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Ahem. If a person does not want their bio printed at all, then whatever you do to it, and no matter how you mess with it, you cannot be acting with the highest standards of love and respect for the dignity of others. In that case, these standards ("verifiable" writing, and love) are simply incompatable, even if you wish otherwise. At best, you may simply be an enabler or co-violator, who acts to mitigate the invasion of privacy, by acting to decrease the outrage. But that doesn't count if you give your assent to the whole process. Giving a drink in a torture chamber doesn't make you a saint if you assent to torture chambers. Being kind to a person in prison doesn't count if you assent to the imprisonment of a person who doesn't deserve to be there at all. If you've got two burglars in a house arguing over whether or not to steal just cash, but not an antique ring which might cause the owner some extra anguish, and one burglar starts talking about "standards of love and respect for the dignity of others," then you know somebody is mightily confused. People who care about love and respect for others don't violate their houses AT ALL. Nada. They don't engage in legalistic niceties about what's kosher to steal and what isn't. I hope that's enough metaphors for the day and that the point comes across. S B H arris 20:17, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
Wow. I see that metaphors do not work. Torture, and aggressive actions with bother people and invade their privacy, are bad things. Wikipedia does not have to be bound to print lies in a bio. There is an intermediate state where people should be able to choose EITHER between having a bio (in which case it is fair game subject to WP:V and BLP and so on), or not having one AT ALL. Being the target of a bio on your life which you don't want here, is a bad thing. Many people arguing that this kind of thing should continue (for OTHERS), cannot seem to imagine themselves in the position of being the target of an unwanted bio on Wikipedia. Why is that? It continues to mystify me. Is it that they never expect to do a notable thing in their entire lives? Is it that they hate people who do do notable things so much, that they don't care about their privacy? What's going on, here? Wikia founder Angela Beesley, who now wants her bio deleted, and cannot get it done, does not seem to have been able to envision her current curcumstance, before the fact. Why not? I don't know.
Jimbo evidently doesn't like his own bio, and has diddled with it in ways which the average wikipedian cannot (this has all been admitted and appoligized for, by Jimbo). And yet Jimbo continues a policy which caused and causes HIM pain, and which he has every reason to think would cause the average bio target even MORE pain than he got, since they don't have the POWER on Wikipedia that Jimbo does; and YET Jimbo does this, while speaking of treating other people with love and respect. Again, this is a mystery to me, and I could use explanation. Jimbo? You didn't like it when it was done to you, and yet you're in a better position than everybody else is, to mitigate what this process does to its targets. You KNOW it's bound to hurt others more than you. So what gives? S B H arris 19:48, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
As for the rest of what you say, other encylopedias before now have been protected by space limitations from biographizing only the very most notable of living people--- people who have in nearly all instances sought notability, or who acted in ways in which notability would be a foreseen consequence. Even so, shorter enclycopedias play with fire. When persons of lesser notability are profiled by newspapers (as for obituaries) or by publications (Who's Who) they are given the kind of editorial control not seen here on Wikipedia. The NY Times even famously is courteous enough to send notable men their own obituaries years in advance, for editing. Wikipedia however, is large enough to be qualitatively a very different thing-- its size resulting in notability creap, which I have noted and don't want to repeat myself about. However, it's a real effect and not to be triffled with, since a personal bio is coming to a place near you. Why have you been so careful to protect your own personal information here on Wikipedia, if you don't want to extend this courtesy to others? Inquiring minds want to know. Perhaps you've been out there fighting injustice with such vigor, that evil people are after you? Golly, me too. :). It's a common problem, don't you know. Wiki bios don't help. S B H arris 21:38, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
complaint by Mr. Bush. 24.59.105.229 12:41, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
As for hatred of one group by another, I threw it out as a possibility. You know there is hatred in the world. Celebritites do get hated for merely being famous. Ask one. Celebrities also routinely are subjected to invasions of privacy which you or I would find appalling. Sometimes by people who don't hate them or have bad intentions. Hoards of souvenier-seeking tourists stipped all the bark off the trees in Jackie Kennedy's front yard, after she moved out of the White House. I'm sure they didn't hate her, but the effect was the same and due to things of this nature she had to follow many an American celeb and flee to Europe just as though the intent had been bad. Let us not make Wikipedia the same kind of influence, whether the intentions are good, or no. S B H arris 23:13, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
BTW, I note that Angela Beesleys bio is nominated for deletion ONCE AGAIN (fifth time, now). Unless she's bothered in a major way by all this, her behavior is inexplicable. It's almost like this whole thing was some kind of torture for her. Silly me. S B H arris 17:50, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
I am trying to update an existing article regarding a national radio talk show host. The host has very little information in electronic format/internet sources.
I asked the host for material his publicist may have or other links that may provide more information and received an email from the host. Instead of providing links or third party information, the person provided answers to questions which were in the email (history, family, career, etc).
Is it OK to expand an article based on this as a source? If so, how would one cite it?
Jaymzyates 04:12, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
I am hereby proposing the following change/clarification. Currently, policy reads: While many well-known living persons' exact birthdays are widely known and available to the public, the same is not always true for marginally notable people or non-public figures. I would like to add the following sentence: For the purposes of this paragraph, any candidate representing a major party (i.e., after the primary or convention) for the US House, US Senate, or Governorship, shall be deemed a person who is public enough that their birth date can be included.
Thoughts? -- Sholom 00:35, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
(outdenting) This is not strictly relevant to this discussion since we are not a "covered entity" but I think it does provide some evidence about general privacy expectations. Under the US HIPAA law, date of birth is considered "protected health information" and must be protected from unauthorized access. Given the general trend that European law is usually more privacy-friendly than US law, I'm a bit surprised to hear that Norway publishes all birthdates online. I guess it just proves that there's an exception to every rule. Rossami (talk) 23:29, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
A few rebuttal points: there is generally no right of privacy for information when that information is publically available. HIPAA applies to information privately collected in medical records, that's not what we're talking about here, and so is completely irrelevant. (BTW, even Census records are available in 72 years, not 100!). Look, every candidate who was running for House had their birthdate easily and publicly available on the internet. How does it make sense that all these election-web-sites can have the information but Wikipedia can not? Recall, all I am talking about are people who are running for US Congress for major parties. If their own websites, or other publicly available websites, list the birthday, why can't WP? This isn't a violation of privacy, this is a simple matter of collecting publicly available information -- Sholom 20:54, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Ignoring the armchair legal philosophies for a moment, I can give countless examples of people who use WP to look up birthdates for constructive or informative purposes - and I've never yet heard of anybody using Wikipedia to commit credit-card fraud. This is paranoia at its finest. None of us are using top-secret information from classified sources to divine birthdates (in fact, that would contravene WP:V), but the simple fact is that any celebrity who has never told anyone their birthdate...we don't list birthdates for. We only list the birthdates of people whose birthdates are widely available in the public domain. Ergo, I strongly suppose any suggestion that would emasculate Wikipedia "for fear that somebody might try and use Donald Trump's credit cards" Sherurcij ( Speaker for the Dead) 06:53, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
I recently became aware of the Brandy Alexandre which has an interesting history. Basically her real name has been revealed somewhere else (and recently a wikipedian also got it from a website profile). However Brandy has made it clear that she does not want her real name linked to her pseudonym and we don't have any reliable sources so we don't mention it. However in the talk page, there is still discussion of the fact that her name was made available in this other place (primarily in the issue of whether we're allowed to mention it or what it was about).
Does anyone else think this kind of discussion should be removed? Basically, even if inadvertedly, we're telling people "hey we can't tell you her real name but if you want to know it you can easily find it out from this other place". Obviously we don't actually say it's definitely her real name but looking at the circumstances, most people can come to their own conclusions. Indeed I did very easily. While we usually tolerate a lot of junk in talk pages, libelious info is something we don't.
