[WikiEN-l] More stringent notability requirements for biographical articles

[Charles Matthews]

On 27 March 2012 15:52, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:

> On Tue, 27 Mar 2012, Charles Matthews wrote:
>
>> Reading what you have written above, and then
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Wikipedia:Biographies_of_**
>> living_persons/Noticeboard#**Chris<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons/Noticeboard#Chris>
>> Butler_(private investigator)
>>
>> and other serious discussions on that page, I'm unconvinced that you
>> actually have a point here.
>>
>
> Why?
>
> I clarified what I didn't think worked: BLP rules which say "do what you
> are
> required to do anyway according to other rules, but try really hard this
> time".  How exactly can such a rule ever being a benefit, and how did it
> bring any benefits in this case?
>
>
> So you have been arguing that without the BLP policy, and without the
noticeboard set up to help compliance with the policy, just the same close
investigations of the actual reliability of sources that nominally fall
within "RS" would be going on?  I don't agree, and I wonder if anyone else
does. I'm not the biggest fan of noticeboards, qua unchartered processes;
but in this case it seems to be working, and having WP:BLP there fairly
clearly has something to do with it.

I note we had a silly onsite discussion on WP:COI recently, based on a
similar and quite fallacious style of argument that the COI guideline was
in effect vacuous. It isn't, and BLP policy isn't, and it seems to me that
to argue that these things make no odds at all fundamentally misunderstands
two things: (i) that pages that express a single and clear idea in the
policy area really are needed; and (ii) the way enforcement actually works
is by decentralisation. We have to do things in a way that scales, and
looking at (for example) NPOV in different places in different ways makes
sense. Or putting it another way, unpacking our ideas is worthwhile, and we
have gone a long way since saying "five pillars" was enough.

Charles