[WikiEN-l] Deletion of unreferenced living person biographies

[Andrew Turvey]

----- "Tony Sidaway" <tonysidaway at gmail.com> wrote: 
> 
> On 9/5/09, Phil Nash <pn007a2145 at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote: 
> > I took a quick look the other day at the categories of unsourced 
> > articles, which go back to December 2006; to be honest, I don't currently 
> > have the time or will myself to trawl through what is a Sisyphean task. Even 
> > limiting that to BLP articles is more than enough to tax the stamina of most 
> > volunteer editors. It's easy enough to begin a stub, and as easy to tag as 
> > unsourced, but it does take some commitment to take the bricks and fashion a 
> > mansion, which I think we should be doing. 
> 
> I feel strongly that biographies of living people without sources 
> should be deleted on sight. They can always be recreated by someone 
> who possesses at least one reliable source. 

Working with some other editors, I started [1] to go through older unsourced living people biographies (BLPs) and either add references or propose for deletion under the criteria for speedy deletion (CSD), the proposed deletion process (PROD) or the Articles for Deletion process (AfD). Attack pages and pages on people which don't assert notability can be speedy deleted under CSD and PROD can be used for the others if they haven't been PRODed/AfDed before. However, many editors think that neutral unreferenced articles shouldn't be PRODed or AFDed unless the proposer has first made an effort to find sources themselves (see guideline [[WP:BEFORE]]). In my experience being an unreferenced BLPs is not enough to persuade editors that it should be deleted - despite being a clear breach of the BLP policy and hence grounds for deletion; it's more likely to succeed if you can show that it's non-notable.

There are 51,000 unreferenced BLPs at the moment [2] - about 13% of the number of articles in category living people and 2% of all articles. Using Twinkle it takes me about 5-10 seconds to propose CSD, PROD or AFD; checking sources takes me about 5 minutes and adding new sources and improving expanding articles takes about an hour.

Clearly whether we allow "deletion on sight" or require proposers to improve articles first makes a big difference to whether this backlog will ever be cleared.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AndrewRT/Unreferenced_BLPs 
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Unreferenced_BLPs

Andrew