[WikiEN-l] In development--BLP task force

[Ken Arromdee]

On Wed, 5 Aug 2009 wjhonson at aol.com wrote:
> The language of the board resolution doesn't come down hard enough on 
> the side of verifiable information.  That is, if something is 
> verifiable, even a direct quote from the subject themself, then that 
> information should be allowed to be included, and should not be 
> forcibly stopped from inclusion by aggressive article 
> patrollers-with-tools.  It seems to me that the way the language is 
> worded, the board is going to continue to allow harassment of those 
> editors conscientious to the evidence, at the expense of verifiable 
> evidence already broadcast widely across the net.

I think that this is exactly why we need people working on BLP.  Wikipedia
has put so much emphasis on rules such as verifiability that some people think
that the rules trump everything else.  Worse yet, the system is set up so that
the rules *do* trump everything else; in a conflict between someone with a rule
and someone who's trying to use judgment, the rule always wins, because
you can always argue with someone's personal judgment, but the rule's
right there in print.

BLP is sort of a hack to the system which says "we're going to force you to
ignore the rules in this particular situation, because they *really* don't
work".  It by no means covers every situation where the rules cause problems,
but it's better than nothing and right now it's all we've got.

Not everything which is verifiable should be included in Wikipedia.