[WikiEN-l] An example of a bad biography

[Steve Summit]

Will Johnson wrote:
> Saying that things in BLPs "hurts people" only furthers the idea that that
> is what we're avoiding.  It's a simplistic approach to a complex issue.
>
> Things that we re-report, summarize, etc in BLP's is sometimes going to
> hurt people...  Our mission is not to protect people from themselves...
> Our mission is to rely on reliable, verifiable sources to tell the public
> what *is* going on.

But merely relying on "reliable, verifiable sources" is a
simplistic approach, too.

There is unquestionably a huge tension between "don't hurt
people" and several of our other core policies.  But if there's
one thing we've learned (or should have learned) lately, it's
that blind, mechanical reliance on "core policies" is not a
surefire approach to encyclopedic perfection.  We're *always*
going to have to actually *think* about the difficult, sensitive
edge cases -- and there are always going to be plenty of them.

Here's an example I encountered today: [[Natascha Kampusch]], a
woman to whom the world has dealt a particularly difficult hand.
One would hope that Wikipedia would play absolutely no part in
making her recovery from her ordeal any more difficult.  But
precisely because her case is so sensational, it's naturally
a magnet for all sorts of attention seekers and conspiracy
theorists.  Some of them manage to get their bizarre allegations
written up in "reliable, verifiable sources", whereupon they're
fodder for a Wikipedia article, whether they belong there or
not.  I've removed two such allegations already, and then there's
this strange claim:

	...on May 25, 2007, her mother was officially charged and
	ordered to stand trial for aiding in the abduction to
	cover up sexual abuse. [10]	

It's sourced to this article in the (eminently reliable, in my
experience) Scotsman:

	http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/Eightyear-kidnap-girls-mother-is.3289215.jp

But if you read the article, you discover that the suit was
brought not so much to charge Natascha's mother but to "clear the
name" of an ex-judge whose earlier allegations along these lines
had been rejected.

It's an unholy mess, which I imagine the Austrian courts have
had an inordinately difficult time trying to sort out, and which
Wikipedia is obviously utterly helpless at rendering a proper
judgement on.  So we have to ask ourselves: do we want to err
on the side of citing reliable sources, or of not furthering
damaging allegations which might or might not ever be shown to
have any substance?  In this case, it seems to me that the answer
is unquestionably the latter, and I've just edited the article to
say

	...there have been (unsubstantiated) allegations that
	Natascha's mother was somehow involved in the abduction
	or its cover-up. [10]

(I'd prefer to remove mention of this issue entirely, but one
step at a time.)

You may think Jimbo's an old softie for harping on this "don't
hurt people" mantra; you may think it's an impossibly subjective
goal and that our only hope is to fall back instead on our nice,
objectively-applied "policies", or on the excuse that truth is an
absolute defense against anything.  But by doing the latter, we
do hurt people, and it's within our power not to.