On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 6:14 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
"we want ... to keep Wikipedia out of aspects of the lives of people that are nothing like encyclopedic, and can cause potential defamation issues. "
That only sounds good until one analyses it.
I think most of us just want to keep Wikipedia away from unsourced negative material about living people, and possibly some of us also want to keep away from even sourced material not relevant to notability, & derogatory in a serious way to people the intimate details of whose lives are not a matter of public concern.
That's a much narrower restriction than what you said, and much more compatible with NPOV, and with the actual wording of BLP.
And anything and everything dealing with living people is potentially defamatory if for reasons right or wrong they don't like what is being said. I think most of us would think it more compatible with NPOV to keep out only what can plausibly be considered as actually libelous, again a much narrower restriction.
This illustrates what arbcom did wrong: they legislated that anyone with a more broadly restrictive view can impose it. Possibly some of them may have actually known what they were doing, and specifically tried to impose their minority view.
-- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
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I think you're correct, in a lot of ways. I think BLP is great to say "If we're going to have negative or potentially controversial information in an article about a living perspon, it absolutely, 100%, must be impeccably sourced from very reliable sources." That's fine, and I would hope we would require that anyway, with or without the policy. On the other hand, I've seen it used to mean "We shouldn't put this person's name in an article, despite it being publically known", or "We cannot put negative information in this person's article despite the fact that it -can- be impeccably sourced." That I cannot support, and unfortunately it leads to an erosion of BLP in general.
Charles writes higher in the thread that we may need tough enforcement against those who intend to use our articles to smear people. Well, yes we do. On the other hand, we need to be very careful that such enforcement is only used against the -right- people, that is, those truly intending to do so. There can be legitimate content disputes in BLPs, but unfortunately, the hammer of "It's a BLP issue, so it goes, period" tends to be used as a sledgehammer to end such disputes.
If BLP is to be strictly enforced, it also needs to be strictly defined. An ambiguous policy combined with "shoot-to-kill" enforcement is a recipe for disaster. We should make very, very sure that there is clear consensus on everything which is to be enforced in such a manner, and from what I've seen, while the core idea (unsourced and potentially negative content regarding living people must be removed immediately and may not be reinserted until and unless very reliable sources back it) does enjoy clear consensus, on many parts (names, applicability to -sourced- information), it is nowhere near clear.