On 18/08/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
So our "living persons" banner contains the following text:
"This article is about or directly concerns one or more living people and therefore must adhere to the biographies of living persons policy. Specifically, unsourced or poorly sourced negative material about living persons should not be posted to this article *or its talk page(s)*. Such material must be removed without hesitation. " (emphasis in original)
I'm particularly concerned about the "or its talk page" bit. Is someone just confused, or should we actually *not* move material from the talk page like this:
I have removed the following text because it sounds defamatory and probably isn't true: "John B Smith was busted twice for frequenting prostitutes in the 1970s". Anyone have a source?
How can we realistically work with potentially defamatory statements - eg, requesting sources for them - if we can't even repeat them on talk pages?
The problem is, even though we consider it an "internal page", it's still visible to the public as a whole and people are just as able to read it and get upset. Writing around the claim is probably a good way to mark it as disbelieved, though, or you could go with something like "I've removed an unsourced claim about involvement with prostitution from the text - does anyone have a source for this? It seems unlikely..."