This isn't libelious AFAIK but we tend to treat personal info the same way at least from Wikipedia:Oversight. Do we need to go as far as perma removing all connection between her name and this other place or even her and this other place with oversight? Or am I just being to privacy paranoid? Or do other editors think it's stupid for us to try and hide something that is out there? P.S. For obvious reasons, please refrain from mentioning what this other place is here. Nil Einne 13:12, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
It could be libelous, if the person whose real name is being discussed is NOT a famous porn star. Going around naming real people as porn stars is not a good thing. Without a real source, such "outings" should be regarded with great suspicion, as they could easily be malicious attempts to hurt some real person who is not a porn star.-- Jimbo Wales 01:06, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
Has there been any discussion here regarding the above category. It seems to be designed to encourage editors to find the missing date. Meanwhile our policy here indicates that for most living persons this information is best left out. Should there be a statement on the category page to that effect? - MrFizyx 02:18, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
I have a question as to how WP:BLP handles a certain type of problem, that can be laid out this way. Suppose that there is a club called the Bunny Club, it’s a gentleman’s only club that is roughly a cross between a Masonic lodge, and Club Med. Many wealthy and influential people are club members; however, it is a private club, and does not make its membership lists public. Now conspiracy theorists spend a lot of time contemplating that all these rich and famous people getting together in private is not a good thing. So they, the conspiracy theorists, spend a lot of time tying to figure out who’s a member, and then spend more time “outing” them by making their names public. Now apparently nothing that bad goes on when club members get together, because some people out themselves, and leak it out that thy are members, and don’t seem to show a lot of guilt concerning their membership. Soon lists start to float around, some people on the lists are in fact members, even admitting it publicly, and other names on the lists are more speculative.
One day someone starts a page here on Wikipedia concerning this Bunny Club, and all the information concerning the club gets dumped onto that page. The creditable, the non-creditable, and anything in-between; its all there with Wikipedia’s name on it.
Some of the claims are pretty wild by conventional standards, but to the crowd that wears tinfoil hats, the claims are entirely credible. Some claims are not only wild, but criminal. Being a gentleman’s only club, it starts making the rounds that the club supplies prostitutes to its members, and not only prostitutes, but under aged ones. Other things pop up, dark tales of conspiracies, etc.
So now we have a page in Wikipedia that on the one hand contains a list of well known public figures, while a few paragraphs down you have allegations of prostitution, so forth and so on. No specific individual is said to have partaken, but it is implied that any or all could have.
Now if this was the end of the story, it would not be so hard to fix the problem, assuming that the above is in fact a problem to be dealt with. However, there is another angle to the story, the conspiracy theorists who accept the whole thing as gospel truth. Worse, some of them are editors right here on WP, and they will fight you tooth and nail, using most any pretense they can think up to keep you from removing their version of the “truth”.
It seems that they see themselves as heroic figures in a David v. Goliath type battle. Goliath is more formally known as the Illuminati, the Globalist, the Trilateralists, -if you will “The Man”. It appears that Wikipedia is their sling-shot, a way to get the word out and awaken the masses; Wikipedia to them is a way to expose “The Man” and his sinister plots. And any editor who fails to see the greater good of what they are doing, and dares to challenge their sources, or whose version of the truth differs from theirs is either a simpleton unable to think for himself, or is secretly an agent of “The Man”.
The problem is that right now the claims made on the Bunny Club page do not tie directly to any one individual. It’s all done indirectly. So it is hard to get a lot of support for using WP:BLP for indirect claims; and its simply not worth the headaches of challenging the sources in order to remove the claims. Thus some of the claims will likely hang around for sometime to come. Some of the worst claims have been removed, but only after minor edit wars, and one edit war is still going on. Referring the problem to the Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard has produced more giggles than results.
Would it be possible to address indirect claims through a rewording of WP:BLP? Or am I overstating the role WP:BLP was meant to play?
Thanks, Brimba 02:54, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
Does wikipedia have a policy regarding pages that were created specifically so that editors can avoid following WP:BLP rules? The page Views and controversies concerning Juan Cole has been the site of massive edit wars over material attacking Cole (much of it coming from blogs). A couple of editors have insisted on including every scurrilous sentence published on any blog anywhere about Professor Cole on this page, while a couple of other editors (myself included) have had to go out of our way researching responses to these attacks (which in some cases get deleted and are only allowed to remain up after extensive edit wars). The editors bent on attacking Cole make no bones about the fact that the page was created precisely to avoid having to follow the rules of WP:BLP. Is there a precedent for such activity? I am of the opinion that the page should follow BLP rules because the page is an offshoot of Juan Cole, and the subject of that biography is the central subject of this page. The anti-Cole editors, predictably, disagree. Is there a process to get a ruling on this issue? Or should the whole page be AfD'd? Any suggestions are welcome.- csloat 05:40, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
I have made the following proposal on
WT:CSD.
Please comment.
Robert A.West (
Talk) 02:42, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Never mind. If
WP:SNOW ever applied to an idea, it was this one. I'm going home to lick my wounds. (just kidding!)
Robert A.West (
Talk)
04:33, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Above is an interesting comment:
This got me thinking. Maybe this has been discussed before, but in case it hasn't, here goes.
Proposition:
Shouldn't there be a policy that requires notification of the subjects of articles before the articles progress too far? This isn't for the sake of asking permission, but of common decency. They, of all people, should have a right to some say in the matter, or at least knowing that they should keep their eyes open. Articles can be started by fans, but can also be started by enemies who will gain an unfair advantage by editing "behind the back" of their intended victim, so the potential victim deserves to be forewarned. Such a policy could save a lot of time and grief, both for the subject, the involved editors, and for Wikipedia. -- Fyslee 21:40, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
If this did anything it would create more edit warring and associated problems. COMMENT: As opposed to the legal and bad-press and bad-faith problems which it surely has created and will continue to create? The German Wikipedia solution, BTW, which works just fine, is to simply prohibit bios (that is, per se dedicated articles on a single person) on living persons. It works well, and there's usually not as much edit-warring about who's dead, verses who's merely notable (We can take a consensus on Jimmy Hoffa.) S B H arris 19:01, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
"Hello, Mr. Al Capone the third? My name is SlutEdit from Wikipedia. That's not my real name, because my real name is none of your business. I'm calling to tell you that I've started a biography on you. You do not have the right to edit it, and you do not have the right to decline the honor of your own bio on Wikipedia. Resistance is futile. If you have any problems with this, just call the Wikipedia office. By the way, you should watch your bio for the rest of your life, in case someone vandalizes it. Thank you for your understanding and support. Your continued donations keep Wikipedia running!"
68.92.156.246
15:04, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
Dear English wikipedians,
we had a debate in persian wikipedia which i'd like to know your comment on. can we publish simple information (like places of study) on a person based on his autobiography? this person is an outlawed political activist ( Ali Javadi) so he does not use his real name so the matter cant be checked with univeristies. I (the editor of article) have used phrases like "he claims to have studing in Newmexico state university". is that counted as "vefriable"? if not, how simple information on some one's background can be verified if he doesnt use his real name? isnt good to use autobiography as a refrence and then declare that these are only self-claims?
