[Foundation-l] Board statement regarding biographies of living people

[Michael Snow]

As I mentioned in my previous message, the Board of Trustees prepared a 
statement at its meeting related to biographies of living people. It 
touches on the major considerations in this issue, but also how this 
relates to our fundamental objectives. The statement was unanimously 
approved by the board. The text of the statement follows:

The Wikimedia Foundation takes this opportunity to reiterate some core 
principles related to our shared vision, mission, and values. One of 
these values which is common to all our projects is a commitment to 
maintaining a neutral point of view.

In our efforts to offer a source of knowledge that is valuable and 
useful to all, we have a responsibility to uphold these values by also 
providing accurate information. Participants in Wikimedia projects have 
created resources of vast size and scope. As we have emphasized for 
several years, in addition to the quantity of knowledge that is 
available, its quality is also an essential matter. The generally high 
quality of information in Wikimedia projects has been confirmed by a 
number of studies, but it is important that we always strive to improve. 
As with any endeavor that provides educational and informational 
material, errors need to be avoided, especially when they have the 
potential to cause harm. One area where this applies is when writing 
about living people.

Increasingly, Wikimedia articles are among the top search engine results 
for just about any query. That means that when a potential employer, a 
colleague, friend, neighbor or acquaintance looks for information about 
a person, they may find it at the Wikimedia sites. As the popularity of 
the Wikimedia projects grows, so does the editing community's 
responsibility to ensure articles about living people are 
neutrally-written, accurate and well-sourced.

As our popularity has grown, some issues have become more prominent:

* Many people create articles that are overly promotional in tone: about 
themselves, people they admire, or those they are paid to represent. 
These are not neutral, and have no place in our projects. Generally, the 
Wikimedia community protects the projects well against this common 
problem by deleting or improving hagiographies.
* People sometimes vandalize articles about living people. The Wikimedia 
community has developed tools and techniques for counteracting 
vandalism: in general they seem to work reasonably well.
* Some articles about living people contain small errors, are 
poorly-written or poorly-sourced. Articles about people who are only 
marginally well-known are often neglected, and tend to improve much more 
slowly over time, if at all.
* People sometimes make edits designed to smear others. This is 
difficult to identify and counteract, particularly if the malicious 
editor is persistent.

The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees urges the global Wikimedia 
community to uphold and strengthen our commitment to high-quality, 
accurate information, by:

1) Ensuring that projects in all languages that describe living people 
have policies in place calling for special attention to the principles 
of neutrality and verifiability in those articles;

2) Taking human dignity and respect for personal privacy into account 
when adding or removing information, especially in articles of ephemeral 
or marginal interest;

3) Investigating new technical mechanisms to assess edits, particularly 
when they affect living people, and to better enable readers to report 
problems;

4) Treating any person who has a complaint about how they are described 
in our projects with patience, kindness, and respect, and encouraging 
others to do the same.

--Michael Snow