[WikiEN-l] BLPs--some ideas

[Ray Saintonge]

Travis Mason-Bushman wrote:

>On 4/20/07 10:35 PM, "Michael Snow" <wikipedia at att.net> wrote:
>  
>
>>Which goes to the
>>point of Wikipedia's oft-cited ability to respond quickly to topics of
>>current interest.
>>    
>>
>This also has a tendency to be one of our greatest failings. By throwing up
>"encyclopedia articles" as quickly as possible about people and issues of
>which little notice has been previously taken and of which we know little
>beyond the "topic of current interest," we are unable to look at these
>issues neutrally or report on people of limited notability with any sense of
>encyclopedic perspective and time. They're very easily taken over by people
>with a clear POV (usually negative) they and end up being bias-fests.
>
There's an implicit presumption of controversiality in what you say.  
You leave the impression that virtually none of these articles about 
borderline notables are for doing anything worthwhile.  A person who 
decides to write a series of articles on each member of a sports team 
will include very few that are notable, but little in what is written 
will come close to negative bias.

>For example, until I moved it, we had a "biography" of [[Tiffany Adler]],
>the entire contents of which were essentially that she was a woman from
>[[Pacifica, California]] who had been arrested and charged with a
>misdemeanor which happened to make it into a couple local newspapers. There
>was nothing about the rest of her life, nothing about who she was, what
>she's done other than that - so readers were left with an
>entirely-unbalanced, biased and completely-out-of-perspective "biography"
>which purported to say that this woman's entire life consisted of being
>arrested. Even as it stands, the article lacks any sense of encyclopedic
>perspective, and basically belongs in WikiNews, not Wikipedia. But there's a
>couple editors who believe that the whole world needs to forever know that
>this person has been accused of this crime, and that it should be the
>person's first hit on Google. "Objectivity" is not the first word that comes
>to mind.
>
Judgement is also comes into play.  A person charged with trespassing 
because she went onto the grounds of city hall to plant flowers that 
would make the place look better, would be different from one who went 
there to plant marijuana.

>We can no longer discount Wikipedia's status as a de-facto scandal sheet for
>everyday occurrences, serving as a permanent record of anything bad or
>remotely controversial that anyone ever did, no matter how minor in the
>grand scheme of things, as long as it ended up with a three-paragraph blurb
>in a local paper. We need to, I think, think about that effect. Is that a
>good thing, and where does it stop? Should a kid who gets expelled from high
>school for carrying a knife (an article on which ends up in the local
>fishwrap) then carry around a Wikipedia biography stating such for the rest
>of their natural life?
>
Most papers are prevented from publishing the names of juvenile 
offenders.  What would be your source for that information.

>That "oft-cited ability to respond quickly" too often means that we respond
>with haste, without perspective and without objectivity.
>
That's jumping to conclusions.  What proportion of articles are you 
talking about.  While single edits may fit into what you describe, such 
articles will undergo considerable change as they evolve through the 
first 24 hours.

    Ec