the translation of article is visible in " Ali Javadi". (altough in persin i have done some edits including adding "he claims..."). please give us your view on that. -- Arash red 16:21, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
" Defamation" is a legal term. It does not mean, "any unsourced material". Do not use templates to attack editors who place unsourced material. Be very sure you understand what is, and isn't defamation before you use the templates. For example, "garbage smells" is not defamation, it is the truth. It may or may not require a source depending on how much it is common-knowledge. Do not use blp1, 2, etc for removing or edit-warring over inocuous remarks. "Paris Hilton likes banana pie" is not defamation. It may be silly, but it's not slander. Similarly "Bill Clinton was once arrested for jaywalking" is not defamation either, believe it or not. The sort of "crime" if you will, has become mundane i.e. no one cares. "Negative" is not the same as "defamation". Do not accelerate a conflict by throwing lighter fluid on it. Wjhonson 15:19, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
Lately in an article I edit quite frequently, there has been a drive to include derogatory content based on a number of partisan sources. When asked for neutral, third party sources the editors who have been challenged have presented someone who's neutrality is suspicious. A simple google search leads to a number of websites which question his objectivity, although he works for a mainstream newspaper. My question is, when dealing with questionable content such as this and the only sources are either partisan or "dubious", how should I continue? Thank you. (Should I crosspost this to RS as well?) Kyaa the Catlord 21:39, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
I started a biopgraphy on astronomer, William G. Tifft, and discovered one of the few sources of biographical information, and want to include it. But another editor disagrees. I would appreciate some input, described on the Talk:William_G._Tifft page. -- Iantresman 17:05, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
I am having a dispute with an editor who very selectively summarizes a particular quote that he thinks violates BLP writing style. See [5] [6] In contrast I think that it is important to stay close to the source to avoid omitting and distorting information. Andries 19:25, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
(ed conf) <<<Outdent. An exceptional claim is easy to spot. For example, a highly contentious statement that has not been reported in reliable sources, and that is based on the opinion of a single journalist, may be considered to be exceptional. If it was not, one could argue that it will be widely reported in multiple sources. As for your assertion that it is not rare that clergy engages in sexual abuse, you may be surprised that it is indeed rare. Yes, there has been huge controversies in the US recently about this issue that have raised public outcry, but nonetheless these cases are very rare indeed. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 22:57, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
<-- We've got a whole article devoted to
Roman Catholic sex abuse cases. But aren't there multiple sources making allegations of sexual impropriety in this case? Is the newspaper article the only source available? -
Will Beback ·
† ·
22:51, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
The discussion on Wikipedia talk:Speedy deletion criterion for unsourced articles seems to have stalled out with opposition to use of it as a general policy, but there was a recognition that BLPs need high standards for sourcing. Would there be a support for a policy that biographies of living persons, even if they claim notability and escape a7, should be speedy deletable if they cite no sources? No sources means nothing can be verified, and that's essential to know if what we write is true. Night Gyr ( talk/ Oy) 21:24, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
But without a source, you can't know what would be considered defamatory or controversial. If I write an article that says "Johnny smith is a republican activist" and Johny smith is a rabid democrat, he might be pissed. This isn't a question of improving sourcing, this is a question of needing sources vs. allowing baseless, unverifiable statements about living persons to stay just because they sound reasonable. Night Gyr ( talk/ Oy) 00:34, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
Notability is far from the most important inclusion criterion. Too many people here treat notability like the law, but notability is not fundamental, it's just a shortcut to help make sure policy is followed. Also, notability doesn't require sourcing to prove claims to fame--it just requires that the claim be made. Night Gyr ( talk/ Oy) 07:07, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
I assume that images of living people come under this policy if the caption makes an assertion, or the placement of the image invites an assumption. Thus, a user placed an image of three young people in threesome with an assertion that this was a picture taken just before an encounter, but with no source cited. I deleted as potentially a BLP violation. Was I right to do so? 68.238.241.22 09:21, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
Should the language in a deletion debate conform to BLP when the subject is a living person? Guettarda 22:48, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
To be specific, I was thinking about Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Dan James Pantone - I really do think that the language there, especially of the nomination, is a bit too strong. Since I am involved in the debate I am probably not the best person to judge, so I would appreciate if someone would have a look at it. Guettarda 14:06, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
This book, published by Doubleday and written by Hoover Institute research fellow Peter Schweizer, contains chapters entitled things like, "Hillary Clinton — Greedy Speculator, Corporate Shrill, and Petty Tax Avoider" and " Ralph Nader — Bourgeois Materialist, Stock Manipulator, and Tyrannical Sweatshop Boss". Is listing these titles a violation of WP:BLP? // Lawyer2b 03:00, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
I have created a template, {{ blpdispute}}, for use in WP:LIVING disputes. It's analogous to templates like {{ POV}} and {{ disputed}}, in that it attracts attention to problem biographies, warns editors and readers of a dispute and provides a resource, in Category:Disputed biographies of living persons, for collaboration in bringing articles in line with WP:LIVING. Any thoughts? szyslak ( t, c, e) 06:32, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
Why should living people get precedence over dead people? Can't estates of the erstwhiles sue as well? — Rickyrab | Talk 19:32, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
How does this policy apply when it is disputed whether or not the individual in question is alive? It's seems reasonable that it would continue to apply following unconfirmed (yet, perhaps, still notable) reports of a person's death. However, at the other end of the specturm, one can imagine Elvis Presley, etc. who some claim are still alive. Just thought it would be good for the policy to address this explicitly if some consensus can be developed. savidan (talk) (e@) 00:25, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
We have a category, Category:Possibly living people, for cases where it's not definitively known whether someone has died, usually because there is no reasonably recent news about them. I think we should consider merging the former cat with Category:Living people. Putting someone in the possibly living cat excludes them from the the living people RC and could be a potential loophole in the process of preventing WP:LIVING problems. While the category contains many people who are more than likely dead, it contains others who are probably alive. I'll go ahead and nominate it for merger on WP:CFD. szyslak ( t, c, e) 08:32, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
We shouldn't include potential libel about anyone, even if they're dead. The only difference is a stricter enforcement of the standard, so there's no harm in treating these articles as if they're about living people. Since they're such high profile figures, it's probably worth it anyway. Night Gyr ( talk/ Oy) 09:04, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
How would any of those not pass muster? All accusations are sourced from secondary sources (historians) and reported as such, rather than indisputable fact or simple tittilation. BLP is a strengthened enforcement of existing policy, and things that wouldn't pass muster under BLP wouldn't pass muster period, BLP just means that we should be more aggressive about enforcing compliance. I said potential libel because if the person was alive then things could be libel, and it's not libel to report that accusations have been made (as long as the existence of the accusations is true, and we don't take their word as fact). As the quote goes on what material is unsuitable... "This is true of all information, but it is particularly true of negative information about living persons." Night Gyr ( talk/ Oy) 14:39, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
Your two points are in stark contrast. You say that reviving dropped accusations can be considered harmful, and then you say that there has been an extensive evaluation and discussion of these claims (which means that they haven't simply been dropped). What I'm not seeing is how any historical article would fail our standards, which is what I asked. The "tales told" were written about in reliable secondary sources, which would permit inclusion even in articles about living people. We include allegations about Vince Foster against the Clintons, as spurious as they may be, because the accusations themselves are written about in reliable sources, and for historical allegations it's no different. Your point was that applying BLP standards to historical biographies would be harmful, but I have yet to see an example of where it would actually cause trouble for content otherwise in compliance with policy. Night Gyr ( talk/ Oy) 16:38, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
You could yank that material right now as unsourced and controversial. WP:V says so. Henry VII was passed as an FA in 2004--standards have risen since then. Inline citations are a requirement for FAs now. None of the stuff you point to is actually in compliance with existing policies other than BLP. Night Gyr ( talk/ Oy) 17:25, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
We do repeat a lot of the gossip-type stuff written about Britney Spears, when found in reliable secondary sources. We don't ignore the existence of such claims if they've been noted by reliable secondary sources. The PhD analysis is not the same as a gossip rag because thesis work is generally peer-reviewed and otherwise more reliable than the average issue of a tabloid, so you can't make a straight equality between the two. It's still perfectly legitimate to remove any unsourced material pending sourcing, regardless of the subject of the article. The claims that were pointed out would be perfectly legitimate to remove with a request for a source to support their readdition. My point is simply that BLP is a more vigorous enforcement of existing policy, so there's no harm in applying it to people who may be alive, rather than only people who are definitely so. All of wikipedia would be better off if we had such a stringent requirement for sourcing. Night Gyr ( talk/ Oy) 20:16, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
I'm talking about its substantive effects on the encyclopedia. I wish we did treat people no different from buildings, and had just as high standards with strict sourcing requirements for all articles. Policy says unsourced material may be challenged and removed by any editor at any time but people are hesitant to apply it and be called deletionist or attacked for removing something "everyone knows" is true yet is noncompliant with policy. I also think many of the pieces of data the policy is concerned with are already excluded by other policies, or simply by its irrelevance. WP:NOT#DIR means that we don't include things like addresses, phone numbers, birthdays (where they're irrelevant) etc. We're not going to be making personal data public when we limit ourselves to already published material like we generally should. I understand the change in motivation for the policy, but the substantive effects on articles should not be exaggerated, simply because all other articles deserve to be held to just as high a standard. It's better for us to have a single correct and sourced article than it is to have a hundred cruddy ones. Night Gyr ( talk/ Oy) 22:37, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
Moved to Wikipedia talk:Conflict of interest WAS 4.250 22:24, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
Several times now I have seen debates erupt about the use of mugshots in articles about living people. Recent examples include Sultaana Freeman and Al Gore III. Would it be reasonable for us to state in the BLP guidelines, that for non-public figures, it is generally not appropriate to include police mugshots in their Wikipedia articles? This may seem obvious, but it seems that every time this comes up there has to be a debate before the image is removed. For public figures I think there is some wiggle room, but for non-public figures I think this is a pretty safe rule to go by. Obviously, very few people are going to be happy about having mugshots of themselves in their Wikipedia article, especially if they are not well known enough to be able to define their own public image. In many of these cases it seems editors are resorting to mugshots simply because they can't find any other images, or worse, to smear the person in question. Enacting a rule about this would help ensure respect for people's privacy and may even prevent a lawsuit or two. After all, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a tabloid. Kaldari 02:25, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
If the musgshot doesn't look like a mugshot then it would probebly be OK. There have been a few such pictures. The Vanilla Ice article had one (now deleted). // Liftarn
I've always been planning to query this. Per above, I would actually go further since I'm of the opinion any photos should be used with caution. People have a right to privacy and if people aren't public figures, I would suggest we shouldn't include their photo unless there is a good reason why we would should be showing it. For example, I removed another photo from the Sultaana Freeman in agreement with some discussion on the talk page since I don't feel there is any good reason why we should be showing a photo of her and she clearly doesn't want her face to be seen by the general public. (The photo didn't have copyright information specified and given it was from a yearbook, I doubt it would come under a suitable copyright anyway). Given her specific case, the drivers license photo can perhaps say but everything else IMHO is unnecessary at the current time. (Obviously depending on how notable and publicly identifiable she becomes this may change)
Similarly, another case I'm familiar with is Amir Massoud Tofangsazan. This article had an image with uncertain copyright status for a while. While this has been removed a while back, I'm of the opinion even if we do get a suitably licensed photo we shouldn't include it. Although this guy's photo has been splashed all over the internet, he still IMHO is entitled to a resonable degree of privacy and given his limited noteability, I don't see any reason to include a photo of him.
