[WikiEN-l] Analysis of BLP issues (Jimmy Wales should reconsider)

[John Lee]

On 4/23/07, Angus McLellan <angusmclellan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> No Original Research is Your Friend.
>
> Articles fabricated from 100% guaranteed primary source material like
> blogs, websites, court reports, police records, and trivial human
> interest reporting usually walk, talk, and quack just like original
> research. But take them to AFD and the reaction will usually be "It
> has references. It can't be original research." How can you do
> original research without references?
>
> We don't need to have biographies on people for whom no
> biographical-quality sources exist at present. We can wait for
> suitable sources to be created. There's no deadline, so I heard. When
> we write about dead people, we  nearly always plunder books,
> biographies, encyclopedias, and the like. We don't look up the 19 July
> 1851 New York Sun. No reason to do any different for people who are
> still breathing.


The downside is that if we don't refer to the 23 April 2007 New York Times,
we lose our edge in terms of being an up to date encyclopaedia - which has
always been touted as one of WP's biggest benefits.

That caveat aside, as someone from a 3rd world country (Malaysia), I would
still support some of the proposed arbitrary measures of notability. If a
person does not meet any Wikiprojects' criteria for notability, and does not
have a single biographical piece (it can be an independently published
webpage, a newspaper article, or a whole book) about him or her, the basic
presumption should be that that person does not deserve an article.

Thinking about pop stars, athletes and politicians in my country, I can't
really imagine anyone notable who would fall prey to this definition. And
even if we do suffer more from systemic bias because of tighter restrictions
on what counts for notability in biographies of living persons, I personally
feel we can afford this. One of the great things about WP is that we'll
always be around, and as the developing world develops, the systemic bias
against the previously-developing countries will diminish.

We're not supposed to be activists fighting systemic bias. We of course
ought to fight it as far as it is possible - but never at the expense of
loosening our sourcing, etc. requirements. Those claiming that we will
suffer from a major systemic bias problem if we require, say, three
biographical pieces about a person for that person to be notable enough for
an article, probably haven't really thought this out, because even
developing countries have newspapers. These newspapers are of course biased,
but look at it this way - *we're a tertiary source*. Ideally we shouldn't
even be referring to these primary sources in the first place. Our job is to
report, not to carry out original research or investigative journalism (no
matter how high its quality).

As long as we implement sourcing requirements that work well across the
board (instead of relying on some obviously systemically biased definition
such as "only subjects of a Britannica article" or "only subjects of a New
York Times puff piece"), such as "only those who have been the subject of at
least one biographical piece", I don't see why we should be rejecting these
sourcing requirements because of systemic bias. If we can't find acceptable
sources, there shouldn't be an article, plain and simple; if we end up
rejecting an inordinately amount large of articles on subjects from the
third world, too bad. (And as an side, I really doubt this would happen
unless we implement some ridiculously strict sourcing regime.)

Johnleemk

P.S. I'm an OTRS member, but don't really check it, so I haven't really been
exposed to the tidal wave of crap that reportedly engulfs those brave people
who do wade through the mass of OTRS mail.