[WikiEN-l] ArbCom Legislation

[Todd Allen]

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 6:14 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:
> "we want ... to keep Wikipedia out of aspects of the lives of people
> that are nothing like encyclopedic, and
> can cause potential defamation issues. "
>
>  That only sounds good until one analyses it.
>
> I think most of us  just  want to keep Wikipedia away from unsourced
> negative material about living people, and possibly some of us also
> want to keep  away from even sourced material not relevant to
> notability, & derogatory in a serious way to people the intimate
> details of whose lives  are not a matter of public concern.
>
> That's a much narrower restriction than what you said, and much more
> compatible with NPOV, and with the actual wording of BLP.
>
> And anything and everything dealing with living people is potentially
> defamatory if for reasons right or wrong they don't like what is being
> said. I think most of us would think it more compatible with NPOV to
> keep out only what can plausibly be considered as actually libelous,
> again a much narrower restriction.
>
> This illustrates what arbcom did wrong: they legislated that anyone
> with a more broadly restrictive view can impose it. Possibly some of
> them may have actually known what they were doing, and specifically
> tried to impose their minority view.
>
>
>
> --
> David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
>
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I think you're correct, in a lot of ways. I think BLP is great to say
"If we're going to have negative or potentially controversial
information in an article about a living perspon, it absolutely, 100%,
must be impeccably sourced from very reliable sources." That's fine,
and I would hope we would require that anyway, with or without the
policy. On the other hand, I've seen it used to mean "We shouldn't put
this person's name in an article, despite it being publically known",
or "We cannot put negative information in this person's article
despite the fact that it -can- be impeccably sourced." That I cannot
support, and unfortunately it leads to an erosion of BLP in general.

Charles writes higher in the thread that we may need tough enforcement
against those who intend to use our articles to smear people. Well,
yes we do. On the other hand, we need to be very careful that such
enforcement is only used against the -right- people, that is, those
truly intending to do so. There can be legitimate content disputes in
BLPs, but unfortunately, the hammer of "It's a BLP issue, so it goes,
period" tends to be used as a sledgehammer to end such disputes.

If BLP is to be strictly enforced, it also needs to be strictly
defined. An ambiguous policy combined with "shoot-to-kill" enforcement
is a recipe for disaster. We should make very, very sure that there is
clear consensus on everything which is to be enforced in such a
manner, and from what I've seen, while the core idea (unsourced and
potentially negative content regarding living people must be removed
immediately and may not be reinserted until and unless very reliable
sources back it) does enjoy clear consensus, on many parts (names,
applicability to -sourced- information), it is nowhere near clear.

-- 
Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.