On Apr 29, 2008, at 2:14 PM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
- Policies biased towards inclusionism mean that we have targets like
this to start with, and people are afraid to delete them because they may get beaten up for being "overzealous" by people who think it is no big deal to call a private person names like this.
I really wish you'd stop making overly broad statements like this. There are tons of important inclusion/exclusion debates on Wikipedia, and the rules covering BLPs have effects elsewhere. It's a lot easier to say that we wouldn't lose much by not having a stub on Bob Kinnear. But the broader effects of what you're suggesting - that stub BLPs should be immediately treated as serious candidates for deletion - is going to have tremendous collateral damage because people *do* implement deletion policy overzealously. If you say that BLPs that can't be expanded beyond a stub are speedies you will get a huge swath of BLPs that simply are stubs deleted, and attempts to recreate stubs on them on the grounds that they can be expanded will be deleted as recreations.
That's a much larger price than you're treating it as, and given the impact you have when you make declarations like this I think it's irresponsible for you to make vague motions in this direction. If you want a change in practice or policy, propose one so it can be debated or implement one. This sort of drive-by "this article was a bad thing and I'm very disappointed in you all" is unhelpful.
- Policies which make it harder than it should be to semi-protect
things.
You mean like the Foundation policy expressly protecting the right of anonymous editors to edit, and the view that protected pages are considered harmful?
We're going to have an error rate of either unnecessarily protecting pages or leaving pages open for vandalism. We have always, based on the early leadership of this project, opted for vandalism instead of over-protection. If you want to swing that pendulum the other way, OK - plenty of people have advocated for the semi-protection of all BLPs. They get shot down because of the fact that the right of anonymous IPs to edit is a Foundation issue. There's not much room to change things here unless you have a specific change to implement, in which case you're basically the person who can do so.
-Phil