[WikiEN-l] BLPs--some ideas

[Andrew Gray]

On 21/04/07, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:

> 5. All BLP articles will contain information, prominently displayed on  the
> Talk Page (or perhaps even on the article itself), of how the person or her
> representatives might express formal reservations to the WMF about the content.
> This will be in the form of a banner with a link to a special OTRS email
> address  created specifically for these types of problems.
> 6. All complainants will be encouraged to list their problems and suggest
> means of correcting them.
> These are just some ideas. Feel free to consider some or all of them, as  you
> see fit. Yes, BLPs are a problem, but there are ways that they can be
> handled effectively and to the satisfaction of everyone. The first step is to  back
> away from posturing and show a willingness to compromise. It will not solve
> all the problems, but it will show our goodwill.

I think 5 and 6 are going in a very good direction. They say, clearly
- yes, you are the subject of the article, and we want you to engage
with us about it. we want to know what you think, we want to know if
there are problems with it. It is *the right thing to do*.

Indeed, having an obvious method for contacting us about the article
may even help discourage "self-editing", people writing about
themselves, because it gives them a simple and obvious route to
follow.

This can only improve matters; as it is, we have this vague feeling
that the subject wanting any input into the article is somehow iffy,
and that's nonsense - the subject having editorial control is iffy,
but they should always be able to advise us on content. Right now,
dealing with complaints from the subject is a minefield of tact; we
never know how far is appropriate to disclose that we're doing this
after being contacted, how we can explain that [some odd action] is
perfectly reasonable without breaking an implicit confidence.

We don't need to resign editorial control over articles, and we don't
need to "surrender" anything, but we can make good, sensible,
appropriate steps to making the subject part of the loop in writing
about them, able to flag up any problems in a timely, efficient, and
well-understood manner. Yes, there will be frivolous complaints, but
we can ignore them or fob them off; in the long run doing something
like this will help us a lot more than it hinders us.

The best bit is, most of the infrastructure is already there :-) We
just need to expand the template spawned by the "living people" tag,
and we'll have rolled this out to 90% of biographies at a stroke...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk