[WikiEN-l] BLPs--some ideas

[MacGyverMagic/Mgm]

Regarding Tiffany,

Articles like that severely lack content about stuff not related to the
arrest.
How about disallowing:
1. Negative articles which severely lacks biographical details.
2. Articles entirely about one or more  negative events related to a person.

Not perfect, but it would leave in tact balanced articles.

On 4/21/07, Travis Mason-Bushman <travis at gpsports-eng.com> wrote:
>
> On 4/20/07 10:35 PM, "Michael Snow" <wikipedia at att.net> wrote:
>
> > Which goes to the
> > point of Wikipedia's oft-cited ability to respond quickly to topics of
> > current interest.
>
> This also has a tendency to be one of our greatest failings. By throwing
> up
> "encyclopedia articles" as quickly as possible about people and issues of
> which little notice has been previously taken and of which we know little
> beyond the "topic of current interest," we are unable to look at these
> issues neutrally or report on people of limited notability with any sense
> of
> encyclopedic perspective and time. They're very easily taken over by
> people
> with a clear POV (usually negative) they and end up being bias-fests.
>
> For example, until I moved it, we had a "biography" of [[Tiffany Adler]],
> the entire contents of which were essentially that she was a woman from
> [[Pacifica, California]] who had been arrested and charged with a
> misdemeanor which happened to make it into a couple local newspapers.
> There
> was nothing about the rest of her life, nothing about who she was, what
> she's done other than that - so readers were left with an
> entirely-unbalanced, biased and completely-out-of-perspective "biography"
> which purported to say that this woman's entire life consisted of being
> arrested. Even as it stands, the article lacks any sense of encyclopedic
> perspective, and basically belongs in WikiNews, not Wikipedia. But there's
> a
> couple editors who believe that the whole world needs to forever know that
> this person has been accused of this crime, and that it should be the
> person's first hit on Google. "Objectivity" is not the first word that
> comes
> to mind.
>
> We can no longer discount Wikipedia's status as a de-facto scandal sheet
> for
> everyday occurrences, serving as a permanent record of anything bad or
> remotely controversial that anyone ever did, no matter how minor in the
> grand scheme of things, as long as it ended up with a three-paragraph
> blurb
> in a local paper. We need to, I think, think about that effect. Is that a
> good thing, and where does it stop? Should a kid who gets expelled from
> high
> school for carrying a knife (an article on which ends up in the local
> fishwrap) then carry around a Wikipedia biography stating such for the
> rest
> of their natural life?
>
> That "oft-cited ability to respond quickly" too often means that we
> respond
> with haste, without perspective and without objectivity.
>
> -Travis Mason-Bushman
>
>
>
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