Hey all,
Apologies if this isn't the appropriate list/discussion to post to; I
learned a lot by following the last BLP discussion, so I'm hoping to get
some advice here. It's a question that as a technology consultant I'm
asked a lot, and I don't have the greatest answer...
I have a friend & colleague, a popular young NYC feminist, who's got a
Wikipedia page. She's often been the subject of multiple
troll/flame/stalking/etc wars, online and off, for many years now-- she
was a favorite target of Anon and 4chan/b/ at one time, to give you an
idea. Her page is rather sparse, but often people swing by and add
inflammatory and other negative material to it. Since she's not *that*
well known, her page isn't watched/edited by enough people to keep that
in check, and she's often left frustrated that this material figures so
prominently in her profile.
I told her the best thing for her to do is find people in her community
who can add more biographical information and really flesh out her page,
so that anything negative has at least more balance to it. Since her
community is mostly women, we butt up against the gendergap issue...
there just aren't that many women (esp feminists) who are into this work.
She's asked on multiple occasions if I or other consultants can be paid
edit the page for her, but I advised that this not kosher in the
community.
So, she's feeling extremely stuck. She's not supposed to edit her own
page, she doesn't have a strong enough community to maintain her page,
and she can't pay anyone to do it. What to do? I understand, and she
understands, that negativity is just part of the Wikipedia world; but
having it be so prominent, and most of it being inflammatory, is just...
ugh. So much of her work has been extremely positive and productive, I
just hate to see her being recorded in history this way.
Any advice is greatly appreciated.
dz
Not off topic at all. The page can be protected by any administrator,
fully or partially as the situation may require, likewise any
administrator can remove BLP violations from the article's editing
history, and oversighters can suppress most serious problems from the
view of even the administrators, email User:Oversight
She can edit her own page with respect to plain error, or to remove
obvious BLP problem, as can feminist friends, or indeed anyone who
notices a problem. And she, or other concerned users can bring up
problems on the talk page of the article.
There is a sense here that because she is a notable feminist that using
the usual techniques of asking the general community for help would be
ineffective; that assumption is both false and untested.
However, not knowing who she is, or the nature of the problem, makes
assistance impossible.
Fred