Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 1:16 PM,
<WJhonson(a)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