We don't currently have a specific policy in BLP on photos but IMHO we should. (We do cover privacy in general of course). What do others think? Nil Einne 15:43, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
I was going through the archives and noticed someone said that we shouldn't worry about the privacy of birthdates because in California and some other US states, you can get anyone's birthday for a $75 subscription to some websites. As soon as I read this I thought it was a silly argument and I just wanted to raise this issue again to point this out. Really I don't think it matters if people's right to privacy is not respected in the US. It is in many other countries, often in law. Of course, if someone's birthdate is available from a reliable source, then obviously it isn't just about whether the information is already publicly available but whether we should respect people's right to privacy when they have limited notability Nil Einne 15:55, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
I want to explore introducing a process for deleting BLPs and their talk pages if the subject of the bio requests it, so long as the subject isn't an important public figure. We're all aware of cases where Wikipedia bios allegedly caused problems for subjects who weren't really public figures. Yet subjects have very little recourse, and we have no formal mechanism for dealing with them and no consistent policy to apply.
The BLPfD policy would have to include a way of deciding which bios it's in the genuine public interest to retain (i.e. in the interests of the public, rather than something the public is simply interested in).
Once a complaint is received from the subject, there would be a presumption in favor of deletion. The process would be something like this:
I'm posting this here to test the climate. Is this the kind of thing that editors could support in principle? SlimVirgin (talk) 19:18, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
I feel it's arrogant of us to presume that Wikipedia has the right to do that to anyone. Would you want us to do it to you? Imagine you were now, as a young man, to go on a shoplifting spree, triggered by a clinical depression, and a few reporters pick up on it because you're actively involved in some local charities, so you scrape through their, and hence our, notability criteria. Would you really want to fail to get a good job over that in 20 years time because your employer saw the Wikipedia article? The court recognized you were depressed at the time, and gave you a telling off so you could put it behind you, but Wikipedia in its wisdom decides it knows better, and that in fact you must never be allowed to put it behind you.
These cases are really happening. Surely you can see the unfairness of it.
As for how to determine we're really dealing with someone, that's a minor issue and easy to organize. If you know someone works at Smith&Co, and you get an e-mail from X@smithandco.com, that's good enough. SlimVirgin (talk) 20:26, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
"Actively involved in some local charities" is not a sufficient mark of notability, and any such article could be removed regardless of whether or not the information was damaging. As I've said before, we already have the mechanisms to remove articles about genuinely non-notable subjects. CJCurrie 20:34, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
Please don't remove items from the list of test cases, especially if you think they are obvious keeps. Test cases help ensure that we don't write policies that would get obvious-keeps deleted. Kla'quot 06:13, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
As for (6) and (7) I oppose deleting the discussion (as opposed to editing it and deleting some of the page history; what we would do for a personal attack or a revelation of personal information on an editor.) Consensus can change, and discussions make mistakes; but how can a decison to delete an article on these grounds ever going to be reconsidered? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 04:28, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
It is unnecessary because enough mechanisms already exist to handle such cases. A living person only warrants a biography if xe satisfies the WP:BIO criteria. If xe satisfies the primary notability criterion, then xe will be the subject of multiple non-trivial published works from independent sources. As such, there will be be plenty of source material for a biography, and all of the handwringing above about narrative becomes entirely moot.
If xe doesn't satisfy the PNC, then (failing the applicability of any secondary criteria) we shouldn't have a biographical article, and again the above handwringing is moot. The John Doe streaker example is a good example of a person who does not satisfy the PNC. Whilst the single sentence may be verifiable, giving it a whole article to itself, with John Doe as the subject, is the wrong way of including it in Wikipedia. See Wikipedia:Notability#Dealing with non-notable topics. Notability is, in part, about including verifiable information in the right way. The right way to include the verifiable sentence is to mention it within an article with a wider context. For this, the sources are the guides. If the act of John Doe streaking is only mentioned in the sources in the context of discussions of the game itself, then the verifiable sentence should be included in Wikipedia in like manner: in an article on the game itself, and not in a biographical article.
For deciding whether the WP:BIO criteria are satisfied, we have AFD. Biographical articles that fail the WP:BIO criteria are regularly either merged or deleted having gone through AFD. Whether the person xyrself objects to having a biographical article is irrelevant. If the PNC is properly applied, any biographical article that passes muster will have copious sources for it to be based entirely upon; and thus any complaints by the subject will be a matter to be taken up with the sources themselves, not with the encyclopaedia at all. Thus the proper focus is not to consider the opinions of the subject; it is to apply the PNC properly. Concentrating upon the opinions of the article subject actually detracts from this. It takes the focus away from looking to see whether the PNC is satisfied.
The opinion of the article's subject is not and should not be a criterion, either for inclusion or exclusion. We don't include articles simply because people want to have themselves included in the encyclopaedia, and we don't exclude articles simply because people want to have themselves excluded. The criteria are WP:BIO, and should be applied uniformly and dispassionately. AFD is the tool of long-standing for this.
The proposal is ill-conceived and a bad idea for several reasons. The most obvious is that it is trivially easy to game. Consider Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sophie Ellis-Bextor, for example. There is no way for an administrator, or any other Wikipedia editor for that matter, to know that it actually is the subject of the article that is complaining, as opposed to an imposter or a simple anonymous troublemaker. Another reason is the idea of "nationwide importance" that the proposal incorporates. That is a badly flawed metric, incorporating as it does both problems of systemic bias and problems of subjective judgements on the parts of Wikipedia editors.
Time spent on this proposal would be better spent encouraging editors to use the existing mechanisms properly and fully: to mercilessly apply the sword of verifiability to all biographical article content, and to ensure that deletion discussions concentrate upon citing sources to show that the PNC is satisfied rather than veering off into irrelevant tangents. Uncle G 05:08, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
Moreover, your question "Do we really want biographies of non-notable people to be limited to what showed up in the police blotter twenty years ago?" is unanswerable, having as it does a premise that is simply false. We don't actually want biographical articles for non-notable people. Therefore asking what we want them to comprise is unanswerable. I repeat what I wrote before, with emphasis on the part being missed: Whilst the single sentence may be verifiable, giving it a whole article to itself, with John Doe as the subject, is the wrong way of including it in Wikipedia.
The sources do "fix it". Wikipedia should reflect both what the sources say and how they say it. As such, if the single verifiable fact is part of a discussion of a larger topic in the sources, then it should be included in Wikipedia in the same way. See the big coloured box at User:Uncle G/On notability#Dealing with non-notable things.
