2009/3/2 Sue Gardner <sgardner(a)wikimedia.org>rg>: I think that: *There should be official Foundation's policy about handling legal problems with biographies of living persons, which should have similar status like privacy policy. It should be legal document saying what to do if... not just a set of advices for editors. Moreover it should clearly state whom to contact on Foundation level, who is responsible for content etc. it should be written by lawyer. *BLP policy on Wikipedia-en (and probably on many others) is rather internal policy for editors describing not the legal issues but rather editing rules - they might be different on different project, moreover they use to change over the time. *These two things of course overlap - but they are two different issues in fact. *It should be made clear that the offical Foundation policy regarding legal issues with BLPs is more important than local BLP's policies and always comes first. In particular the legal BLP Foundation policy should give an answer for: *what to do if a person want to remove enitre biography from Wikipedia - especially in cases when a person is not formally a "public person" but he/she is somehow famous *what to do if a person claims that a given information hurts him/her life but it is well proved by sources - and what sources are acceptable and what not. *what to do if a person says his/her biography is wrong but rejects to provide proves or sources of their claims *what kind of information should never be put on biography because it is personal even if someone found public sources for them (like E-mail and real address, phone number, illnesses, etc.) Two recent examples from Polish Wikipedia: *A sportsmen had anitdoping case around 5 years ago, when he was 18. There is good source of this information (his own interwiev in sport's magazine in which he appologises for taking an illegal drug). Now the guy is saing that it was all forgotten by mainstream media, he was already punished for this (6 months break) but he is now trying to get new contract and Wikipedia entry on him may destroy the deal. Therefore he ask for removing this info or his entire bio... *A pop singer manager wants to remove the birthday of his starllet, because she is (probably) around 30 but her current image show her as "almost teenager". The birhtday is sourced by "Who is Who in Poland", paper eddtion - but it was removed from electronic version, and they also manged to remove it from all other web-pages. -- Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html

I think that the implementation of Flagged Revisions will clean up a lot of the BLP problems. Another possibility that I doubt anyone will support is appointing a BLP Committee or group of administrators to oversee all BLP matters. ________________________________ From: Sue Gardner <sgardner(a)wikimedia.org> To: foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Sunday, March 1, 2009 11:20:53 PM Subject: [Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people Hi folks, I've been increasingly concerned lately about Wikimedia's coverage of living people, both within biographies of living people (BLPs) on Wikipedia, and in coverage of living people in non-BLP text. I've asked the board to put this issue on the agenda for the April meeting in Berlin, and I'm hoping there to figure out some concrete next steps to support quality in this area. In advance of that, I want to ask for input from you. First, I'm going to lay out the scope of the problem as I see it. (If you're already up to speed, you might want to skip that bit.) Then I'll lay out a little of my thinking on how we could aim to improve. I would very much appreciate any feedback from you -ideally here on this list- before the April meeting :- ) (Please note that for convenience I'm going to use the phrase "BLP" as shorthand for the whole issue of coverage of living people throughout all Wikimedia projects. BLP's probably constitute the majority of that coverage, but not all of it.) Scope of the problem: I am sure that BLP subjects have been complaining about their portrayals since Wikipedia's very early days. And I am sure that BLPs have always suffered from the same problems and errors that occur in all articles: malicious vandalism, biased editing, lack of citations, and so on. However, I am particularly worried about BLPs, for two reasons: 1. BLPs are, by definition, about living people. A mistake in an article about the War of 1812 is too bad. A mistake in an article about a living person could cause that person real-world harm. We don't want to do that. 2. I believe the risk of hurting people is greater than it used to be, because Wikipedia is growing increasingly unignorable. People are using the internet to check out job applicants, colleagues, dates - and we are the first search result for many names. As Wikipedia generally becomes bigger and smarter and more in-depth, its credibility increases - and so the gap between what we aim to do and what we actually achieve on many BLPs, becomes ever more visible and disappointing. This hurts our mission: * We want to be taken seriously. Having a large number of influential, accomplished people (the people who are typically subjects of BLPs) distrusting or disliking us, damages our credibility. * We aspire to be neutral and accurate. We know that not all BLP complainants share that goal - some simply want their BLP whitewashed. The existence of unfounded complaints, though, doesn't undercut the seriousness of the real problem: many BLPs are inaccurate, unfair and paint a distorted picture of their subject. They are not up to Wikipedia's standards. * And -as I said earlier- these are real people's lives. Neutrally-written, sourced information that is unflattering to the subject of an article is appropriate to an encyclopedia, but lies, nonsense, insinuations and unbalanced portrayals are not. So what can we do? Here are the things I am thinking about. I would love your input: * Do we think the current complaints resolution systems are working? Is it easy enough for article subjects to report problems? Are we courteous and serious in our handling of complaints? Do the people handling complaints need training/support/resources to help them resolve the problem (if there is one)? Are there intractable problems, and if so, what can we do to solve them? Some Wikimedia chapters have pioneered more systematic training of volunteers to handle OTRS responses; should we try to scale up those or similar practices? * Are there technical tools we could implement, that would support greater quality in BLPs? For example – easy problem reporting systems, particular configurations of Flagged Revs, etc. * Wikimedians have developed lots of tools for preventing/fixing vandalism and errors of fact. Where less progress has been made, I think, is on the question of disproportionate criticism. It seems to me that the solution may include the development of systems designed to expose particularly biased articles to a greater number of people who can help fix them. But this is a pretty tough problem and I would welcome people's suggestions for resolving it * The editors I've spoken with about BLPs are pretty serious about them – they are generally conservative, restrained, privacy-conscious, etc. But I wonder if that general attitude is widely-shared. If Wikipedia believes (as is said in -for example- the English BLP policy) that it has a responsibility to take great care with BLPs, should there be a Wikipedia-wide BLP policy, or a projects-wide statement of some kind? BLPs and our general effect on living people have been a tough problem for a long time, and I think we need now to bring together the appropriate people and resources, and hash through how to best make some progress on the problem. I'd like to start that discussion here, now. I'd appreciate any feedback from you all, before April. Please note I am deliberately not asking questions about who should be responsible for what: chapters, individual volunteers, the Wikimedia board or staff. We can figure that part out later. Right now I'm mostly interested in what we should be doing. Thanks, Sue _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

