Slim Virgin wrote:
We're going to have more than a major hole in our coverage if we lose a lawsuit.
Why? Aside from requiring us to take down whatever libelous misinformation we lost the case over (which we would want to do _anyway_), what limitation would it put on Wikipedia's coverage?
The ideal thing would be to come up with a working definition of "borderline notable" and to give those people the right to have their bios deleted on request. But this being Wikpedia, we'll never agree on a definition.
Largely because IMO such a thing is impossible to define in anything like an objective manner.
Another good idea is not to allow living bios on people who have not already had a bio published by a reliable source. That would massively reduce our coverage, but it would solve almost all of our problems.
It would leave at least one really massive problem though; we'd lack coverage of everyone who doesn't already have a bio published by a reliable source (for whatever value of "reliable source" gets settled on). For a resource that's claiming to be a general encyclopedia this would be a _massive_ omission.
The worst option is to continue as we are, where a huge number of living bios are either vanity articles or attack pages.
If that's the worst option you can think of you're suffering from a drastic lack of imagination. We could get rid of BLP entirely, for example, and start encouraging original research into geneology. :) Also, I'd like to know how you know that there's a "huge number" of vanity articles and attack pages on Wikipedia. We already have a lot of policies and a lot of editors working against those things, most of the problems I've seen slip through the cracks have been pretty trivial cases (like this one).