On 3/30/07, John Lee <johnleemk(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 3/30/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28news%29#Robert_Mugab…
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