New subject: [Foundation-l] Biographies of Living People: a quick interim update

10 Mar 2009


      --- On Mon, 3/9/09, Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org wrote:
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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:
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On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 5:12 PM, Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org
wrote:
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There is a big unresolved question around

whether, if
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marginally-notable people ask to have their
articles deleted, that
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request should be granted.  My sense -both from
the discussion here
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and other discussions elsewhere- is that many
Wikipedians are very
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strongly protective of their general right to
retain even very
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marginal BLPs.  Presumably this is because
notability is hard to
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define, and they are worried about stupid
across-the-board
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interpretations that will result in massive
deletionism.  However,
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other people strongly feel that the current
quantity of BLPs about
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less-notable people diminish the overall quality
of the encyclopedia,
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reduce our credibility, and run the risk of
hurting real people.
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There seems to be little consensus here.
Roughly: some people seem
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to strongly feel the bar for notability should be
set higher, and
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deletion requests generally granted: others seem
to strongly feel the
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current state is preferable.  I would welcome
discussion about how to
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achieve better consensus on this issue.
I would quibble with this statement a little bit.
There is a difference in
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my mind between raising the notability bar and
granting weight to subject
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requests for deletion. There seems to be a growing
agreement that marginally
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notable subjects make for bad biographies and greater
risk; there is very
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little appetite for beginning deletion discussions or
deleting articles upon
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subject request.
So these two issues need to be separated, because
indeed they are quite
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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,
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corporation, or any other entity with living
representatives) should be
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afforded some control over encyclopedia content, even
as little as the
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ability to request a deletion nomination; most
Wikipedians would be against
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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