[WikiEN-l] Request to Wikipedians for BBC Documentary

[Kat Walsh]

On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 12:54 PM, David Gerard<dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/8/18 Cathy Edwards <Cathy.Edwards at bbc.co.uk>:
>
>> I think I have a good idea why BLP are a hot topic of debate in this
>> area,
>
>
> It's because they're special, because they can cause  (and have
> caused) damage to people in a way that other articles can't. (And the
> same applies to material about living people in other articles.)
>
> Basically, we don't have the luxury of eventualism with biographical
> material about living people - it has to satisfy the standard rules
> (neutrality, verifiability, no original research) but we can't have a
> bad article and wait for it to be better - it has to be not-awful at
> any given time. So people get really harsh on reference quality,
> whether a given incident is noteworthy, etc. And that extends to even
> having an article at all - for many subjects, having a Wikipedia
> article can be a curse.

This is about 95% of the truth, actually. Other articles *can* cause
harm in exactly the same way, but are not as obvious or attractive a
target.

-Kat



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