My response below appeared very belated as I realised after sending it that it woudl go to moderation as I had changed my e-mail address. It is of course now old news as the AfD on Angela's article has been closed as no consensus - keep.
This debate had lead me to reconsider my position. I really do not see why we should not delete articles on living persons if they request it and if they have not put themself firmly into the public domain, such as standing for office. Starting a company is not putting yourself into the public domain. It is the company that may deserve an article and the people who founded it should be mentioned. But that does not imply that we should breach their privacy by a full article on the founders. Getting elected to the Royal Society or similar is not pushing yourself into the public domain. Such a person might be mentioned on an article that explained the advance that lead to their election to the RS, but if they do not want a full bio, we should not write one. Privacy is very important.
We are not writing an encyclopedia overnight. If a person is really notable, an article can be added later, possibly after their death, if they persit in requesting that there be no article in their lifetime.
I do not think this course of action is out of line. For example, I think "Who's Who" does not force an entry on someone who does not want one. They do not argue that someone is notable and people have a right to find out about them whether the person wants this or not. I think there is a terrible arrogance about forcing a WP article on someone who does not want their privacy breached in this way.
I understand that my approach is very close to the Japan WP approach that I asked about at the end. I think it should be followed up and implemented in the en WP.
Apologies for top posting. I do not normally top post, but I am not specifically addressing the issues in the post below, just following up rather late.
Brian.
On Thu, Jul 13, 2006 at 08:54:56AM +1000, Brian Salter-Duke wrote:
On Wed, Jul 12, 2006 at 11:21:21PM +0100, Andrew Gray wrote:
On 12/07/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
There is a problem with two relatively tiny groups of people that should be at least mentioned here.
First, there are the Wikipedia lovers who insist that everything about Wikipedia is super duper important and who love to fill Wikipedia with Wikipedia fan cruft *and* to work really hard to look up negative information about anyone who has ever been hostile to Wikipedia. ...
"It's true so we should have it in and who are you to say otherwise and you're just deleting information and... they *asked* for deletion? OMG CENSORSHIP"
This is a slightly hyperbolic paraphrase, but a true one. People get insanely twitchy if they think something is removed by request; they *asked* us to remove it? that means they don't want people to know it! it must be important! we must fight to keep it!
I've encountered this quite a few times. It seems to be a cultural thing - I don't think I'd be wrong to guess it's a much more common attitude among Americans than Europeans, and among a certain type of them. There's not much we can do except be tactful and occasionally wield the Big Stick Of Editorial Common Sense.
Maybe that explains why I'm puzzled by this discussion, being a Brit now in Australia. We are not trying to write an encyclopedia overnight. If someone does not want an article on them, then I think we should be inclined to delete it. The times when we do not delete should be where the person has put themselves into the public limelight and people will want to know about them. We do not therefore delete [[George W. Bush]] or any politician. However people who found businesses or are VPs of businesses are entitled to privacy. Our readers do not have to be able to find information about them on WP.
Having meet Angela at a couple of Melbourne meetups, although we have not discussed her article, I understand why she wants it to go. I'm about to move over to Afd to state my opinion.
"No, the names of his four-year-old twin daughters are not notable. Yes, they're verifiable if you go and... oh, you did go and look up the county registers did you? That's nice. But it's not important. It causes the guy undue distress, and our readers don't need to know it."
I mean, trivia stuff. I've seen a few requests on OTRS from people saying things like "I guess you have an article on me, and that's fair, but can you take out the fact that I was born on September 2nd and just have it say 1958?" Or the seemingly inexhaustible list of minor porn starlets who, quite justifiably, write to us and say "your article on me has my real name! take it out! I'm scared!"... Articles are filling up with information that is, at best, borderline trivia (and at worst actively stupid), and we have a (default?) culture that seems to encourage adding it.
There are times that I think adopting the rule jp.wiki has on biographies would be a damn good idea...
Could you tell us what this rule is or where to find it written in english?
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
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End of WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 36, Issue 32
-- Brian Salter-Duke b_duke@bigpond.net.au [[User:Bduke]] mainly on en:Wikipedia. Also on fr: Wikipedia, Meta-Wiki, WikiNews, WikiBooks and Commons