On 5/23/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
No, any user or administrator who is following the terms and intent of Biographies of living persons may remove grossly inappropriate material or delete an offending article even if almost everyone else on Wikipedia objects.
The problem is that ArbCom doesn't do content disputes. Do they act as a final voice on what violates BLP? Here, there are 3-5 people saying that the Crystal Gail Magnum article violates BLP and is an attack page. Having read it's deleted form, I'm torn on that. But you have many more people disagreeing. In this case, who gets the final decision? Any admin can simply delete it, yes--I agree, this is in and of itself needed. If I wrote, "Jimmy Bob McGee of Backwater Arkansas sucks off turtles and beat his wife" as an article, delete it on sight. But on cases that some disagree on, do we defer to the first admin to delete it? What if others say he's wrong? If he won't agree to restore the article, it has to go to DRV. Which is good: it's a sanity check on rogue actions of deletion.
The problem here is that people are basically saying any keep or overturn deletion opinions are invalid, by invoking BLP. In essence, the argument is that any admin can, citing BLP, delete any article and have it stick, even if others disagree with the admin's BLP reasoning. The problem obviously is that the only way to then stop this--if the admins close the DRV that supports retaining/overturning the deletion as "Delete/keep gone per BLP"--is to wheel war.
It reads awfully like people are treating BLP as an I-WIN button in a case like this, implying that differing opionions that no BLP vio occurred have no credence. The implication is that the opinions of the 3-5 outweigh anything else.
Regards, Joe http://www.joeszilagyi.com