[WikiEN-l] BLP, and admin role in overriding community review

[Joe Szilagyi]

On 5/23/07, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at waterwiki.info> wrote:

> No, any user or administrator who is following the terms and intent of
> Biographies of living persons may remove grossly inappropriate material or
> delete an offending article even if almost everyone else on Wikipedia
> objects.
>

The problem is that ArbCom doesn't do content disputes. Do they act as a
final voice on what violates BLP? Here, there are 3-5 people saying that the
Crystal Gail Magnum article violates BLP and is an attack page. Having read
it's deleted form, I'm torn on that. But you have many more people
disagreeing. In this case, who gets the final decision? Any admin can simply
delete it, yes--I agree, this is in and of itself needed. If I wrote, "Jimmy
Bob McGee of Backwater Arkansas sucks off turtles and beat his wife" as an
article, delete it on sight. But on cases that some disagree on, do we defer
to the first admin to delete it? What if others say he's wrong? If he won't
agree to restore the article, it has to go to DRV. Which is good: it's a
sanity check on rogue actions of deletion.

The problem here is that people are basically saying any keep or overturn
deletion opinions are invalid, by invoking BLP. In essence, the argument is
that any admin can, citing BLP, delete any article and have it stick, even
if others disagree with the admin's BLP reasoning. The problem obviously is
that the only way to then stop this--if the admins close the DRV that
supports retaining/overturning the deletion as "Delete/keep gone per
BLP"--is to wheel war.

It reads awfully like people are treating BLP as an I-WIN button in a case
like this, implying that differing opionions that no BLP vio occurred have
no credence. The implication is that the opinions of the 3-5 outweigh
anything else.

Regards,
Joe
http://www.joeszilagyi.com