-----Original Message-----
From: Ray Saintonge [mailto:saintonge@telus.net]
Sent: Monday, May 28, 2007 11:57 AM
To: 'English Wikipedia'
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] On living bios and the rest of the world
Delirium wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
On 28/05/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm
<macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, Wikipedia is not paper, but if we're
going to write readable articles
not everything can make the cut. Naturally, it's notable incidents that
should get in. Trouble is that not everyone agrees on what is notable and
what isn't.
Incidents are one thing - putting articles under a name when the
incident is the notable thing is another.
I think many (most?) people agree with this in principle, but there's
wide disagreement over the threshold for when someone's role in an
incident is sufficient to make *them* notable. Serial killers on the
FBI's "10 most wanted" list clearly meet the threshold; some lower-level
executive embroiled in the Enron scandal clearly doesn't; but there's
plenty in between.
What those who appear to be taking a hard-line about deleting these BLPs
for non-notable people should be taking note of is that the argument is
not about any specific person's notability. It is about how we
determine that they do not warrant an article. When you say that any
admin can delete these articles on the basis of his own opinion you run
into the fact that many of these admins have not established themselves
as having trustworthy judgement. There has been a suggestion that
admins who abuse the BLP excuse would be swiftly disciplined, but there
is no confidence that this will indeed happen as quickly as the excuses
are used.
Ec
That's right. I don't want to see inexperienced administrators stepping out in
that way. I would not start deleting stuff from a biography unless I was pretty sure that
I both knew what I was doing and it was justified and was able to defend the action.
We don't want to set the bar too high though BLP is there for a good reason, survival
of Wikipedia.
Fred