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

[George Herbert]

On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 5:43 PM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 4/17/12, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
>> The key problem here - IMHO - is not-sensitive editors interacting
>> with sensitive BLP subjects.
>
> That is not always the case.
>
> What would *you* do if you cleaned up and expanded an article on a BLP
> you had never heard of before (to 'do the right thing'), and did the
> best job you could, but the subject of the article turned up on the
> talk page of the article and objected to the rewrite and said they
> didn't want an article on them (I'm talking in general here, not about
> specific cases)?
>
> To make it even harder, they are being reasonable about it, rather
> than abusive, and you feel bad about how things turned out. What then?
> You feel an obligation to keep an eye on an article that *you*
> rewrote, but you know the subject objects to it. You are not getting
> paid for this (you are 'only' a volunteer), yet you have found
> yourself caught in this rather horrible situation that you would never
> have found yourself in if you had been employed by a published
> scholarly encyclopedia to write an article.

Why would you not find yourself in a similar situation if employed by
a published scholarly encyclopedia and were told "This guy is just
notable enough, write a brief bio of him for the next version"?

In the WP case - if they're being reasonable, and object to the
rewrite, it's usually either because they have info or points not
previously in evidence (in which case, yay, we have more information)
or don't understand Wikipedia policy or editorial standards (yay, we
have a newcomer who's being reasonable, we can talk to them and
educate them, and maybe rope them into contributing).  They key is to
talk to them.  Reasonably.

Under existing BLP and notability policy, we have criteria for article
existence/non-existence.  If the subject makes or can be helped to
articulate a case under that policy that they shouldn't have an
article, then the reasonable thing to do is to run it up the AFD
flagpole and see if others agree.  If they object but can't make a
case under the policy, then it's a case of trying to make sure they
understand Wikipedia's goals and policies and standards, even if they
end up disagreeing with some of them.  Again, if they're starting
reasonable, they generally listen and engage.

I have never had a conversation along these lines - OTRS or normal
on-wiki - that went terribly badly if it started out with a
fundamentally reasonable and constructively communicating subject.  I
don't know how many I dealt with, but it's more than 10.

Far more were of the "No, no, it is true that they convicted me for
that but it was a lie!  And that other warrant too!  You bastards
can't post that stuff about me, someone might read it and stop taking
my financial advice!"...


What is wrong about this situation currently with the radio
personality is that it appears to be the once-every-few-years serious
outlier.  Unlike the Sigenthaler thing which was a totally innocent
article subject and resulted in the BLP policy, this current one is
probably not something we can fix with rules that are compliant with
our other core goals.

Some cases just make lousy precedent.  Lawyers and judges are acutely
aware of that.  I understand that it blew up enough to gather a lot of
internal attention, and am not unsympathetic to the individual's
complaints and discomfort.  But we can't rework carefully balanced
policies over something so muddy ugly as this particular case.


There's a fundamental difference between "This was fucked up" and "We
need to change our core values to avoid this happening again".


-george



-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com