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

[Chad]

On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 6:30 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> [snip]
>
> (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?

As a former OTRS person, I can say that this number is surprisingly high.
I handled a *number* of cases in which people wanted their articles deleted.
Some were completely non-notable, some were marginally notable, and some
still are completely notable (but they'd still rather be gone, once
we've explained
that we can't white-wash for them).

> [snip]
>
> 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

While working with OTRS, I actually sent several articles through AfD. And I
typically didn't announce that it was an OTRS thing, so as to let the community
judge the article on its own merits. This would actually be a decent policy to
follow: encourage OTRS respondents to send the marginally notable through
the normal AfD process (like any other) and allow those in the community
more equipped to deal with deletion/BLP issues handle it.

-Chad