[WikiEN-l] Request to Wikipedians for BBC Documentary

[David Gerard]

2009/8/18 Cathy Edwards <Cathy.Edwards at bbc.co.uk>:

> I think I have a good idea why BLP are a hot topic of debate in this
> area,


It's because they're special, because they can cause  (and have
caused) damage to people in a way that other articles can't. (And the
same applies to material about living people in other articles.)

Basically, we don't have the luxury of eventualism with biographical
material about living people - it has to satisfy the standard rules
(neutrality, verifiability, no original research) but we can't have a
bad article and wait for it to be better - it has to be not-awful at
any given time. So people get really harsh on reference quality,
whether a given incident is noteworthy, etc. And that extends to even
having an article at all - for many subjects, having a Wikipedia
article can be a curse.


> but why do you think fiction is contentious - because it's in
> danger of unbalancing the encyclopedia?


Often the sourcing is awful, primary research, original research, etc.
I think it's frequently it's that the articles themselves aren't
really good enough to convince, so people are unconvinced about the
topic area in general. (We had similar problems with articles on
schools a few years ago - "not notable, we don't need articles on
every school," etc., but really I think it was that the articles were
really not good or useful-looking. This is just in my subjective
opinion.)

Apart from that, some people just go "WHAT ON EARTH" at the idea of
some topics being in the encyclopedia.


- d.