[Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people

[David Gerard]

2009/3/2 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>:

> From what I can tell, a lot of subjects of BLPs that have problems
> with their articles don't complain at all. The accounts I've heard
> (or, at least, my interpretation thereof) of Wikimedians being
> approached at events by people with bad articles have all been along
> the lines of "my article is rubbish, how do I get it fixed?" not "my
> article is rubbish and I've been trying to get it fixed but nobody is
> listening to me". That suggests that those subjects that don't happen
> to meet a Wikipedian never actually complain. There are two possible
> explanations for that that I can see: 1) They don't really care all
> that much and the complaints we get are just opportunistic moaning or
> 2) they have no idea where to even start with complaining. While there
> may be some cases of (1), I'm sure (2) is a significant factor.


I would guess it's mostly (2), in my experience. People have no idea
who to contact. The "Contact Wikipedia" link on en:wp's sidebar
doesn't seem to catch their eye - though it gets you to the right
answer in three further clicks. Perhaps it should be on the page you
hit immediately.

(My usual answer: "Email info at wikimedia dot org, that's wikimedia
with an M. It'll get funneled to the right place. All other ways of
contacting us end up there anyway." This seems to work a bit.)


- d.