On 13/09/2007, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
It's a reliable source for the claim that the action happened, but not a reliable source for the truth of any of the allegations made during that action. And it's *definitely* not a reliable source for the allegations' *notability*.
That's the key point. Stating Ken's claim about me eating hobbits is fine from a reliability point of view, but if Ken isn't some kind of expert on either me or hobbits, then his claim isn't notable and shouldn't be included for that reason, and that reason alone. If Ken was an expert on people eating hobbits then his claim would be notable and it should be included in any article on me.
Of course, we're not actually talking about articles, so we've ended up a little off-topic. People need to stop applying Wikipedia's policies about articles to everything else - they don't apply. Perhaps the problem is our overuse of acronyms - people end up forgetting what they actually stand for. The B in BLP stands for "Biographies". The policy is about biographies, that means articles about people, articles go in the main namespace. The BLP policy does not apply to the rest of Wikipedia. Some of the reasoning behind it does, but not all.
BLP isn't just about having a good encyclopaedia, it's about ethics, and ethics apply everywhere.
If all namespaces were not Google-indexed, it wouldn't matter so much. All namespaces need not be Google-indexed - robots.txt can be adjusted to leave the non-encyclopaedic ones out. However, user pages rank just about as high as article-space biographies, making them just as much of an issue.
The first sentence of WP:BLP: 'Editors must take particular care adding biographical material about a living person to any Wikipedia page.'
*any* Wikipaedia page - any namespace.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:BLP#Templates
'This policy applies to all living persons in an entry, not merely the subject of the entry.' (That, in turn, cites an RfAr.)
So, the entire page doesn't need to be about a particular person for that page to contain a BLP violation with regards to that person. (Consider all the RfCs and RfArs....)