[WikiEN-l] "Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement"

Sat Apr 7 20:52:44 UTC 2012

On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 1:47 PM, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com>wrote:

> BLP is a good idea and we got it for good reasons.  These recent
> developments, however, forget that we are *an encyclopedia*. It's into
> barking mad territory.
>
> No. We will not go to removing bios on demand on my watch.
>
> George William Herbert
> Sent from my iPhone
>
>

Well, for many minor biographical articles, we are not an encyclopedia, but
a collection of garbage.

When Hari defamed the people he disliked, his stuff stayed in articles for
weeks on end.

Example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cristina_Odone&diff=307012625&oldid=304006952

In this edit

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Richard_Littlejohn&diff=403251514&oldid=403077128

he manufactured a "criminal record" for "acts of violence committed in
Peterborough in the 1970s" out of the fact that (according to Sam
Blacketer) the guy had once, as a teenager, been fined £20 for involvement
in a pub brawl.

This type of BLP abuse, where some obscure, unflattering fact is inflated
to vastly undue importance, and given its own section and headline, is
absolutely typical of Wikipedia.

One BLP I helped get deleted a few weeks ago had a section "X's brushes
with the law" which took up 50 per cent of the entire article. The material
was apparently put in by a former lodger whom she had evicted because he
was allegedly doing -- and selling -- drugs in her house. Editing her
biography was his revenge. Some of it was inaccurate, none of it was
sourced adequately (court records rather than secondary sources), none of
it was biographically relevant (traffic citations and a civil matter). Yet
when the subject took the infringing material out, two experienced
Wikipedians put it back in and warned her for COI editing.

Encyclopedia? Let's not flatter ourselves. For borderline notable people,
it's more like a defamation engine crossed with an infomercial generator.
Here is another example: Klee Irwin. This is what the article looked like
today:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Klee_Irwin&oldid=479539626

This what it looked like six weeks ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Klee_Irwin&oldid=478654615

In one version the guy is a crook, in the other he is a saint. Both
versions are rampant coatracks. Neither article version is worthy of being
called a biography in an encyclopedia. Wikipedia is nowhere near reliable
if an article can flip-flop like that.

If that is the quality level we are happy to settle for with minor
biographies, where we either end up with hatchet jobs or infomercials,
because nobody neutral can be BOTHERED to write about these obscure people,
then I think it would indeed be better not to have "biographies" like that
at all.

Another example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rande_Gerber&diff=416351133&oldid=393382165

This turns a sexual harassment accusation into fact. Not even the tabloid
sources the edit was based on presented the alleged harassment as fact. In
fact, they presented statements calling the veracity of these allegations
into serious doubt – none of which were reflected in Wikipedia.

As far as I can tell, this court case has sunk without trace. But this edit
stood like that for a whole year. An accusation obviously suffices for a
conviction in the court of Wikipedia.

When it comes to minor biographies, the site is riddled with stuff like
that, just sitting there. It's shite, however many times you call it an
encyclopedia. Absolute, incompetent, malicious or self-serving, shite.

With editor numbers stagnating or declining, we need fewer biographies, not
more.

We need to restrict ourselves to biographies that are encyclopedically
relevant, so that articles get tended and watched by more people than just
the subjects themselves, and the people who hate them.

Andreas

> On Apr 4, 2012, at 5:27, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> > I noticed a thread on Jimbo's talk page that is partly related to this.
> >
> >
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#A_radical_idea.3B_BLP_opt-out_for_all
> >
> > Tarc suggested:
> >
> > "Any living person, subject to identity verification via OTRS, may
> > request the deletion of their article. No discussion, no AfD, just
> > *poof*. In its place is a simple template explaining why there is no
> > longer an article there, and a pointer to where the reader can find
> > information on the subject, a link similar to Template:Find sources at
> > the top of every AfD."
> >
> > What people there seem to be missing is that the template would
> > explicitly say "article removed at subject's request". The point being
> > that this could well result in a big PR stink for either Wikipedia
> > ("the article was rubbish and rightly removed") or for the subject
> > ("they are (wrongly) trying to control what is said about them").
> >
> > [This is why it relates to the topic of this thread]
> >
> > This is why such a proposal might actually work.
> >
> > I am rather surprised at why some people miss that this is about
> > living people though. BWilkins said:
> >
> > "You can't very well tear out "Mussolini" from every copy of EB ever
> > printed, can you?"
> >
> > Obviously, for those who are dead, this proposed policy would no
> > longer apply, and you default back to the usual arguments about
> > notability and so on. And I still maintain that notability cannot be
> > properly assessed until someone's life or career has finished. The
> > whole "notability is not temporary" thing needs serious
> > re-examination.
> >
> > Carcharoth
> >
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