Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 1:16 PM, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
Saying that things in BLPs "hurts people" only furthers the idea that that is what we're avoiding. It's a simplistic approach to a complex issue.
[snip]
You're correct that the goal is to be neutral and that neutrality sometimes makes people unhappy.... But neutrality goes beyond being simply factual: having a big high profile article about some trivial gaff that would be soon forgotten without WP's help is not neutrality. Neutrality is more nuanced that the impression people put off when they make the "they screwed up, it's their problem" argument. ... and in this and many many other cases, there really isn't an argument the the subject screwed up and somehow deserves the embarrassment of having the truth told.
But this is again a generic policy; we even have one of those impenetrable bits of jargon for it, [[WP:UNDUE]]. We have flamewars about it all the time, ranging from whose views on global warming are worth including in the main article, to which criticisms of Islam are notable. Sure, with biographies of living people (as well as several other classes of articles, such as those on imminent elections, and maybe even criticisms of Islam) it may be *more important* to follow this policy as promptly as possible than with articles about long-dead people or untimely subjects almost nobody cares about. But that's just a general preference to fix The Articles That Matter More sooner, not some unique way of writing BLPs.
On the union-leader-attack page though, I would agree that some mechanism to deal with repeated obviously-bad reverts from multiple or changing IP addresses would be ideal. I wasted a good bit of time keeping both pro- and con- crap and blogcruft out of [[Erwin McManus]], some page I found on recentchanges patrol about some guy I've never heard of and don't care about at all, but who appears to have a strong following and strong opposition. Posting in the obvious places (some BLP page; Wikiproject Christianity; I forget where else) elicited not much of a response, and protecting the page myself elicited an admonition that I shouldn't have protected a page I was "edit warring" on.
-Mark