[WikiEN-l] A new solution for the BLP dilemma

Durova nadezhda.durova at gmail.com
Fri Jun 5 18:27:41 UTC 2009


Perhaps I should have thought of this example sooner: one extreme instance
that comes to mind is the following biography:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Sanchez

Which was nominated for deletion three times and kept:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Matt_Sanchez
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Matt_Sanchez_(2nd_nomination)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Matt_Sanchez_(3rd_nomination)

and caused an arbitration case:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Bluemarine

The biography subject was the target of a long term harassment and
impersonation campaign across multiple sites on the Internet, which spilled
over onto Wikipedia, and during the arbitration that harassment culminated
in his computer getting hacked and his bank account getting emptied.  The
offsite harassment continues, although fortunately (after about two years of
volunteer effort) its effects on Wikipedia have been minimized.

The subject himself is no boy scout.  When he gained attention a ghost from
his closet emerged, and his attempts to deal with the resulting problems at
Wikipedia were so counterproductive that he got sitebanned.  Wjhonson (who
posts actively to this list) was also active in that dispute and our
perspectives on it differed, so I hope this amounts to a brief neutral
summary.  For purposes of this thread, that's background.  Here's the
substance:

BLP vandalism at Wikipedia is not all random one-offs.  It also consists of
persistent or strategic damage.  Wikipedia does a much poorer job at
handling the latter problems.

In this instance the article subject was completing his education and
looking for work while Wikipedia's article persistently violated BLP, RS, V,
and NPOV.  A series of experienced volunteers were unable to resolve the
problems without arbitration.  The net result was two editors sitebanned,
one indefinitely blocked, and another topic banned.

Looking back on that long ordeal, that dispute might not have grown so long
and bitter if it were possible to noindex that BLP while the problems were
getting addressed.

-Lise

Now as an act of good faith I'm going to offer to initiate a request to have
that topic ban lifted.  It's been about a year and the editor otherwise had
a good onsite record.

On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 10:47 AM, philippe <philippe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Jun 5, 2009, at 9:47 AM, Jim Redmond wrote:
>
> > As several others have mentioned, noindexing won't prevent
> > vandalism, won't
> > prevent mirrors from showing the hidden content, and won't prevent
> > direct
> > visits to the hidden content.
>
>
> Pardon the dumb question, but do we have a "{{nomirror}}" or similar
> feature?  If so, some combination of {{noindex}}, {{nomirror}}, and
> flagged revisions might be a temporary panacea...
>
> Philippe
>
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-- 
http://durova.blogspot.com/


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