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.
The other issue, of marginal notability and the risk it poses to Wikipedia, is much more relevant for this discussion.
Yes. I would love to see it discussed more here :-)