Slim Virgin wrote:
On 3/6/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Slim Virgin wrote: Just a quick FYI, William. BLP applies throughout the website.
Could be problematic if this were true in practice, since my user page utterly fails to meet BLP's standards and I expect the vast majority of other user pages are the same - I don't think I've ever seen a user page with a references section. I've also made assertions about myself on article talk pages from time to time that I never bother to cite.
Bryan, I'm sure you don't have defamatory material about living people on your user page. You're allowed to say bad stuff about yourself, just not about anyone else. :-)
Last I checked I was still alive, though I don't have a reliable source on hand to back that up so it's just OR. :)
Seriously, though, BLP actually doesn't limit itself to defamatory material. It reads: "Unsourced or poorly sourced contentious material — whether negative, positive, or just highly questionable — about living persons should be removed immediately, and without discussion from Wikipedia articles, talk pages, user pages, and project space." That covers pretty much everything I've put up on my userpage, and the contents of most other userpages I've seen as well. It gets even worse when we consider the user pages with "this user is a vandal" warnings and such - that's clearly defamatory stuff that other people have put there.
I don't think it's a good idea to have a policy that's this drastically at odds with the actual practice even if everyone's unofficially agreed that it doesn't _really_ mean what it says it means. Our policy pages should at least be honest, it's hard enough to make sense of some of them as it is.