--- On Mon, 3/9/09, Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org wrote:
From: Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Biographies of Living People: a quick interim update To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Monday, March 9, 2009, 4:59 PM 2009/3/8 Nathan nawrich@gmail.com:
On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 5:12 PM, Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org
wrote:
- There is a big unresolved question around
whether, if
marginally-notable people ask to have their
articles deleted, that
request should be granted. My sense -both from
the discussion here
and other discussions elsewhere- is that many
Wikipedians are very
strongly protective of their general right to
retain even very
marginal BLPs. Presumably this is because
notability is hard to
define, and they are worried about stupid
across-the-board
interpretations that will result in massive
deletionism. However,
other people strongly feel that the current
quantity of BLPs about
less-notable people diminish the overall quality
of the encyclopedia,
reduce our credibility, and run the risk of
hurting real people.
There seems to be little consensus here.
Roughly: some people seem
to strongly feel the bar for notability should be
set higher, and
deletion requests generally granted: others seem
to strongly feel the
current state is preferable. I would welcome
discussion about how to
achieve better consensus on this issue.
I would quibble with this statement a little bit.
There is a difference in
my mind between raising the notability bar and
granting weight to subject
requests for deletion. There seems to be a growing
agreement that marginally
notable subjects make for bad biographies and greater
risk; there is very
little appetite for beginning deletion discussions or
deleting articles upon
subject request.
So these two issues need to be separated, because
indeed they are quite
separate.
Totally agreed, yes - thanks Nathan. In future I will separate these two points.
One asks whether the subject of an article (be it a person,
corporation, or any other entity with living
representatives) should be
afforded some control over encyclopedia content, even
as little as the
ability to request a deletion nomination; most
Wikipedians would be against
this, I believe.
Hm. That's interesting.
As a basic principle, that makes sense to me - that article subjects shouldn't have control over the content of the encyclopedia. But -perhaps this is a little bit of hair-splitting- OTOH I don't think we should take deletion requests any _less_ seriously than complaints from disinterested observers. In other words - someone saying "the article about me is awful and shouldn't be in an encyclopedia" should be taken equally as seriously as someone saying "that article about X is awful and doesn't deserve to be in an encyclopedia." In both instances, the article needs be assessed on its own merits.
I say this because sometimes I think people may be tempted to refuse deletion requests _because_ they come from the article subject. If that indeed happens, I believe it's a mistake.
That is why I think we should process deletion requests by the subject without any special notice if they have a chance being deleted. And if they are obvious cases where they will be kept, simply tell the person we don't delete on request. Putting these articles at AfD with a note that the subject requested deletion is going to make things worse most of the time. It will attract people to the discussion who are interested in putting on a show for the announced audience and who would not show up at a basic AfD. I don't think listing an AfD as a subject request will change the overall result of the discussion, but just make the path to that result more difficult for the subject.
Birgitte SB