Richprentice

Organisation mission statements in lead paragraphs

An organisation's "mission statement" might give you some ideas of things to put in a lead paragraph, and might be worth linking to or quoting if particularly relevant, but certainly it wouldn't often be suitable to serve as the lead itself (I guess there might be a situation where it is, depending). Hope that helps! --_{tiny plastic} Grey Knight ⊖ 19:01, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Agreed; a lengthy quote is generally inappropriate, but using selective wording often is useful, and can avoid arguments. Another way around the problem is to simply say XYZ says that their mission is "To do A, B, and C";^[1] again, preferably without quoting at length.

As to why you see this so often, I suspect it's not so much because most editors feel this is appropriate, but rather because editors with conflicts of interest who are unaware of or chose to ignore that guideline have gone ahead and cited themselves (so to speak), or those with strong feelings (say, about a political organization) have chosen to quote something at length. And then the text "sticks" because the organizations are relatively obsure, or the partisans of the language are more persistent in keeping the language in.

But if push comes to shove, "mission statements" do get cut down or eliminated altogether. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:51, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Honorary degrees

I reverted your removal of the honorary degree mention in Sean Hannity. Honorary degrees, while having no real academic value, are still significant in terms of a biography. That info is included in numerous other bio articles. For example, the article on Bill Cosby details no less than 9 honorary degrees. There is mention of honorary degrees for Billy Graham, Stephen Colbert, Maya Angelou lists 39 of them, even Benjamin Franklin. So I'd say there is ample reason to leave it in this article as well. Niteshift36 (talk) 12:45, 15 October 2008 (UTC)