As an easy start for BLPs to contact us for help, why not have the global footer of all WMF sites include a prominent and very visible link to a simple mail form they can use to mail OTRS or the Foundation for help? - Joe

I applaude that the foundation wants to do something about problems with BLP. In several countries, the success of wikipedia is so great, that it has become the number one source for information. This in turn means that we as the wikimedia movement have a huge responsibility and stepping up to that has become a question of ethical behavior: Not doing so would just be wrong. Meaning that we need better ways of dealing with problematic biographies and we need more ways of making these problems not happen. Oh, and editors are also living people by the way. Don't forget about striving to make the wikimedia projects a pleasant place to work in and not the documentation place for beerhousebrawl-style discussions it too often is. More specific answers to Sues questions: 2009/3/2 Sue Gardner <sgardner(a)wikimedia.org>rg>: My experiences are mostly on de-WP. Problems with BLP are coming in frequently now, roughly once a week even people with lawyers.We have a highly motivated Support-Team that is able to handle the cases coming in via OTRS at an acceptable speed and with good success. The support team works tight with WM-DE and our lawyers. People strive to become better, there have been several RL-meetings of the team, which have now become recurrent events, financially supported by WM-DE and also by our lawyers. Reason for this is that these meetings have been useful to the volunteers attending and that, as I said, the team is highly motivated. So: yes, strive to have this for every Wikipedia. Availability is a problem: Although the page with the email is listed on any de-WP-page, people frequently complain that it was difficult to find us. As for en-WP, finding a contact adress is hard even for me. One of my reasons to develop Flagged Revs was an incident with blatant vandalism in an article about a well known german politician that persisted for several months until we got an email from his office. That is plain unacceptable. Flagged revisions work very well in these cases. However, flagged revisions are not the complete solution, in particular they do not help persistently against clever POV pushing or against making articles more unbiased. But: I really like the test proposal on en-WP to try flagged revs out on BLP articles. Turn it on for those as soon as possible. What is so special about Wikipedia as far as the BLPs go is the Wiki. It means that anybody can do anything and that means that the principle of a lot of people checking an article is important to success. Flagged Revs makes at least a four-eye-principle mandatory for edits of not yet trusted editors. That's good, but it doesn't mean that the people actually know what they are writing/flagging about. What I'm saying is: Notability is an important criteria for BLP to make sure that there are actually people around who can check what is written. When in doubt about notability, delete BLPs. Do not make low notability criterias for living persons. Yes. There already are project wide policies, like the neutral point of view and for example a privacy policy could be useful. I have the impression that privacy is cherished in any culture, west, east, you name it, so this might fit. I also severely disagree that the foremost goal of the foundation regarding legal issues should be, to make the foundation a legally untargetable fortress, at the cost of no control whatsoever about the projects it hosts. There is a middle ground and that should be taken, for the benefit of the content and the editors. Best, Philipp

At no.wp there was a link in the sidebar with email address to OTRS to ease reporting of such problems. It generated to many emails to the liking of some of the people on the OTRS list. After a poll with 3 against the link - they wanted an alternate solution, two for the link, one unclear and one who wanted to leave the problem to WMF, the link was removed three weeks later with a reference to the previous poll as conclusive. John