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

[Charles Matthews]

"Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia)" wrote

> For context, your statement as quoted was: "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."
> 
> What about the advances we've made over the past two years in agreeing that
> the well-being of article subjects is also a legitimate consideration.  In
> Wikipedia jargon, I could simply say that "you left Notability off your
> list."  But it's a deeper sense of respect for our obligations, as reflected
> in such places as [[Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Badlydrawnjeff]] and
> [[/Footnoted quotes]].  See also [[Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Doc
> glasgow#Outside view by Newyorkbrad]]; [[Wikipedia:Requests for comment/QZ
> Deletion dispute#Outside view by Newyorkbrad]]; the DRV log for May 28, 2007
> (Hornbeck/Ownby); and the Shawn Hornbeck thread currently on ANI.
> 
> There is plenty of accurate, neutral, fully sourceable material about living
> persons that still has no place in Wikipedia.  Or anywhere else on the
> Internet, really, but we can only control our own site.

OK, one of the problems here is that people assume "notability" can be elided somehow (I have never assented to the idea that "reliable sources" says it all about notability). Another is that we haven't properly got to the "salience" issue, and again verifiability from reliable sources fails to do enough. I would claim that nitpicking material about someone notable can still be too much for neutrality. And even if not, ther is no need for negatives to be accumulated - a propagandist's trick, in fact. (This is roughly the argument I developed in the "defamation timebomb" thread on my User talk.) Or more accurately, perhaps, if negative fact F can be removed from biography B, while not affecting neutrality, why should it not be removed? 

The onus here is on understanding NPOV better. Biographies should _not_ be whitewashed. But that doesn't mean that every negative fact should be included. As I said, my reading of BLP is to do with being "scrupulous".

Charles 

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