Erik Moeller wrote:
Jimmy, I think this is a case where your famous divine intervention might be helpful to establish a general principle, so I'd appreciate your input.
We have Angela (Beesley) on AfD now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Angela_Beesley_...
The fact that Angela does not want this article to exist has been cited as a reason to delete. It looks like this deletion will go through.
Eek.
Let me think about this a bit, because the ramifications could be enormous either way. There is something to be said for existing procedures on AfD (and I say this as a full-fledged charter member of the "AfD is broken" club!).
I personally think, and would vote this way if I were voting, that factors like:
...does the borderline notable subject ask not to have a bio? (Angela) ...does a mature respect for human dignity of a borderline notable person suggest that a bio is not needed? (Brian Peppers) ...is Wikipedia horribly naval-gazing at times? (Jeremy Rosenfeld, Brian Chase)
...can and should all matter, and be taken into account by people commenting at AfD.
This is in direct opposition to a certain faction with a different read on what it means to be the 'sum' of all human knowledge, a read which comes closer to a 'data dump' of all human knowledge. :)
---------
There is a problem with two relatively tiny groups of people that should be at least mentioned here.
First, there are the Wikipedia lovers who insist that everything about Wikipedia is super duper important and who love to fill Wikipedia with Wikipedia fan cruft *and* to work really hard to look up negative information about anyone who has ever been hostile to Wikipedia. This is a very tiny group of people generally, and in some cases people fall into this trap mostly because they had a run-in with someone who hates Wikipedia because the bio about them is bad, etc.
Second, there are the Wikipedia haters who insist that every negative thing about Wikipedia should be dug up and stuck into the encyclopedia at every possible point. It is important to note that the current trouble with my bio and Angela's bio started when a banned user came in and made rather a strange mess of both articles, including original research that was flatly wrong, as well as strangely intimidating personal data (and if you do not know the whole story behind this, please trust me, I am not kidding about this).
So... bios of living persons, a perennially difficult area for us. And this spills over into deletion debates.