Slim Virgin wrote:
On 3/29/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
It needs to be clear up and down the line that the arbitration committee will support people who remove unsourced information, as long as they are nice about it. But these things should never come to us, people who resist removal of unsourced information should be clued in long before it comes to that.
The other solution is to stop publishing biographies of living persons, or at least to offer subjects deletion on request.
By hosting living bios, and by inviting anyone in the world to edit them, we're encouraging bad editing in a quantity we have no hope of controlling.
Sarah
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Regrettably I think Sarah is right. Any individual case can usually be solved with a creative use of existing policy, a little common sense, and the occasional use of the pointy stick.
However, our quality control is not upscaling - nothing like. And we have a moral, if not a legal, duty to consider that. We simply cannot protect the subjects of the biographies we are allowing from nastiness that they should not be subjected to.
I'd not be as drastic as disallowing living bios. But we do need to except that the eventualism that has so well served wikipedia in other areas doesn't work here. If vandalism or POV hangs around on our article on Quakerism - really only our credibility suffers. Not so with a living person - on whom this may be the only comprehensive listing on the internet.
The problem is with the marginally notable. We recognise and revert crap on famous people quickly - and in any case no-one will form their opinion of George Bush based solely on our information.
The solutions: #Disallow living bios altogether - far too drastic #Drastically raise the notability thresholds on bios - possible #Restrict anon editing etc in Wikipedia, or require some scrutiny of editors - possible, but the whole project will suffer #Fork off all living bios to a separate wikimedia project with specialized rules/community etc (a 'wikipeople' or 'wikiwho') - should be considered as it would allow tough rules here - whilst retaining eventualism on the rest.
For now, I'll predict we'll simply tweek existing rules - but I will also prophecy that before too much longer we will adopt one of the above. I just hate to think of the crisis - wrecked life or bad publicity - that will be the thing that forces us to do it.
Doc