On Fri, May 25, 2007 8:03 am, Fred Bauder wrote:
I think my prior interpretation of BLP may have been unduly expansive.
Thank you for admitting this.
With respect to articles such as about the complaining witness in the Duke La Cross case, Neutral point of view conflicts with Verifiability as we have no way to round out such an article as the only published material is negative. Resolution of the conflict is difficult and results will vary with the situation.
On the contrary, NPOV does not conflict with verifiability. A neutral point of view means that we balance it out based on what we know. An article is neutral even if it reports mostly negative things about a topic or subject if that's what the sources say. To minimize the verifiable information when the verifiable information is almost completely negative is a violation of NPOV.
Again, few reasonably disagree with removing negative information from BLPs that's poorly sourced/unsourced - if anything, it's "instruction creep" past the basic verifiability/NPOV policies. The problem is BLP being used as a bludgeon to get rid of well-sourced, verifiable, NPOV information because the neutral point of view is negative.
If Wikipedia was around during Jack the Ripper's time, would we have to move his article to [[1888 presumed prostitute murders]], or would we simply accept that the most neutral article we could make is simply verifiably negative?
-Jeff