From: Sue Gardner <sgardner(a)wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Biographies of Living People: a quick interim update
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Monday, March 9, 2009, 4:59 PM
2009/3/8 Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com>om>:
On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 5:12 PM, Sue Gardner
<sgardner(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
>
> 1) 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