If there's something that we should be convincing editors of, it is that not everything needs its own individual article. Not every name in a list of people associated with some overall topic should be a link, for example. Uncle G 02:06, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
Now the thing we are discussing, Uncle G, is whether we might exclude biographies of almost nobodies if they ask us too. You say you presented an argument. Here it is, if I might quote you: "The argument... is that.. we don't exclude articles simply because people want to have themselves excluded." I am planning to try that one on Mrs Note tonight: "I am not doing the washing up, Mrs Note, because I do not do the washing up." I'll tell her Uncle G sent me. Grace Note 04:31, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
As for your quote: I suggest going back to what I actually wrote — which is conveniently right there in front of you twice, now — and reading the next sentence. Uncle G 16:10, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
BLP articles with a low importance assessment (and I'm expecting this would be at least 75% of them) should be generally be deleted if the subject requests it (some authentication should be required if there is doubt) unless there's a good reason to do otherwise (obviously there will occasionally be debates about someone's importance). In fact most low-importance BLP's should be deleted regardless (since they are full of COI and publicity seeking, and the BLP policy is inherently in conflict with NPOV, so we should only create a BLP article if it's important enough to justify a lot of careful editing to preserve the encyclopedia's neutrality) but that's a different topic. 67.117.130.181 15:16, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
As for "In fact most low-importance BLP's should be deleted regardless": I suggest doing some New Page Patrol and seeing what actually occurs from day to day. Most biographies of living people are deleted, inasmuch as they are usually people submitting unsourced autobiographies, or unsourced biographies of their friends and relatives. Consulting Special:Log/delete, I see that three such biographies were deleted in just the 20 minutes prior to my typing these words. (They were Brandon Di Puma, Brian Russell-Simpson, and Chanroeun Saron.) Uncle G 16:10, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
More importantly, "multiple non-trivial published works from independent sources" does not necessarily comprise "plenty of source material for a biography". I reiterate points I made above, but they seem worthy of consideration if someone has yet to recognize the measure. In most professional biographical publishing houses, the threshold of "plenty" when assessing source material for a biography necessarily includes original biographical interviews with the subject. Except in the most unusual circumstances, at least a pre-publication review of a draft in consultation with the subject is expected before any major biographical document about a public figure goes to press. Unless a publisher is unconcerned about repeating other publishers' errors, one benefit of such consultation is that the subject often offers the last best chance of challenging the veracity of "multiple non-trivial published accounts." Exceptions abound -- but even in significant exceptions, such as the case of an internationally-known political fugitive, earlier biographical interviews are available. However, a collection of "multiple non-trivial published works from independent sources" might not include a single biographical interview. As I explained earlier, these published works might be about isolated events in the subject's life, but they might not come close to offering biographical insight. We are left with a collection of "multiple non-trivial published works from independent sources" paraphrased and placed under a person's name to appear as if, and indeed intended as (according to the intentions of some expressed here) a biography. Quite simply, paraphrased narrative based on a collection of press accounts about a person’s life is not necessarily a biography. To represent it as such can erode trust in a source that claims otherwise, especially among readers astute enough to recognize the difference. Jill Hemphill 20:19, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
As for your reiteration, you are missing the fact that this is an encyclopaedia. The lengthy handwringing about "original biographical interviews" and "consulting the subject" is completely ignoring our Wikipedia:No original research policy. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, a tertiary source. That means that the journalists and biographers who have performed interviews and consulted the subjects are our sources. Handwringing about a need to interview the subjects to check facts is missing the point. It has always been the principle here that Wikipedia is not set up to perform fact checking. Therefore we write, and only write, based upon sources where that fact checking (e.g. interviewing any necessary people) has already been done. For further explanation, see User:Uncle G/On sources and content and Wikipedia:Reliable sources.
As I have already written once above, all of the handwringing about narrative and interviews is moot. If someone satisfies the PNC, there will be enough source material for a full article. If someone does not satisfy the PNC, then we shouldn't have a biographical article in the first place, so any arguments based upon the premise of such articles being comprised of a sparse few facts pinned together are completely irrelevant. In such cases, giving the subject its own article is the wrong way for Wikipedia to be presenting what information there is on the subject.
So the proper course of action is to do some AFD Patrol and ensure that the PNC is properly applied at AFD, not to waste time and effort inventing additional deletion processes. It isn't a lack of deletion processes that is the problem.
To see the problem, note that not a single editor in any of the three AFD discussions of Rachel Marsden actually challenged it (or, indeed, defended it) on the depths and the provenances of the published works that cover the subject. None of the editors who are here pushing for a new deletion process have actually applied our existing processes. Uncle G 16:10, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
There's nothing about my education in the article, and my most significant achievement and life's work is barely mentioned. This Wikipedia article is an incompetent biography. -- Daniel Brandt - January 2, 2007
WAS 4.250 12:46, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
Some input on the above, in 3 areas:
Addressing one point made above by Jill and others, please go read Bodil Joensen for a biography I expanded (apologies, it's on a notable Danish porn star, but it's one where this exact issue came up). Go read it. She's dead, but the fact that a simple article discussing her porn career could be easily expanded to a balanced biography, based upon publicly available and citable sources, makes me sceptical that we really have a problem here. Also look at the article on Hani Miletski, a notable academic researcher in the same pornographic field. If someone is notable enough for a biography article, then there will usually be enough material to describe at the least their work and some basic personal information in a balanced manner (Miletski's article is an example) and often enough to do a full bio in a balanced manner (Joensen's article is an example), drawing on cited sources in each case. My point being, lack of sources doesn't necessarily seem to me to be causing huge problems for notable people's biographies in practice. FT2 ( Talk | email) 00:52, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
I'd support some form of subject input on articles which personally impact upon them. That's not a matter of dropping dispassionate objectivity, nor a charter for caving in on demands and threats. It's a recognition that Wikipedia, like it or not, has the ability to impact on peoples lives and others perceptions in a big way. That power is usually used well, but it is a power and a responsibility, and it's more important to say "is there a genuine basis for review here", than to say "make them jump through hoops to get listened to".
What I would like to suggest as an alternative to "Biographies for Deletion", would be some form of editor committee which takes third party complaints about biographies and articles which are claimed to impact them negatively (with strict criteria clarifying the bases upon which complaints will be considered), so that third parties can post if they have an issue and members of the committee can consider each objection neutrally and direct that the article be rectified in specific particulars as needed (eg a section should be reliably cited or dropped... or a balancing viewpoint should be added if the third party has provided a valid source). I'm wondering if this would achieve more than a "biographies for deletion" listing, since it would have the ability to rule on specific facts and issues, and thus rapidly address the more troublesome BPL's where (as often happens) part may be fine and part may not.
The aim would be specifically to answer concerns of the form "this article contains significant untrue or unbalanced information that impacts on me or my life", and which responds to these by stating which of the bulleted concerns seem to have no basis for complaint and are policy compliant, and which are legitimate concerns possibly needing editorial rectification. Note that we already have a page like this for copyright violation complaints, another area where third parties need to interact with Wikipedia content criteria.) FT2 ( Talk | email) 01:16, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
Last, although it would in many ways be a problematic can of worms, it seems undeniable to me that a person's view of their biography as written by another person (whoever that 'other' may be) is in fact almost always notable in the context of their already-existing bio. Should there therefore be some provision to make a person's (possibly limited length) statement in response to the bio available, as part of NPOV? ("==Statement by John Doe on this biography article==" up to say 500 words or some fixed, reasonable maximum?) Clearly there would have to be criteria to ensure no breach of copyright, no self-promotion, no spam or hate material, no other legally troublesome issues, but since it would be identified as their personal comment, NPOV would be fine. I think I'd like to give that to subjects of bios. Their viewpoint is notable, and provided it's clearly identified as their personal viewpoint, it can only serve readers, to be able to see what subjects say about the bio written on them. Yes it would be unusual, but also it is a very obvious enhancement. It adds content richness and the chance to include additional material, without detracting from existing factuality. It also would work well even in the event of someone who is upset about some negative fact reported in their bio, since then both viewpoints are shown.
