On 22/04/2008, Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/22/08, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Charlotte Webb wrote:
Regardless, it would be trivial for a bot to generate a list of articles belonging to both [[Category:Living people]] and [[Category:Articles for deletion]], and list them on some prominent
Something like that.
Unfortunately I can't tell whether this is agreement or dismissal.
Agreement :-) The mechanism IMO isn't as important as doing it, though. BLPs are special because we're stupidly popular with a stupidly high Google pagerank, so a Wikipedia article on - or naming - someone is usually the top hit for their name. So bad info about living people can cause actual harm.
If we end up with grey and skimpy living bios, then that's how things are and we can wait for high-quality sources. We've got years to get it all lovely. We're not a source of up-to-the-minute investigative journalism or dirt-digging, after all. While taking care not to slip into doing puff-pieces, either.
(IMO this isn't even about legal issues at all, really.)
Regardless of anything else that might be said about it, creating one comprehensive list of BLPs currently on AFD would at least allow people to get a better, broader idea of which pages would be affected by the current proposal. This would be more helpful in personally deciding how good of an idea it really is, much more-so than examples hand-picked to support an already formed opinion. I am also skeptical of a "trial period" for the current proposal as I doubt enough people will be aware of the "reverse default outcome" soon enough to get meaningful results. A live list would also be helpful in measuring this awareness (and to some extent, obedience) during the "trial period" if there is one, or forever and ever amen otherwise.
Personally I think we should just do it. But anyway.
Also it would be useful in identifying and correcting "collateral damage" and determining the overall level of it.
Mostly terrible public relations I suspect.
If somebody here is good with bots and interested in helping me with this idea, please let me know, publicly, privately, I don't care, but soon.
Over on wikitech-l they're working very hard on making fast category intersections work :-)
- d.