry Houdini Even a superficial reading of “Conjuring” by American magician Harry Houdini conveys the inescapable conclusion that the magician’s view of the topic was focused on two matters. The first was the debunking of the then-fashionable spiritualists; the second was the greatness of Houdini. Read “Conjuring” by Harry Houdini

Lillian Gish The contribution of silent film star Lillian Gish appeared in 1929. By the time it was replaced in 1939, Hollywood was in full swing and exposition of this sort probably sounded somewhat quaint. Read “Motion Pictures: A Universal Language” by Lillian Gish

T.E. Lawrence For the Fourteenth Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, wrote on the subject of guerrilla warfare. The element of personal experience that pervades the article is unusual in an encyclopedia but must have been the chief reason this particular author was sought out. Read “Guerilla” by T.E. Lawrence

Marie Curie Marie Curie, who was twice awarded the Nobel Prize, contributed this article on radium to the Thirteenth Edition of Encyclopædia Britannica. Writing in the third person, she modestly described her involvement in a discovery that would have a significant influence on subsequent research in nuclear physics and chemistry. Read “Radium” by Marie Curie | Watch a video documentary on Marie Curie

Orville Wright This fraternal biography may well be unique in the history of Britannica. It appeared in the first printing of the Fourteenth Edition (1929). It was revised several times, first in 1950, two years after Orville’s death, and the last time in 1969 by Charles Harvard Gibbs-Smith, who subsequently wrote the biography of both brothers that appeared in the Fifteenth Edition (1974). The first mention of the Wright brothers in Britannica was in the Twelfth Edition (1922). Read “Wilbur Wright” by Orville Wright | Watch a video documentary on the Wright Brothers

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Can you imagine Sigmund Freud writing and defending Psychoanalysis on Wikipedia? Or Orville Wright being allowed to control a biography of his brother without Wikipediots screaming about “Conflict of Interest” and WP:OWN?

Me neither.

Perhaps we’d even have Slimvirgin (aka Sarah McEwan aka Linda Mack) accusing Orville of multiple violations of WP:NPOV and not writing in Good Faith…it might even have been fun to put Marie Curie in front of the ArbCom.