[Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people

[Nathan]

There are a couple of reasons I can think of why shifting to
delete-on-request for marginally notable BLPs would be problematic.

(1) As Tomasz notes, the idea of marginal notability is one that doesn't
play well to non-Wikipedians and isn't well defined in any case.

(2) We'd still have to have a deletion discussion, and if the "default to
delete in the absence of a consensus" policy change continues to stick then
having an additional default to deletion in the absence of consensus
situation is duplicative.

(3) If the idea is to skip deletion discussions entirely, then we would be
leaving the determination of "marginal notability" up to the admin reviewing
the request. I can't think this would go over well - speedy deletion (i.e.
deletions requiring the opinion of only one or two people) is a sensitive
subject, and the criteria are intended to be strictly interpreted.

(4) How many requests do we actually get from article subjects to delete the
article about them? I would think most would be happier with an article that
speaks well of them and/or is simply factually correct. If we were to adopt
this particular approach (and if it were not redundant, perhaps because the
existing approach failed to take root permanently) would it have much
practical impact?

We should keep in mind that deleting marginal BLPs is not a solution for the
BLP problem. The process requires that someone who is aware of the policy
comes upon a page that could stand deletion and takes the correct steps to
see it deleted. Marginal BLPs, by their nature, are often poorly linked or
orphaned and not well monitored by people versed in deletion policy; if they
were, then we would have no problem with them.

Maybe by giving subjects a more obvious and easy way to complain we can get
past this hurdle, making OTRS respondents responsible for starting AfDs. But
we still have a whole constantly expanding host of articles and potential
articles on living people who are too notable to delete; a deletion default
doesn't help with those.

Nathan