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. 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.
The other issue, of marginal notability and the risk it poses to Wikipedia, is much more relevant for this discussion.
Nathan