[WikiEN-l] Deletion of unreferenced living person biographies

[stevertigo]

On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 9:40 AM, Emily Monroe <bluecaliocean at me.com> wrote:
>> "Delete on sight" is unwiki, and violates several of our core
>> policies that supercede BLP including NPOV and CIVIL and their
>> subordinates.
>
> True, but I see a lot of articles at new page patrol that also violate
> NPOV, CIVIL, or both. "I run this great business" is POV, not to
> mention SPAM. "Emily smells funny" violates CIVIL, and probably NPOV,
> too. It's astonishing to see how obvious somebody will violate
> Wikipedian article standards because they don't know what they're
> doing, and I wish there was a more civil way to fix that problem
> besides speedying their article and leaving them a "Welcome to
> Wikipedia! Your first article really sucks!" temp message.

I understand of course that there are things which legitimately need
to be removed and without any deliberation. We generally aren't
talking about speedy deletes, but the grey areas that require
deliberation. As deliberation requires discussion, the plain fact is
that discussions themselves must run their course and not be violated
or gamed one way or another - in the deletion context we understand
deletionism itself is the default modality.

The main issue with BLP is the *time bomb fallacy* - the unnerving
notion that bad articles and statements are like bombs that need to be
removed within minutes or else things will blow up
Seigenthaller-style. Since BLP policy inevitably goes back to
Siegenthaller, we would do well to remember that the slander in his
bio article was there for a lot longer than just a few minutes. If
someone saw the article even a month before he did, they could have
corrected it, and the eventual inevitable blowup over Wikipedia's
"reliability" would have come from somewhere else.

The point is to *slow down, and respect ongoing discussion.* I pointed
out the disparity between the speedy-deletionistas and the
slow-undeletionists at [[WP:DRV/SV/ONS#Fastness-ness and
slowness-ness]]. Just having an XFD template at the top of a
problematic article generally mitigates any issue of liability - we
are being upfront and attentive about dealing with any substantive
issues.

Regards,
Stevertigo

PS: Please be sure to keep the byline/attribution on the quotes you
are responding to.