[Foundation-l] Biographies of Living People: a quick interim update

[David Gerard]

2009/3/8 Sue Gardner <sgardner at wikimedia.org>:

> Second, there is also a fear ---represented here probably most
> strongly by David Gerard, but I believe lots of other people think the
> same thing--- that if we tackle BLPs clumsily, we could make things
> worse not better, or at least might introduce new problems.   For
> example, we might make the error of privileging kindness over
> neutrality, resulting in a general whitewashing of BLPs.  Or we could
> accidentally encourage a massive wave of deletionism, resulting in
> much smaller and less useful Wikipedias.


FWIW, I drafted the version of WP:BLP that first became policy on
en:wp :-) Very strong on the basic content rules and putting the new
considerations into that context. It's changed considerably in the
details since then, of course, but the point still stands: if NPOV
requires upsetting an article subject, NPOV wins.


- d.