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

[George Herbert]

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 11:36 AM, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:

> On Tue, 21 Apr 2009, David Gerard wrote:
> > I was thinking more "where's the catch?" I still can't see one. A
> > lollipop for each catch anyone can spot!
>
> Some catches:
>
> 1) Glosses over how you reconcile the conflict of interest policy and
> allowing
> people to fix their own biographies.
>
> 2) It gives a cursory, vague, reference to human dignity, but in general it
> emphasises accuracy and verifiability too much.  Some BLP problems aren't
> really about that, and painting them as such is trying to fit a square peg
> into a round hole.  Privacy problems aren't about either one.  Undue weight
> problems *could* be called accuracy, but that gives the wrong impression.
> Someone who shares a name with a child molester and finds Wikipedia the
> first
> Google hit for his name can't really complain about accuracy or
> verifiability.
> And this doesn't even touch the issue of what to do with information is
> verifiable but false.
>
> 3) And then there's this:
> # 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.
> The problem here, as with so many things in Wikipedia, is that Wikipedia
> is set up so that in a conflict where some of us want to use a rule and
> some
> want to use human judgment, the rule wins.  If someone who complains
> ends up violating a rule, it doesn't matter how many times we say he
> needs to be listened to with patience, kindness, and support; he'll
> probably
> get treated as a rule violator.



I'm going to put forwards a theory...

I think that this is the Foundation basically saying in as neutral a way
possible "The underlying idea behind the Enwiki BLP policy is good and
should be a standard throughout WMF projects".

I think this is NOT an attempt to interject "Enwiki BLP sucks and needs to
be enhanced/changed/warped"

I think that the problems we're having with Enwiki BLP emphasize how
problematic it is to determine a right solution and how to enforce it.  The
Foundation can acknowledge that, and ask that other projects begin to
unversally adopt the concept, while accepting that we have a ways to go
before the policy is perfect.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com