FT2 (
Talk |
email)
01:16, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
How about a test - if said information is on a living person AND it can easily be found in a search engine search (from a non Wiki site of course) then it is fit for inclusion. If it exists and is citable BUT the subject objects to the material, we remove it. That seems pretty simple to me -- Tawker 05:17, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
What is the best thing to do for the unsourced lists in Category:Lists of people with disabilities and Category:Lists of people by medical condition? They are almost all unsourced and many have a lot of (or all of them) living people entries. I sourced a few of them like list of HIV-positive people and List of autistic people, but it's a lot of work. I also put some on prod or AFD (which is usually contested). Or I removed the person section, like on Quadriplegia which was also contested. Other examples are list of stutterers, List of physically disabled politicians and List of people with visual disabilities. Garion96 (talk) 16:23, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
Please remember the fundamental rule of categories: if an article is in a category, it must be obvious to a reader of the article why it is there, on first coming from the category description. First decat all the entries where this isn't so, and you will have left either quite reasonable cats, or empty ones. In the first case the problem is solved, and in the second case the TfD (if you explain what you've done) should be a piece of cake. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 00:03, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
This problem arises everyone now and then. Nearly all lists of people are problematic. For example, we have lists of gay people. I'm pretty sure if you look through the archives both here and the noticeboard you'll find this issue of lists has been raised before. Generally speaking, the consensus AFAIK is to ruthlessly delete people from the list unless the claim is supported by a reliable source Nil Einne 08:37, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
I stopped by because of a situation in the Sathya Sai Baba arb case. Take a look at Talk:Sathya Sai Baba/Comments. Basically I think the restrictions on talk-page content are way too onerous, especially for articles about public figures. They make collaborative editing extremely difficult. The point of talk pages is to be able to assess claims and citations, chase down better sourcing for material that appears to be correct but you don't have completely solid cites for, ask people if they have access to works cited in bibliographies, etc. The link above shows someone hassling me over an arb restriction [10], for posting a link to a carefully researched bibliography that was written by a former Sai adherent who subsequently left the movement. Keeping such discussion off of talk pages stops the articles from improving. You end up getting groups of editors collaborating secretly off-wiki instead of openly on the talk page. That is not in the wiki spirit, in my view.
The BLP policy in general should distinguish public figures from not-so-public ones. At least for public figures, the rule for talk pages should be similar to the arb ruling in Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Francis Schuckardt, which said don't remove stuff from talk pages unless it's actually libelous, rather than the current extremist practice which destroys the thoroughness and NPOV of articles. If necessary, protect talk pages from Google indexing using a robots.txt tag, or even have restricted subpages that can't be viewed except by established users (initially let's say that means those who can create new articles, i.e. account is a few days old and they've made a few edits) that can be used for more open discussion. That should totally stop search engines and slow down random snooping. More serious snoopers will use Google and find everything on other sites anyway.
Weirdly about the Sai Baba article, it extensively discusses very serious allegations about sex abuses that are not all that convincing, because those were the ones sensational enough to get attention from TV networks and big newspapers and so they're considered well-sourced. This is about a guy who claims to materialize gold jewelry from thin air, a much easier claim to refute in scientific terms than allegations that someone did or didn't commit lurid sex crimes. But those easy and straightforward refutations from Indian skeptics' journals are excluded from the article because of wikilawyering over circulation figures etc, and pointing out the obvious non-miraculous explanations of these materializations was not sensational enough to get made into TV shows.
67.117.130.181 19:25, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
I've been repeatedly confused by the phrase "unsourced or poorly sourced controversial material".
Does this mean: Material that is EITHER unsourced OR poorly-sourced-and-controversial? Or does it mean: Material that is EITHER unsourced-and-controversial OR poorly-sourced-and-controversial?
Does anyone else find this unclear? I would appreciate if a clarification were made here or on the main page.
The reason I keep stumbling on this is there are certain bio pages I watch that are contstantly begin littered with stuff like "Smith owns two golden retrievers," or "Smith's favorite rock band is Ear Damage and he once served as a guest roadie at their gala concert in Des Moines." In other words, unsourced but not particuarly controversial. I would expect this page to make the policy on handling such additions crystal clear. But it doesn't, at least to me.
Maybe another way of putting my question is, what is the policy on handling unsourced trivia? Personally I think it should be deleted immediately just like unsourced controversial material, but I don't see an easy justification for that on the policy page. Mrhsj 16:24, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
As WAS says, we shouldn't go around deleting everything that's unsourced--there's tons of it in WP, most of it uncontroversial, and there have been at least two academic studies about the number of errors in Wikipedia compared to other encyclopedias and we came out fine both times. So we don't need to go berserk removing stuff that looks correct unless there's a recognizable chance from the nature of the item that an error could do damage (mainly this is when the item says something unflattering). What we have to safeguard against is malicious editing, repetition of controversial gossip as if it were fact, etc. Beyond that, we should as usual AGF. 67.117.130.181 12:44, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
Isn't labelling someone with this drawing a conclusion on that person and breaking WP:NOR and defamatory which would break BLP? Kyaa the Catlord 17:47, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
The wikien-l links in the notes section currently [11] go to wrong posts. Will somebody find the right URL's? PrimeHunter 16:40, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
Concern has been expressed about giving the exact dates of birth of living people as it might assist in identity theft. Surely this is even mor etrue of mother's maiden name. I am constantly asked for this as a form of identification. Also, maiden name of wife would assist in identity theft if there are any adult children, even if the subject of the bio is no longer alive. I therefor epropose that maiden name sof mother and wife be excluded from all biographies where this may be a danger.-- Holdenhurst 16:24, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
Where the names are on the public record, they should be included. Similarly, where the exact date of birth is on the public record, it should be included.-- Runcorn 23:51, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
Hi, I was contesting the inclusion of material from a blog posted on the article Benjamin M. Emanuel I had deleted the information saying it was poorly sourced contentious material that claimed the father of US Rep Rahm Emanuel was a murderous terrorist and also called for the speedy deletion of the article saying that it was an attack page. My edits were reverted by Admin User: Mel Etitis, thankfully now another Admin has deleted the same things that I had. My question to the board is about Mel Etitis' claim on my talk page that I was “misinterpreting the guidelines concerning blogs”.
listed three sources #1 being the reliable Washington-Times and #2-3 being from blogs, it stated
I stated that “This page is in violation of wiki-standards concerning biographies of living persons, it cites three sources two of which are blogs which are not reliable sources by wiki-standards and therefor can not be used. The one reliable source mentioned does not claim association with Irgun but only the "the pre-independence Israeli underground" and so does not support the claims made in this article.” User: Mel Etitis explained why I was mistaken by writing on the talk-page that “The article, however, is clear about the sources of the claims that it reports, and reports them in a dispassionate, disinterested, not to say sceptical way. Blogs, etc., shouldn't be used to verify claims made by articles, but they can certainly be referred to as the source of claims that are reported.” I wrote “The use of skeptical caveats does not allow for wiki-pages to use unsubstantiated charges that come from non-reliable unnotable sources." I received no direct response to that post, but at one point Mel Etitis wrote “WP:V#SELF simply doesn't rule out the reference to a blog, it rules out the use of blogs as (the sole) source for what articles say about their subjects. if the article said that he was a murderer, and cited a blog, that would be wrong; if it says that he's accused of murder in a blog, that's very different.” Is this true? Can an editor cite any claim from a blog as long as they cite that blog and add skeptical caveats? At first I thought he was just being biased because he was an early contributor to the article and had placed claims that Benjamin M. Emanuel “was a member of the Irgun, a radical Zionist paramilitary organization” on his son US Rep Rahm Emanuel’s page on 19:47, 9 January 2007 without any references. But as he is an Admin and as another Admin User:NawlinWiki had removed my request for speedy deletion at 18:44, 10 January 2007 and wrote on the title of that edit “doesn't seem to be an attack page, has sources”, I was confused. I went to the Wikipedia talk:Verifiability page and asked if this was acceptable and they seem split on the matter see discussion here. So the Question is: Can one cite a blog that claims someone is a murderer without evidence as long as one states that this information is from a blog?-- Wowaconia 19:01, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
There is an article about Blackmore's Night vocalist Candice Night. There was a note about her given name. But then her management deleted it. What do you think about it? Is it right or wrong? Geevee ( talk) 14:05, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
Are we now to police user page content to this BLP standard or just attempts to associate user pages with notable people's biographies? E.g. Jimbo's bio points to his web page (which looks OK) but maybe not every Wikipedia account holder who is notable wants to advertise his/her edits as being contributed with such gravitas. -- 71.141.231.234 23:37, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
This page was vandalised at some point with three unnecessary occurences of the {{ failed verification}} tag. I have sorted it out, but watch out for that happening again. Jake95 17:10, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
It's not vandalism. -- PopPop PopMusic 14:00, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
Once someone is deceased, BLP no longer applies. Shouldn't the WPBiography/BLP templates come down from the articles then? What is the proper way to handle this? F.F.McGurk 16:34, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
If you look at the standard template, it says {{WPBiography|living=yes}}; just alter "yes" to "no".-- Runcorn 17:28, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
What is the policy on sourced rumors in general? Also here are a couple of particular instances I have questions about:
A recent discussion on the Village Pump about whether it was ever appropriate to list product endorsements in the articles of celebrities (consensus: yes) got me thinking about the potential problems with unsourced claims of endorsement. Many jurisdictions have a distinct cause of action for false endorsement claims, i.e., making it look like someone has endorsed a product or service when they have not, and it's not extreme to imagine this amounting to libel in even ordinary cases of endorsement.
