[WikiEN-l] In development--BLP task force

[wjhonson at aol.com]

Of course, and that's why we have other rules which moderate the other 
rules.  And the BLP policy itself is a rule.  However if a piece of 
evidence is both verifiable, and widely reported and yet negative about 
a person, and that person vociferously objects to it's inclusion... 
than what?  That is the problem here.  We should not white-wash a piece 
of negative, verifiable, widely reported bit simply because it might 
affect a person, or even if they claim it does or has.  We're not the 
nicey-nice patrol and shouldn't be forced to become it.  We're 
encyclopediasts and sometimes you have to say that Hitler was bad.

Will Johnson

<<Not everything which is verifiable should be included in Wikipedia.>>





-----Original Message-----
From: Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net>
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wed, Aug 5, 2009 10:30 pm
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] In development--BLP task force










On Wed, 5 Aug 2009 wjhonson at aol.com wrote:
> The language of the board resolution doesn't come down hard enough on
> the side of verifiable information.  That is, if something is
> verifiable, even a direct quote from the subject themself, then that
> information should be allowed to be included, and should not be
> forcibly stopped from inclusion by aggressive article
> patrollers-with-tools.  It seems to me that the way the language is
> worded, the board is going to continue to allow harassment of those
> editors conscientious to the evidence, at the expense of verifiable
> evidence already broadcast widely across the net.

I think that this is exactly why we need people working on BLP.  
Wikipedia
has put so much emphasis on rules such as verifiability that some 
people think
that the rules trump everything else.  Worse yet, the system is set up 
so that
the rules *do* trump everything else; in a conflict between someone 
with a rule
and someone who's trying to use judgment, the rule always wins, because
you can always argue with someone's personal judgment, but the rule's
right there in print.

BLP is sort of a hack to the system which says "we're going to force 
you to
ignore the rules in this particular situation, because they *really* 
don't
work".  It by no means covers every situation where the rules cause 
problems,
but it's better than nothing and right now it's all we've got.

Not everything which is verifiable should be included in Wikipedia.


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