[Wikimedia-l] Resolution: Media about living people

[David Gerard]

On 12 December 2013 12:25, Mark <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:

> Undue or unsourced negative information about living people is one aspect of
> that, and what most of the formal BLP-related policy, and the process around
> things like OTRS, is intended to address. The flipside is undue or unsourced
> *positive* information about living people: in comparison to biographies
> about non-living people, BLPs draw a huge proportion of puffed-up, COI, and
> sometimes outright paid editing.


Yes, I think hagiography is a problem on en:wp.


> Between tendentious negative information and self-promoting positive
> information, I worry that the overall quality level of our biographies of
> living people ends up poor in a great many cases, especially cases outside
> the top tier of biographies visible enough to draw significant third-party
> editors (Barack Obama, Fidel Castro, that kind of thing). But it would be
> better to understand the problem, if it is one, in more detail.


I don't think this is, though - when people are this unambiguously
famous, I think our biographies hold up in terms of content, even when
the prose flows badly.

How would we measure this?


- d.