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

[Anthony]

On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 12:29 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> 2009/3/2 Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org>:
> >> Flagged Revs is an excellent way of dealing with vandalism to BLPs,
> >>  technical solutions to more subtle problems are a little trickier.
> >> Flagged Revs could be used with addition levels - a "free of
> >> vandalism" level and a "well balanced, fact-checked and free of
> >> anything remotely libellous" level. Two separate levels are necessary
> >> since the 2nd takes far too long to be a practical vandal fighting
> >> tool - I'm not sure which level would be shown by default to whom,
> >> that needs to be worked out.
> >>
> >
> > Another good idea, but how would an article be accepted as "well
> balanced"?
> > You just can't write about a topic which has any level of controversy and
> > come up with an article which everyone will agree is "well balanced".  No
> > matter what you write, someone is going to have a problem with it, so
> > marking an article as "well balanced" is more likely to increase the
> > complaints rather than reduce them.  I think Citizendium's "approved
> > articles" is about the best you can do in this type of situation, and
> their
> > articles certainly aren't "well balanced".
>
> Of course, the terms need to be well defined, I was being
> intentionally vague about that part because it requires significant
> discussion and debate that I don't think we want to get into now.
> Citizendium's "approved articles" are the equivalent of (not exactly
> the same as, though) our "featured articles" - we don't want to
> require all BLPs to be featured, that would never work!
>

Citizendium's "approved articles" is similar in goal to Wikipedia's
"featured articles", but the process is very very different.  If adopted by
Wikipedia (and I highly doubt it would be), it would be *much* more scalable
than the current "featured articles" system.  That said, I didn't think your
proposal was to "require all BLPs to be [flagged as well balanced]".

As for your vagueness, well, I think the implementation is the key to
flagged revisions.