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).