User:Cyclopia/On the BLP problem
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There is a problem with BLP. But it is not what most of people seem to think.
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I think "doing the right thing" is about removing unsourced material from Wikipedia. I think writing an encyclopaedia is all about evaluating sources and giving them appropriate weight.
I would characterise the argument that "BLPs should default to delete" as a simplistic, one-size-fits-all approach. I would also describe it as an overreaction based on a misconception about what Wikipedia is, and what it can ever aspire to be. Wikipedia's an enormous collection of user-submitted content and while we remain "the free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit", we cannot eliminate problematic BLP-related material. I would say that the essential problem isn't with Wikipedia, but with people who uncritically believe what Wikipedia says. (These are often the same people who believe what they see on TV, what they read in the newspapers and what they hear on the radio.)
I also believe that where there's a reliable source to analyse, there's an article to be written. I repeat that BLP policy is, quite rightly, about removing unsourced negative material concerning living people, not about eliminating all negative material about living people entirely.—S Marshall Talk/Cont 15:00, 23 October 2009 (UTC)
From a deletion review
Hm, I summarise the complaints: if admins will just play by the rules of consensus, discussion, and take no disruptive unilateral action, then the community consensus will deal with the BLP issues this project faces. That's so ridiculous it is funny. Hasn't happened in my 4 years of caring, and won't happen anytime soon.
This deplorable community is totally irresponsible and deserving of nothing but ethical contempt. No one should abide by "consensus" when consensus has time and time again shown itself to be as mature as a baby on acid. And this case? Either it will be dismissed or it will strain on the wikilawyering gnats of who blocked whom, and what was out of process - while swallowing every available camel and (to mix metaphors) elephant in the room. Arbcom may "feel the BLP pain" but they won't actually do anything useful.
Actually, even speedy deleting all unreferenced BLPs won't make all that much difference. But the community will not even go that far. Until it starts to do things like this, it will not even begin to tackle the real problem - which is that current structures can only realistically maintain the 20% of most notable BLPs to an acceptable quality wrt to libel threats.
If the community believes it is acceptable to keep wholy unreferenced articles about living people around for THREE YEARS (and that's what I was deleting) then sod the community.
An example of what some admins think of the Wikipedia community. User:Scott MacDonald in
The Seigenthaler incident was kind of the 11/9 of WP. It was painful, but it made it much more self-aware, especially of its influence on the real world. This, by itself, is a good thing. The increased measures of protection for biographies are mostly a good thing. More measures of protection for biographies would be a good thing (see below).
Unfortunately, as in many cases, good intentions go too far. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, so to say. And now the good intentions surrounding BLPs are, in some cases, begin to border on paranoia (no offence intended: it is a common human reaction), and that is beginning to harm Wikipedia. The problem is that entirely reasonable articles on notable subjects are being deleted for reasons that not only have no ground in notability/inclusion criteria grounds, but even do not match the BLP policy. Also, reliable and sourced and neutrally presented information is being prevented to enter articles for the very same reasons. What happens, and not sporadically I am sorry to say, is that people are overzealous on BLPs, to the point of preventing legitimate, sourced, neutral information to be added.
What follows is a discussion of many points that are often brought at AfD discussions and other discussion on BLPs.