[Foundation-l] Biographies of Living People: a quick interim update

[Sue Gardner]

2009/3/8 Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com>:
> On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 5:12 PM, Sue Gardner <sgardner at 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.

> The other issue, of marginal notability and the risk it poses to Wikipedia,
> is much more relevant for this discussion.

Yes. I would love to see it discussed more here :-)