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

[David Gerard]

On 27 March 2012 17:20, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> 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.


The key point to remember about BLPs is: no eventualism. If an article
about someone dead 200 years says something nasty and wrong, that's
not great, but it's not urgent. If an article about a living person
says something nasty and wrong, that is urgent, and we can't just
assume the wiki process will on balance fix it in the fullness of
time. It's the simplest possible way of doing it and it's a vast
improvement over the previous situation. It's not perfection, but
calling it a "failure" is hyperbolic.


- d.