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

[George Herbert]

On 6/15/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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...

And nobody thought that it might be controversial and should be
discussed by the wider policy community...?

I don't think the reasons are stupid or dumb or wrong.  I understand
why a BLP article subject might not want the Google hit to come up.

I also am unconvinced that it's obviously necessary or useful as a
policy in other than the most extreme cases.

In any case, the reasoning for it needs to be made clear and open.
I'm perfectly happy for the community or the community of
policy-oriented-people to conclude that it's ok to do.  I don't think
this was appropriate to do in more than a corner case handful of
special cases without airing it as a policy question to this group.

> > 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)

I suppose that blanking is easier than figuring out how to have Google
ignore them...

I would feel better if there was a clear link on the blanked page to
the closing admin's final version, as part of the page blanked
explanation.

I would also feel better if you took the arguments above and created
at least an essay on this on-wiki so that the policy discussion is
public and the result openly available.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com