[WikiEN-l] ArbCom Legislation

[David Goodman]

"we want ... to keep Wikipedia out of aspects of the lives of people
that are nothing like encyclopedic, and
can cause potential defamation issues. "

  That only sounds good until one analyses it.

I think most of us  just  want to keep Wikipedia away from unsourced
negative material about living people, and possibly some of us also
want to keep  away from even sourced material not relevant to
notability, & derogatory in a serious way to people the intimate
details of whose lives  are not a matter of public concern.

That's a much narrower restriction than what you said, and much more
compatible with NPOV, and with the actual wording of BLP.

And anything and everything dealing with living people is potentially
defamatory if for reasons right or wrong they don't like what is being
said. I think most of us would think it more compatible with NPOV to
keep out only what can plausibly be considered as actually libelous,
again a much narrower restriction.

This illustrates what arbcom did wrong: they legislated that anyone
with a more broadly restrictive view can impose it. Possibly some of
them may have actually known what they were doing, and specifically
tried to impose their minority view.



-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG