[WikiEN-l] Deletion of unreferenced living person biographies

[Charles Matthews]

Thomas Dalton wrote:
> 2009/9/8 Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com>:
>   
>> Thomas Dalton wrote:
>>     
>>> Is there a problem with unreferenced BLPs? Potentially harmful
>>> information in a BLP should always be referenced, but if there isn't
>>> anything potentially harmful then what is the problem? I would remove
>>> potentially harmful unreferenced material per WP:BLP and leave it at
>>> that.
>>>
>>>       
>> It is of course handy to know that the article refers to a real,
>> existing person, not a hoax. Everything in WP is supposed to be
>> verifiable, and that applies to BLPs too.
>>     
>
> True, but that isn't a BLP issue, it is a general article issue. You
> can't use that argument to support deleting unreferenced BLPs on sight
> unless you argue for deleting all unreferenced articles on sight. (I
> might an actually support that argument - the sources in an article
> should be the actual source of the information and only the author
> knows that so they should be the one citing the source.)
>
>
>   
Now, now. I'm in favour of using PRODs in such cases, as a "soft" method 
that is nothing like deleting on sight. You asked "what is the 
problem?", and part of the problem is evidently that if none of the 
article checks out then it might be a hoax. I would think badly of 
someone who put forward an article for PROD deletion for, say, an 
academic on these grounds, since typically an academic will have an 
institutional home page and it shouldn't be at all hard to find it and 
add it to the page. I did add a PROD to a BLP recently for someone 
claiming to be a historian (not an academic): in other words someone who 
had written a book and that was about it.

Charles