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

[Sue Gardner]

2009/3/4 Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com>

> On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 5:41 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > 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.
>


I understand & appreciate the desire to proceed solely on the basis of 'what
makes a good encyclopedia,' without incorporating any considerations outside
that. Seriously, that makes a lot of sense to me.

But having said that, there doesn't seem to be a really clear consensus on
'what makes a good encyclopedia' when it comes to BLPs - witness for
example, all the discussions about what constitutes notability.  Since no
clear consensus has emerged, and nobody seems to be arguing that retaining
biographies of marginally-notable living people is an obvious and important
good thing to do ... then why _not_ shift the bias towards deleting the
marginally notable upon request?

I don't think that would lead to hagiographies Wikipedia-wide. You could
just as easily argue it would improve quality by eliminating some mediocre
articles that nobody cares about much .. while also, as a lucky side effect,
reducing unhappiness among the subjects of those articles.  Perhaps our
stance could shift to _thanking_ subjects of bad BLPs for helping to police
quality :-)


I'm sorry - the quote is default to *keep* if the article is not a
> marginally notable BLP - which, through negatives, means default to delete
> for marginally notable BLPs.


I get it now, thank you :-)