[WikiEN-l] Bio and BLP opt-out thoughts; "BLP People"

[Andrew Gray]

On 24/05/07, Joe Szilagyi <szilagyi at gmail.com> wrote:

> What could qualify? The person needs to demonstrate or illustrate harm that
> Wikipedia has caused them. "I don't want an article on me," doesn't count.
> Wikipedia itself in it's role as a Huge Ultra Mega Site With Stuff On You
> needs to be causing you harm counts--show us and tell us what happened, and
> we'll help you if we can. If you drove drunk, embezzled money, or are a
> notable whack-job, and we simple report on that, no, that doesn't count.
> You're a notable drunk or whack-job already.

(...)

I am, ethically, a little disturbed by making "we have harmed you" a
requirement for us to do the correct thing. We should prefer a method
that prevents harm to one that mitigates it, where possible.

Other problems with this proposal:

a) We get a nuclear option for the worst cases. Frankly, we already
have a nuclear option for the worst cases, it's called Doc :-)

a) ii) More seriously, what about the lesser cases? The ones where the
person hasn't complained as such, or where it's still a very shoddy
page but isn't explicitly "harmful", or... The proposal should in
theory not affect how we deal with these at all, but in practice I
forsee us getting laxer and laxer with these simply because a more
draconian upper level exists "and you can take it to them if you have
a problem", etc. This is the way the community thinks...

b) Define "harm". No, really. I note that in many jurisdictions, you
do not even need to show that a malicious attack piece caused anyone
to think the less of you in order to win a defamation case - only that
it plausibly *would* have caused them to think the worse of you and
that they plausibly could have seen it.

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