[WikiEN-l] [[Daniel Brandt]] is gone again

[Andrew Gray]

On 15/06/07, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:

> > You're joking, surely.  We should probably courtesy-blank all AfDs of
> > living people, successful or not.  These are real people.  This stuff
> > hurts.
>
> We've never done it before, and I don't think anyone's tried to make
> a coherent case for why we should do so on BLP incident AFDs.

We have been doing it, on an ad-hoc basis, for a year or so -
generally after a complaint. It tends to be low-profile, because
no-one ever watches archived deletion discussion pages so no-one
notices...

> If you are serious, you need to make a good argument why, not just a
> couple of throwaway lines.  That we had an article once will be
> archived in places; unless you're arguing to blank and delete history,
> then the history is available if someone wants to go looking for it.
> The degree of protection delivered by such a courtesy blanking seems
> rather meager, and it's definitely against all other standard archive
> policy...

The purpose is to stop the first google hit on someone's name being
"self-promotional vanity tripe", which is a little cruel even when
they did write the article - and when, as so often happens, they
*didn't*, it's just nasty.

Most AFDs on people are filled with not particularly nice comments.
It's dine we keep them for internal purposes, but it seems fair to
stop leaving them obviously public to be stumbled upon. Blanking
doesn't hide that there was a debate or hide the decision; what it
*does* do is hide the most stupid excesses of the discussion.

(If AFD could use words like "vanity" a little less often that'd be
nice too, but I don't see it happening much)

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