[WikiEN-l] Getting hammered in a tv interview is not fun

[doc]

Slim Virgin wrote:
> On 3/29/07, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at waterwiki.info> wrote:
>> It needs to be clear up and down the line that the arbitration committee will support people who remove unsourced information, as long as they are nice about it. But these things should never come to us, people who resist removal of unsourced information should be clued in long before it comes to that.
>>
> The other solution is to stop publishing biographies of living
> persons, or at least to offer subjects deletion on request.
> 
> By hosting living bios, and by inviting anyone in the world to edit
> them, we're encouraging bad editing in a quantity we have no hope of
> controlling.
> 
> Sarah
> 
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Regrettably I think Sarah is right. Any individual case can usually be 
solved with a creative use of existing policy, a little common sense, 
and the occasional use of the pointy stick.

However, our quality control is not upscaling - nothing like. And we 
have a moral, if not a legal, duty to consider that. We simply cannot 
protect the subjects of the biographies we are allowing from nastiness 
that they should not be subjected to.

I'd not be as drastic as disallowing living bios. But we do need to 
except that the eventualism that has so well served wikipedia in other 
areas doesn't work here. If vandalism or POV hangs around on our article 
on Quakerism - really only our credibility suffers. Not so with a living 
person - on whom this may be the only comprehensive listing on the internet.

The problem is with the marginally notable. We recognise and revert crap 
on famous people quickly - and in any case no-one will form their 
opinion of George Bush based solely on our information.

The solutions:
#Disallow living bios altogether - far too drastic
#Drastically raise the notability thresholds on bios - possible
#Restrict anon editing etc in Wikipedia, or require some scrutiny of 
editors  - possible, but the whole project will suffer
#Fork off all living bios to a separate wikimedia project with 
specialized rules/community etc (a 'wikipeople' or 'wikiwho')  - should 
be considered as it would allow tough rules here - whilst retaining 
eventualism on the rest.

For now, I'll predict we'll simply tweek existing rules - but I will 
also prophecy that before too much longer we will adopt one of the 
above. I just hate to think of the crisis - wrecked life or bad 
publicity - that will be the thing that forces us to do it.

Doc