2009/5/26 Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net:
Trying to do Biographies of living persons without a rule proved futile; so a written policy was created.
Which only works because it's NPOV/NOR/V with (a working aim for) no eventualism whatsoever.
We still don't have a corresponding policy for organizations.
It'd need a bad example as compelling as Siegenthaler.
The underlying principle is don't hang an article on scraps of negative information, but you could write a book on the biographies on Wikipedia, and an even more interesting book if you collected all the half-cocked material we have excluded for one reason or another. Not a book you would want to publish or distribute in the UK, however.
*cough* indeed :-)
(The UK phone-call-receiving people do get calls or emails from UK article subjects, with varying degrees of legal threat attached. As per any customer support, solving the problem, or pointing them in the right direction to solve the problem, usually deals with things very nicely. I avoid editing legally problematic BLPs about UK-based subjects, but in almost all cases they're happy to have someone helping solve the problem. Pointing out that we take this very seriously when we're alerted to it helps a great deal too.)
- d.