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

[Nathan]

On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 5:34 PM, Sue Gardner <sgardner at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> I'm confused. Doesn't the current (English) policy say "if there's no
> consensus ... the page is kept."  So, default to _keep_, rather than
> default
> to delete...?
>
> It's only the English policy, so I realize it's not necessarily
> representative/reflective of any of the other language versions,
> regardless.  But in general, my understanding is that "default to keep" is
> more-or-less standard practice Wikipedia-wide (as much as all language
> versions can be said to have a standard practice), and the English policy
> seems to support that.
>
> Recapping this piece of the thread: It seems to me that "default to delete"
> is not widely considered satisfactory, if it is interpreted to mean an
> automatic or near-automatic deletion upon request.  Human judgment needs to
> be applied.
>
>  Erik had proposed that articles which meet these three criteria be deleted
> upon request: 1) they are not balanced and complete, 2) the subject is only
> marginally notable, and 3) the subject wants the article deleted. This
> would
> shift the bar towards a more deletionist stance for BLPs, but would
> preserve
> articles which are either complete and balanced, _or_ which are about
> people
> who are clearly self-evidently notable.
>
> Assuming there is some consensus about what clearly self-evidently notable
> means, or that some consensus could be created ..... does that proposal
> make
> sense to people here?
>

According to Dominic's quote, it says default to delete if the article is
*not* a marginally notable BLP. Not a very elegant way of changing the
policy, but perhaps it was intended to slip past wide notice. While deleting
marginally notable BLPs has become more common, even where no consensus to
delete exists, the proposal did fail.

As far as granting significant weight to the wishes of a subject? Subject
request has consistently been rejected as a basis for deleting an article,
and many comments in the deletion discussions I've read have even rejected
lending weight to these requests in any way.

Nathan