[WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Foundation-l] Board statement regarding biographies of living people

[David Gerard]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Michael Snow <wikipedia at verizon.net>
Date: 2009/4/21
Subject: [Foundation-l] Board statement regarding biographies of living people
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>


As I mentioned in my previous message, the Board of Trustees prepared a
statement at its meeting related to biographies of living people. It
touches on the major considerations in this issue, but also how this
relates to our fundamental objectives. The statement was unanimously
approved by the board. The text of the statement follows:

The Wikimedia Foundation takes this opportunity to reiterate some core
principles related to our shared vision, mission, and values. One of
these values which is common to all our projects is a commitment to
maintaining a neutral point of view.

In our efforts to offer a source of knowledge that is valuable and
useful to all, we have a responsibility to uphold these values by also
providing accurate information. Participants in Wikimedia projects have
created resources of vast size and scope. As we have emphasized for
several years, in addition to the quantity of knowledge that is
available, its quality is also an essential matter. The generally high
quality of information in Wikimedia projects has been confirmed by a
number of studies, but it is important that we always strive to improve.
As with any endeavor that provides educational and informational
material, errors need to be avoided, especially when they have the
potential to cause harm. One area where this applies is when writing
about living people.

Increasingly, Wikimedia articles are among the top search engine results
for just about any query. That means that when a potential employer, a
colleague, friend, neighbor or acquaintance looks for information about
a person, they may find it at the Wikimedia sites. As the popularity of
the Wikimedia projects grows, so does the editing community's
responsibility to ensure articles about living people are
neutrally-written, accurate and well-sourced.

As our popularity has grown, some issues have become more prominent:

* Many people create articles that are overly promotional in tone: about
themselves, people they admire, or those they are paid to represent.
These are not neutral, and have no place in our projects. Generally, the
Wikimedia community protects the projects well against this common
problem by deleting or improving hagiographies.
* People sometimes vandalize articles about living people. The Wikimedia
community has developed tools and techniques for counteracting
vandalism: in general they seem to work reasonably well.
* Some articles about living people contain small errors, are
poorly-written or poorly-sourced. Articles about people who are only
marginally well-known are often neglected, and tend to improve much more
slowly over time, if at all.
* People sometimes make edits designed to smear others. This is
difficult to identify and counteract, particularly if the malicious
editor is persistent.

The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees urges the global Wikimedia
community to uphold and strengthen our commitment to high-quality,
accurate information, by:

1) Ensuring that projects in all languages that describe living people
have policies in place calling for special attention to the principles
of neutrality and verifiability in those articles;

2) Taking human dignity and respect for personal privacy into account
when adding or removing information, especially in articles of ephemeral
or marginal interest;

3) Investigating new technical mechanisms to assess edits, particularly
when they affect living people, and to better enable readers to report
problems;

4) Treating any person who has a complaint about how they are described
in our projects with patience, kindness, and respect, and encouraging
others to do the same.

--Michael Snow


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