doc wrote:
Most of the real BLP issues group round biographies of little known people. Bios that be nature can only ever have information about the bit part they played in some small-town scandal, and thus can never be a balanced 'biography' of the person's life. Bios that highlight news that otherwise would be forgotten. Bios that are damaging because they may are the only public biography of the person in existence. Bios that by nature are under-watched. Bios where few will know enough to spot spin and hatchet jobs.
Actually, when I was browsing through that list of {{unreferenced}} biographies last night I didn't come across a single one of these. The only person I found whose notoriety was due to a "scandal" actually looked pretty significant (not just some small-town thing) and had a lot of information about him out on the web.
The vast majority of the little-known people with biographies were minor sports figures, singers, actors, models, race car drivers, etc. whose articles were completely non-controversial and didn't mention any scandalous events.
What we've got on this list are reactionaries who don't want any change and would rather pretend that everything's jolly and no change can ever improve everything. Sure, any change will have some downsides - but that's not the end of the story.
Please don't mischaracterize those who disagree with you. I don't believe that "no change can ever improve everything", I just think that this specific change of being more aggressive about deleting biographies is not the best way to improve Wikipedia and may in fact be detrimental. As someone said elsethread, "we need to do something, this is something, therefore we need to do this" is flawed logic.
Personally, I think that once stable versions are finally implemented many of the major deletionism issues that have been going on for years will fade away. That's the change I'd really like to see, it'll make Wikipedia safer for work-in-progress again.