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

[Jeff Raymond]

On Fri, May 25, 2007 8:03 am, Fred Bauder wrote:

> I think my prior interpretation of BLP may have been unduly expansive.
>

Thank you for admitting this.


> With
> respect to articles such as about the complaining witness in the Duke La
> Cross case, Neutral point of view conflicts with Verifiability as we have
> no way to round out such an article as the only published material is
> negative. Resolution of the conflict is difficult and results will vary
> with the situation.

On the contrary, NPOV does not conflict with verifiability.  A neutral
point of view means that we balance it out based on what we know.  An
article is neutral even if it reports mostly negative things about a topic
or subject if that's what the sources say.  To minimize the verifiable
information when the verifiable information is almost completely negative
is a violation of NPOV.

Again, few reasonably disagree with removing negative information from
BLPs that's poorly sourced/unsourced - if anything, it's "instruction
creep" past the basic verifiability/NPOV policies.  The problem is BLP
being used as a bludgeon to get rid of well-sourced, verifiable, NPOV
information because the neutral point of view is negative.

If Wikipedia was around during Jack the Ripper's time, would we have to
move his article to [[1888 presumed prostitute murders]], or would we
simply accept that the most neutral article we could make is simply
verifiably negative?

-Jeff

-- 
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