On 8/18/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 8/18/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)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&ol…
SlimVirgin added the original text on 28 June:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Blp&direction=next&a…
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