[WikiEN-l] News agencies are not RSs

[Charles Matthews]

Ian Woollard wrote:
> Can I ask what policy this was done under? While I generally approve
> of the action here, it seems that the admins involved were not
> entirely following the letter or really entirely the spirit of
> Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons. So how are they not
> technically rouge admins?
>   
What are policies for?  We tend not to ask this often enough. 

I say that policies are generally there to create reasonable 
expectations, of editors contributing to Wikipedia, under what you could 
call "normal circumstances".  We have IAR because not all circumstances 
are normal, and application of policy can lead to the "wrong" answer.

WP:BLP has as nutshell "Biographical material must be written with the 
greatest care and attention to verifiability, neutrality and avoiding 
original research", which I agree with; together with stuff about 
ethical and legal responsibility (which I find somewhat surprising). 
Anyway, the "greatest attention" to verifiability means that high 
standards such as more than one source can be applied, even if news 
agencies were always reliable sources (which is very debatable, I 
think). "Be very firm about the use of high quality references", it 
says. That's the letter.

Charles