I propose that all claims that a living person was paid to endorse a particular product or service be expressly treated as inherently "controversial," so that they are to be removed if they are not reliably sourced. Thoughts? Postdlf 16:08, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
What should one do when you notice an editor that is adding things to a bio that seem to indicate a possibility of the user being a subject of that biography, or affiliated to a subject? I noticed User:75.80.55.135 adding some things that seemed to suggest just that. The way the user is adding things has got some of the edits reverted though (not because the edits were really malicious though). And I wanted to make sure that the user, if indeed a subject or affiliated with a subject, doesn't leave wikipedia with a bad experience, which is the general idea of WP:LIVING#Dealing_with_edits_by_the_subject_of_the_article I think. So I left a message on the talk page, and I just wanted to make sure if I handled that right. If I am not being too presumptuous, or on the other hand if I am not assuming too much here, and if what I did was at all needed. What do the rest of you think?-- Codemonkey 03:59, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
I thought your message was very well-considered and thoughtful, Codemonkey. Too often the subject of an article, obviously concerned about how they are presented, finds themselves thoroughly bitten by editors who are trying to do the right thing. Gently nudging the "outsider" to what is after all only our internal, inward-looking idea of what the right thing is should be approved, and I approve it in your case. Good work. Grace Note 08:21, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
It may be that the current policy is unrealistic and should be more flexible. Those people in the very many directories extant, such as Burkes, Debretts, Who's Who, Kellys, Whittakers, Who's Who in Scotland, Dods, etc., all carry the full dates of birth for living people/people in the public domain. David Lauder 14:22, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
For something to be controversial, by definition, it must have already caused a controversy. I'm pretty sure the idea of this policy is to prevent things from getting to that stage, so I think we should change it to "potentially controversial". - Amark moo! 02:44, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
There has lately been a bit of controversy and heated debates about including the dates of birth for certain articles. Here I would like to propose some sort of change to clarify matters further to prevent such wide interpretation of the policy as has been done. The current text is:
Wikipedia includes exact birthdates for some famous people, but including this information for most living people should be handled with caution. While many well-known living persons' exact birthdays are widely known and available to the public, the same is not always true for marginally notable people or non-public figures. With identity theft on the rise, it has become increasingly common for people to consider their exact date of birth to be private information. When in doubt about the notability of the person in question, or if the subject of a biography complains about the publication of his or her date of birth, err on the side of caution and simply list the year of birth rather than the exact date.
I would like to open up discussion on altering the bolded part of that quote. Certain possible ideas that have come up have been:
I'm leaving a note on the village pump to get some opinions about this as well, but I'd be much interested in opening up a discussion here about this. Cowman109 Talk 16:53, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
As far as WP:V is concerned I'm wondering if it should be a 100% cite policy for each and every statement in an article, since users are using it that way already under the assumption that any statement could be potentially controversial.
I don't necessarily think that a 100% cite policy is a particularly good or workable one, but if that is what we effectively have then the article should say so. Artw 03:15, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
What is unclear about this from the policy?
Undue weight applies to more than just viewpoints. Just as giving undue weight to a viewpoint is not neutral, so is giving undue weight to other verifiable and sourced statements. An article should not give undue weight to any aspects of the subject, but should strive to treat each aspect with a weight appropriate to its significance to the subject. Note that undue weight can be given in several ways, including, but not limited to, depth of detail, quantity of text, prominence of placement, and juxtaposition of statements.
CyberAnth 04:44, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
I fully support an interpretation that each and every statement beyond what is clearly common knowledge be cited in BLPs - especially in BLPs.
Apart from such a standard, determining what is or is not "controversial" is clearly a subjective exercise. It is therefore inherently error-prone. Within the space of that proneness is risk - risk of liability. These are hard facts, folks.
What is or is not "controversial" must therefore become a strictly objective exercise. The sole and exclusive way for that to happen is via strict adherence to WP:V. And even WP:V itself is very clear that any statement not cited may be removed.
The perennial incantations of many editors and admins - "BITE" and "POINT" and "CIVIL" - are typically rouges to allow irresponsible editorship to go on. "I like it" - "this is my nest" - "this may spillover to upset my articles" - these are the more likely causes underneath the incantations.
Yet it has all along been the responsibility of editors to know WP content policies before adding material to the project - especially with regards to BLPs. And they are forewarned of this at numerous turns, including when they sign up, and on BLP article Talk Pages.
It is time - far, far past time - to require real responsibility in editorship on BLPs. While this may cause some transitory upsetting of "nests", that is an entirely acceptable thing if it serves to produce the desired outcomes, and to alleviate even the potential for liability. And besides, the only reason it might be upsetting to some is that the culture here has been far too lax with BLPs.
A helpful analogy here is the mass deletion of replaceable fair use images by a cohort of admins. Yes, it upsets some editors' "nests" - editors who had a responsibility to know better in the first place. Yet given the GFDL, and despite the upsetting, it is for both the the long and short-term good of the project. If you are reading this, it is therefore in your interest as well.
Jimbo has well stated that "WP:BLP is essential the future of the project in every regard and must be taken very very seriously in all respects." [12] I invite others to join me in taking these words to heart, and following it with commensurate actions.
CyberAnth 21:11, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
CyberAnth, a few seperate points about your edits based on this policy:
So, who is going to define "clearly common knowledge" then? " Otto Waalkes is a German comedian and actor. His perhaps most famous trademark are the 'Ottifanten' ('Ottiphants'), elephant-like comic characters of his own design." is clearly common knowlege for me (and every other German out there), but I'm sure it's not common knowledge in the US. Whose common knowledge are we going to use? -- Conti| ✉ 21:50, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
I just cited the elephant pre-occupation in the article.
I suggest the following as particularly pertinent from Wikipedia:Common knowledge:
Anything the reporting Wikipedians don't have direct personal experience with. Most of us don't have personal experience with space travel, or the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. But many of us have experienced popular music, know our local geography, and are familiar with the meanings of words within our local communities, although, as always, if your edit is challenged, no matter how convinced you are that you're right, you must cite a reliable published source.
CyberAnth 22:31, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
Since meeting WP:BLP relies heavily on the citation and reference tags, which are complex to use and quite frankly not something a new or casual user is likely to bother themselves with, perhaps anyone who is not a longstanding user should be banned from editing articles where WP:BLP applies altogether? In the long run it can only save trouble. Artw 21:37, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
I think that this suggestion is completely against the idea of Wikipedia. Users should never be forbidden from editting articles just because the individual contained within the article is alive. The Earth has over six billion people, and while less than one percent of them could be construed as notable for coverage in Wikipedia, we should not restrict new users to write solely about historical (read deceased) individuals.— Ryūlóng ( 竜龍) 08:35, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
There is a problem at Boris Stomakhin with contributors edit warring. The problem is that the sources for the negative comments are all in Russian. Not only is it impossible for non-russian speakers to read them, we can't even tell if they are reliable" or not. For example, "death to all russians" is sourced to [13]. So, what guidance is offered? In a sense, these sites fail "verifiability" for most of us William M. Connolley 12:56, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
The default position is that in BLPs, "You must get it right", or when unwilling to do this, perhaps find another area.
