[WikiEN-l] BLPs: Wikipedia entry nearly scuppers rugby player's career

[David Gerard]

2008/10/1 Gordon Joly <gordon.joly at pobox.com>:
> At 23:10 -0400 30/9/08, Nathan wrote:

>>To answer your question - probably not, no. If there is a two page article
>>about someone in the Times, and midway through page 2 it says that he
>>inherited his brown eyes from his father, that is an example of a fact found
>>in a reliable source that does not belong in the article. Salaciousness
>>isn't the standard for inclusion of a detail in an encyclopedic entry.

> Indeed,


It depends. For instance, details of someone's family are the sort of
thing readers would expect to see in bios and are generally included
and sourced. However, we've had cases where apparently-innocuous
details of family and where they live are in the article unsourced and
are regarded by the subject as sensitive private information, and
needed urgent removal.

The point of WP:BLP is (or should be) that our fundamental content
rules NPOV, NOR, V are all that's needed - but we need to apply them
very harshly and we really can't be eventualist about bad info in
living bios. This can result in somewhat detail-poor and washed-out
articles, but we're often the top Google hit for their name, and we
can wait for well-sourced info (which is where eventualism comes in).

e.g. in the rugby player case, the undue weight aspect of NPOV was
lacking in the old version, and this caused real-life problems for the
subject.


- d.




- d.