[WikiEN-l] Borderline notable bios (yes, again)

[Jimmy Wales]

Erik Moeller wrote:
> Jimmy, I think this is a case where your famous divine intervention
> might be helpful to establish a general principle, so I'd appreciate
> your input.
> 
> We have Angela (Beesley) on AfD now:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Angela_Beesley_%283rd_nomination%29
> 
> 
> The fact that Angela does not want this article to exist has been
> cited as a reason to delete. It looks like this deletion will go
> through.

Eek.

Let me think about this a bit, because the ramifications could be
enormous either way.  There is something to be said for existing
procedures on AfD (and I say this as a full-fledged charter member of
the "AfD is broken" club!).

I personally think, and would vote this way if I were voting, that
factors like:

...does the borderline notable subject ask not to have a bio? (Angela)
...does a mature respect for human dignity of a borderline notable
person suggest that a bio is not needed? (Brian Peppers)
...is Wikipedia horribly naval-gazing at times? (Jeremy Rosenfeld, Brian
Chase)

...can and should all matter, and be taken into account by people
commenting at AfD.

This is in direct opposition to a certain faction with a different read
on what it means to be the 'sum' of all human knowledge, a read which
comes closer to a 'data dump' of all human knowledge. :)

---------

There is a problem with two relatively tiny groups of people that should
be at least mentioned here.

First, there are the Wikipedia lovers who insist that everything about
Wikipedia is super duper important and who love to fill Wikipedia with
Wikipedia fan cruft *and* to work really hard to look up negative
information about anyone who has ever been hostile to Wikipedia.  This
is a very tiny group of people generally, and in some cases people fall
into this trap mostly because they had a run-in with someone who hates
Wikipedia because the bio about them is bad, etc.

Second, there are the Wikipedia haters who insist that every negative
thing about Wikipedia should be dug up and stuck into the encyclopedia
at every possible point.  It is important to note that the current
trouble with my bio and Angela's bio started when a banned user came in
and made rather a strange mess of both articles, including original
research that was flatly wrong, as well as strangely intimidating
personal data (and if you do not know the whole story behind this,
please trust me, I am not kidding about this).

So... bios of living persons, a perennially difficult area for us.  And
this spills over into deletion debates.