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

[David Gerard]

2009/3/2 Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com>:

> I would like to see Mike's opinion, though, on how deeply the Foundation can
> be involved in establishing Wikimedia-wide policies on content like BLPs. It
> would seem to challenge the notion that the Foundation itself hosts but does
> not control project content. Tomasz' suggestion would be an especially
> serious departure from past practice.


The BLP policy on en:wp basically says: the article needs to be NPOV,
verifiable and no original research, and it needs to be good enough
and not-wrong *at all times*. That is, the basic content rules, but
applied very hard indeed. Furthermore, any given statement needs to be
not merely referenced, but actually noteworthy in itself.

This is an ideal, but it's a reasonably simple and clear one.

(This has been misinterpreted, with varying degrees of wilfulness, as
"do no harm", take out anything possibly negative, etc. Nevertheless,
solid references that are evidence of notability of each claim
generally mean stuff stays in. The Polish examples above would be told
"er, no, go away.")

How do other projects interpret or implement their own BLP policies?
Are they more or less like the en:wp one? What differences exist?


- d.