On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 5:43 PM, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
On 4/17/12, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
<snip>
The key problem here - IMHO - is not-sensitive editors interacting with sensitive BLP subjects.
That is not always the case.
What would *you* do if you cleaned up and expanded an article on a BLP you had never heard of before (to 'do the right thing'), and did the best job you could, but the subject of the article turned up on the talk page of the article and objected to the rewrite and said they didn't want an article on them (I'm talking in general here, not about specific cases)?
To make it even harder, they are being reasonable about it, rather than abusive, and you feel bad about how things turned out. What then? You feel an obligation to keep an eye on an article that *you* rewrote, but you know the subject objects to it. You are not getting paid for this (you are 'only' a volunteer), yet you have found yourself caught in this rather horrible situation that you would never have found yourself in if you had been employed by a published scholarly encyclopedia to write an article.
Why would you not find yourself in a similar situation if employed by a published scholarly encyclopedia and were told "This guy is just notable enough, write a brief bio of him for the next version"?
In the WP case - if they're being reasonable, and object to the rewrite, it's usually either because they have info or points not previously in evidence (in which case, yay, we have more information) or don't understand Wikipedia policy or editorial standards (yay, we have a newcomer who's being reasonable, we can talk to them and educate them, and maybe rope them into contributing). They key is to talk to them. Reasonably.
Under existing BLP and notability policy, we have criteria for article existence/non-existence. If the subject makes or can be helped to articulate a case under that policy that they shouldn't have an article, then the reasonable thing to do is to run it up the AFD flagpole and see if others agree. If they object but can't make a case under the policy, then it's a case of trying to make sure they understand Wikipedia's goals and policies and standards, even if they end up disagreeing with some of them. Again, if they're starting reasonable, they generally listen and engage.
I have never had a conversation along these lines - OTRS or normal on-wiki - that went terribly badly if it started out with a fundamentally reasonable and constructively communicating subject. I don't know how many I dealt with, but it's more than 10.
Far more were of the "No, no, it is true that they convicted me for that but it was a lie! And that other warrant too! You bastards can't post that stuff about me, someone might read it and stop taking my financial advice!"...
What is wrong about this situation currently with the radio personality is that it appears to be the once-every-few-years serious outlier. Unlike the Sigenthaler thing which was a totally innocent article subject and resulted in the BLP policy, this current one is probably not something we can fix with rules that are compliant with our other core goals.
Some cases just make lousy precedent. Lawyers and judges are acutely aware of that. I understand that it blew up enough to gather a lot of internal attention, and am not unsympathetic to the individual's complaints and discomfort. But we can't rework carefully balanced policies over something so muddy ugly as this particular case.
There's a fundamental difference between "This was fucked up" and "We need to change our core values to avoid this happening again".
-george