On 3/29/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
The other solution is to stop publishing biographies of living persons, or at least to offer subjects deletion on request.
By hosting living bios, and by inviting anyone in the world to edit them, we're encouraging bad editing in a quantity we have no hope of controlling.
That would leave a major hole in our coverage. There has been talk of deleting articles about people that are only slightly notable at their request, but that just results in arbitrary definitions of how notable you have to be to not be allowed to have your article removed.
We're going to have more than a major hole in our coverage if we lose a lawsuit.
The ideal thing would be to come up with a working definition of "borderline notable" and to give those people the right to have their bios deleted on request. But this being Wikpedia, we'll never agree on a definition.
Another good idea is not to allow living bios on people who have not already had a bio published by a reliable source. That would massively reduce our coverage, but it would solve almost all of our problems. The published bios would establish notabilty and would act as sources for our own bio, so we've have fewer errors.
Below that is the option to allow all living bios to be deleted on request.
The most drastic would be to stop publishing living bios of any kind.
The worst option is to continue as we are, where a huge number of living bios are either vanity articles or attack pages.