On 3/30/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/30/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/30/07, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
geni wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28news%29#Robert_Mugabe...
So that's the best example I have seen in a while.
Wow. Just wow. This is both exhilarating and frightening - exhilarating
in
that what we do on WP can have a tremendous effect on the world, and frightening in that in cases like this, this can be a tremendous
negative
effect.
I think raising the notability bar without moving our bios of living people offWP will be far too controversial and chaotic. I would be in favour of doc's proposal to create a separate wiki for living people - it could be
a
Wikia wiki or something run by WMF. The point is to divert this offWP so as to get people specialising in this sort of thing to make the policies
for
articles on living people. (Specialisation of labour seems to be a good idea here.) Then we will be free to raise the notability bar on WP as arbitrarily as we like without worrying that we will be getting rid of useful information.
How do you figure that raising the notability bar will not get rid of useful information? Raising the bar will lose useful articles depending on the criteria that are being used. It doesn't matter if it's located on WP or elsewhere.
Mgm
Of course - what I meant is that we won't be deleting the content forever - we will be just outsourcing it to another wiki that specialises in bios because we aren't equipped to handle such articles, which probably need to be treated differently from other encyclopaedia articles anyway. When the subjects of these outsourced articles reach the bar set by WP for notability, we can just move them back to WP.
I think the bar for notability should be based on what our policies can handle without creating significant loopholes. I like the idea of limiting on-WP bios to only subjects with a biographical secondary source.
It's undeniable that such a policy would lead to useful articles moving off WP. But weighing the costs and benefits, it seems to me that BLPs (specifically living people who aren't famous enough to be on a few people's watchlists) are in a class of their own, and need special handling in a different wiki, which can specialise in solving the problem of writing and maintaining such bios.
Johnleemk