David Gerard wrote:
OK. What seems a practical first move?
Deleting all living bios is not going to fly. It just won't be accepted.
The layer of barely-notable bios could be vanquished with little trouble. The tricky part is "what is notable?" It's not going to be possible to come up with a hardline definition that doesn't result in gross systemic bias, editors deleting like deranged robots or both.
Is a new deletion rule on living bios worth trying? It's the most politically viable idea I've heard so far.
- d.
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Our current notability threshold is "what will survive afd on the average day" - all attempts to codify it as x number of sources have failed. And actually deserve to fail.
If we lower the threshold for an admin to close an afd as 'delete' (only for biographies of living people, mind), then over time, the afd inclusion threshold will rise in this area.
The advantage of this is we decrease the number of low-notability bios, and yet allow the community to decide what stays and what goes, if a case can be made, then we can keep it. Much better than legislating for the number or quantity of sources which will just end up in arbitrary rules and wikilawyering.
The other thing we might consider is a process of 'fix or die' for biographies. Low notability bios with critical content might be listed and unless properly sourced and neutrally re-written after x days they get deleted. This would remove the culture of people voting "this needs clean-up not deletion" and then walking away. (Yes, I realise there are problems with this - but perhaps we could chew on it).
(For the record I don't want to delete all, or even most, of our biographies - and if I've given that impression I apologize. I just think we need to find some strong solutions to reduce our collateral damage to low-notability individuals whom we give a very rough ride.)
Doc