On 8/18/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/18/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Who put that in, and what do they say?
An anon changed "posted to articles or talk pages" to "this article or its talk page(s)". http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Blp&diff=next&old...
SlimVirgin added the original text on 28 June: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Blp&direction=next&am...
The BLP policy in essence is that Wikipedia must take care not to initiate or spread nonsense about living people, whether via our articles or posts on talk.
The requirement not to move potentially defamatory material to talk pages is because they're cached by Google (and even if they weren't, they're read by a lot of people), and the point is to stop the spread of the defamation. Editors who wanted to damage someone had begun to realize that getting the material onto a talk page was as useful as getting it into the article itself, and with no annoying restrictions like NPOV, V, and NOR. There was also an ArbCom ruling that material of that nature should be removed from a talk page, and I'm speaking from memory now, but I believe it was the CBerlet/Nobs01 case. Someone in that case was posting long screeds of damaging claims to the talk page because editors were resisting allowing it into the article.
There are lots of ways material can be discussed with directly referring to it, and people can ask for a reliable source for all edits without specifying the particular edit that's caused the problem. We don't need to say: "Do you have a source for the claim that Professor Sir John Doe was seen with a woman not his wife in a nightclub last night?"
Sarah