Re the idea of informing BLP subjects that we have a biography on them.

Whilst some subjects of BLPs would be quite easy to contact via Email, there are those who won't be. Especially the ones who are now senile or in jail.

While most of the subjects of our BLPs are fine upstanding members of society, some are in jail and others deserve to be. Allegedly a quarter of our editors are legally minors, I would be uncomfortable with any new process that involved us encouraging adolescents to email strangers or that classified the subjects of our BLPs into those suitable or unsuitable to be contacted.

There is a practical issue about informing people when we have articles on them in scores of languages. During next years Olympics there will be new sports stars emerging who suddenly have articles created about them on scores of different language versions of Wikipedias. Having a separate notification of each one would probably be seen as spam, but checking whether someone had already been notified via the intrawiki links would be difficult - even the death anomaly project only attempts to work across 80 language versions.

So this would require quite a team of volunteers, especially if you included one of the larger language versions such as English, and especially if you restricted this to our older editors.

Finding volunteers to do this and continue to recruit as they leave might be difficult. I can't see either the article creators or the newpage patrollers accepting this as an additional task even if we weren't worried about inviting adolescents to email Mafiosi and so forth.

Also there is a serious risk of raising false expectations, over here there was a recent unsuccessful legal attempt to put the onus on the newspapers to inform subjects before they wrote about them. That didn't differentiate between writing bios on people or naming them as part of another story, and I think we would have difficulty holding the line that a one paragraph article on one person was fundamentally different to a similar length mention in a match report or an article about a Rock group or terrorist incident. In my experience a large proportion of our BLP violations don't take place in BLPs, but a policy of informing people whenever we named them on wiki would be even less practical than one of informing them when we wrote an article about them.

WereSpielChequers

Message: 7 Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 00:40:10 +0100 From: Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Interesting legal action To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List        foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: BANLkTi=KR4FVoV12N-72sHYPkm5On5yBDg@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

On 23 May 2011 00:03, FT2 ft2.wiki@gmail.com wrote:

...

Out of interest, when a BLP is created and not speedy deleted, could we not write a standard email to the subject stating that a biographical article has been created on them on the online encyclopedia "Wikipedia", inviting them to review it, explaining what it's about, and pointing them to remedies for fixing minor or major issues or requesting deletion? Hearing from us might at the very least be seen as "us trying to do something right".

I've not heard that idea before; I like it. We should do that. It wouldn't be difficult and would, as you say, show that we are at least trying to do the right thing. We would need to be prepared to deal with the increased traffic to OTRS that it would inevitably result in, but that's not too big a problem.