[WikiEN-l] Bans and online/offline reputation (was Re: Follow-up on my Ban from Wikipedia (part 3))

[Tracy Poff]

On 9/13/07, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:
> *notability*.  There's already a BLP problem on Wikipedia where someone
> finds a minor celebrity, digs up an article where they got drunk and went
> naked in public 20 years ago, and adds it to Wikipedia.  We take that out
> because of BLP considerations, *even if it really did happen*.  Not because
> it's not true, but because it's not notable.  An ultimately minor incident

I don't quite agree with the other parts of your message either, but I
want to point this out: we absolutely *do not* remove true information
from articles on people because of 'BLP considerations'. We do it for
*exactly* the same reasons we'd remove such information from any other
article; namely, NPOV and in particular to avoid undue weight. The
[[WP:BLP]] itself notes that there may be problems with neutrality if
we just leave any true information in, and gives this as the reason
for removing such information.

The important lesson from this is that we remove true things from
articles *because they are encyclopedia articles* and our articles
need to follow NPOV. Our project space pages are under no such
restriction. We do courtesy blankings and in general try to be nice to
people, but it has nothing to do with our BLP policy.

Tracy Poff