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

[David Gerard]

2008/10/2 Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia) <newyorkbrad at gmail.com>:

> There is, or certainly should be, at a minimum, a policy and spirit of "do
> no UNNECESSARY or UNJUSTIFIED harm."  And I believe that in fact, there is.
> Of course, it's the question of what is unnecessary or unjustified that
> raises the most serious ethical quandaries.
> We remain the largest collaborative website in the world, which often
> produces the top-ranking search result when people look up information on a
> given individual.  I will be dismayed if anyone still believes that the
> potential harm that our articles may cause to their living subjects by, for
> example, invading the privacy of borderline-notable living people,
> is something that should receive no attention in making our content
> decisions.  It would be intolerable for the project to willfully
> harm innocent people by operating in this manner.


Definitely, which is why we have a BLP policy at all - our living bios
can profoundly affect the real lives of people in the real world. It's
hard to reduce this to mechanistic rules.


- d.