With the upcoming Board meeting, we will be present recommendations for adoption:
The Wikimedia Foundation and the Board always have maintained a hands off policy on editorial practice and policy as long as local projects fall within the mission statement of the Foundation and laws. However, the Board and the staff also realize that while not responsible for the content directly, they should have processes and policies by which projects should operate when relating to living people. Hence the task force (applications went out last June, started in September), and I'll forgo the history of all that for another time.
What we're doing is creating a guideline and policy for global application- this is not aimed at en.wp in a way that a magic bullet will change it. Instead it is supposed to create a framework for smaller projects that have no process in place, as well as influence the larger projects that we have learned from. The issues relating to living people range from foo.wp to quote to commons to wikt, even. The purpose is to provide a long term viability guide that will help both the readers, the subjects, and the users to work together in creating quality treatment of living people. This also includes community interaction in a tangential way, but that's for another project.
The recommendations that we have written up are a culmination of examination off the problems that face all wikis, and are simply defined with the goal of establishing a mindset in projects that are developing a proper method of dealing with living people.
The Recommendations can be found here: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Task_force/Living_People/Drafting_pages/R...
I would like to emphasize that while I am the primary author of this page, I cannot link to the three legal pads full of notes from hundreds of Wikimedians over the past nine months.
Please discuss these issues if you see something in particular, and email me if you have a particular concern you'd like to discuss in private. I can also be found on freenode IRC as Keegan.
Thanks!