So my feeling of it is, my sense of it is, that the living biographies part of Wikipedia, which is one of the most difficult and most important areas, is one where we're really seeing a really massive movement towards higher quality. A lot of people in the community are really committed to that.
And the few people who are still sort of in the old days, saying, "Well, you know, it's a wiki, why don't we just... ", yeah, they're sort of falling by the wayside, because lots of people are saying actually, we have a really serious responsibility to get things right. [14]
CyberAnth 09:12, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
Comment. Many articles are going to need to use foreign sources if Wikipedia is to avoid Western bias. There are many Wikipedia contributors who speak other languages. It should not be difficult to find an impartial editor (or even an admin) who speaks the relevant language and can check the validity of the source. Wikiprojects on countries that speak that language and translation projects are a good place to look. Also as Rossami points out most people have userboxes whith their language proficiencies which add them to relevant categories. Off the top of my head, Mikkalai is a native Russian speaker, you could approach him. WJB scribe 14:31, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
Support and comment. I agree with William M. Connolley. But the reason of this editing war is actually violation of LP policy by User:Vlad fedorov. Please see my arguments here Talk:Boris_Stomakhin#Violations_of_LP_policy. Biophys 16:52, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
Translation of the material needs to be provided for verifiability. See WP:V#Sources_in_languages_other_than_English ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 18:24, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
I was wondering what kind of "warning" I should give a user who edits an article to state a person has passed away? See Jaco van der Westhuyzen. It seems like a pretty serious thing to be claiming. I did a search on google news and he seems to be almost certainly alive and well. - Shudda talk 23:43, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
A lot of heat has been thrown about lately due to the aggressiveness that BLP allows editors to utilize in conforming to the guideline. I think that the project would benefit from adding a request that any of the following be fulfilled:
If these are done, and there is no response, then removal of controversial and unsourced material should be utilized as a last resort. We are a community and we will work a lot better if we communicate instead of forcing some individuals to work from scratch (and do not quote Talk:Ron Jeremy#WP:BLP, I'm tired of that whole situation).— Ryūlóng ( 竜龍) 08:46, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
A compromise option might be to create some templates which could be placed on an article's talk page (and possibly the talk pages of regular contributors), noting that material incompatible with WP:BLP has been removed, but can be restored if properly cited. Unless the information has been purged from the article's history, editors should be able to see what material has been removed, and therefore what citations need to be found before the material is restored — and the template could point this out. Applying a template like this might help reduce the emotional response when material is removed. This way, the material is still removed ASAP (to cover Wikipedia's collective ass from lawsuits), but regular editors of an article might feel less affronted. — Josiah Rowe ( talk • contribs) 19:48, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
I think Josiah's idea is good, with some very important caveats. The sum total of WP:BLP is not satisfied by simple adherence to WP:CITE, although it is is a very common misconception among Wikipedians that it does. Often, the problematic issues are more nuanced but problematic just the same. For example, say a biography (or more properly, something under the guise of a biography) contains numerous sentences explaining the person generally, but the rest of the article is little other than a slugfest of controversies and criticisms, placed in most often by that person's critics. In this case, and even if each item is properly cited, WP:Undue weight is the concern - and an undue weight problem is a BLP problem. Another example is often found in the sections on the subject's viewpoints and beliefs. When a subject's views are expressed primarily from the perspective of his or her critics, even if properly cited, this violates WP:NPOV, and as such it too is a BLP problem. So, perhaps a way to deal with this is to make a talkpage template that says, "Material incompatible with WP:BLP has been removed from this article. Further information may be available in this article's edit history." I think such a template is a good idea for articles that show no recent edit history and/or no obvious evidence that the article is in recent editors' watchlist. CyberAnth 20:56, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
(It would be good to link the word "history" to the page's history, but I don't know how to do that.)Material has been removed from this article in accordance with Wikipedia's policy on biographies of living persons. This policy states that "editors should remove any controversial material about living persons that is either unsourced, relies upon sources that do not meet standards specified in Wikipedia:Reliable sources, or is a conjectural interpretation of a source." Care should also be taken to avoid giving undue weight to minority viewpoints.
This page's history will show the information that has been removed. If it is possible to restore that information with citations from reliable sources, and while maintaining a balanced tone, editors may do so. However, please do not restore content that violates WP:BLP. Thank you.
Could some people please take a look at Banjee and then weigh in at Talk:Banjee#WP:BLP on whether {{ BLP}} belongs on that talk page? One editor thinks it does, because the article has a photograph of an (unidentified) living person and mentions another living person by name. I think it doesn't, because the article isn't a biography of a living person, but rather an article about a group of people. — An gr 17:28, 3 February 2007 (UTC)
Do we really need the list of articles about living persons that have been contentious? This looks to me to be irrelevant to a policy page, and I would suggest it is removed. Enchanter 21:08, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
Biography of Living Persons Administrators ("BLP Admins") carry out a specialized, narrowly tailored administrative role within Wikipedia. Please see WP:BLPADMIN to offer your thoughts on this proposal. CyberAnth 03:24, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
I hope this isn't the wrong place to post this. I posted a report yesterday at WP:AN/3RR, but nothing was done. I appreciate that administrators are working on a voluntary basis, and may not have had time to look into my complaint.
Gillian McKeith is a living person who writes books on nutrition. She uses the title "Dr Gillian McKeith", but her doctorate is not recognised by the authorities in the area where she obtained it. (Correspondence course, and payment of fees.) She appears regularly on television, and claims to be able to diagnose and cure health problems by examining peoples faeces, which I believe she does on her TV programmes.
A user Briantist started inserting "aka the poo lady (passes herself off as doctor)" into the first line of the article. Several users have reverted him, but he keeps reinserting it, sometimes under the pretext of reverting vandalism.
He made four reverts yesterday, and I left a message on his talk page and also on the article talk page. I asked him to revert himself. He replied that "the rule doesn't apply if you are restoring items that have references which are being replaced by opinion". I've read the 3RR policy page carefully, and I can't see that it says that. (In any case, his edits are not being replaced by "opinion"; they're just being removed.) He added "Also, it's not me who appears on TV every week at about 830pm forcing people to smell and look at poo!" (This can all be found here.)
I reported him, but no administrator took any action following my report, and I accept that. However, he came back today, and made two edits, which I think violated the spirit of 3RR. He had been changing "Gillian McKeith" to "Gillian McKeith aka the poo lady". Now, he changed it to "Scatalogically infamous Gillian McKeith". [16] And he had been adding "passes herself of as doctor". Now he added "who sells herself as Dr Gillian McKeith". [17] I reverted him, and he reverted me with "rvv". [18]
I apologise if I shouldn't bring this here, but I think this is more than a content dispute. I've read various policy pages, and feel I'm now familiar with several of them, but I find this one more difficult to absorb, because the idea of "negative, unsourced" is rather subjective. Briantist insists that his claims have references, and I believe it's quite true that her doctorate is unaccredited, and that some people call her "the poo lady", but I think the living Gillian McKeith might well object if she saw such inflammatory langauge in the very first sentence.
It doesn't seem to be a 3RR matter any longer, because his more recent reverts were not within the twenty-four hours. But I'd really appreciate some help from someone experienced who has a good understanding of the BLP policy. Thanks. ElinorD 11:51, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
I saw this the other day, but was busy. I agree with Tom about "passes herself off as". However, I find "scatologically infamous", and "sells herself as Dr Gillian McKeith" if possible, even more problematic. [20] [21] [22] To begin an article with "Scatologically infamous Gillian McKeith" completely violates WP:NPOV, WP:NOR, and WP:BLP. While NPOV and NOR violations do not absolve a user from the obligation to adhere to 3RR, violations of BLP do, and any editor should feel free to continue taking out such material, without regard to 3RR. The insertion of such material is borderline trolling, and I wouldn't hesitate to block someone for it (after warning), even if he did not violate 3RR. I'm rather busy at the moment, but I think an administrator should keep an eye on that page, as there seems to be an ongoing problem. [23] Even the talk page (because talk pages are subject to BLP too) is problematic. [24] Musical L inguist 13:17, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
The purpose of BLP is to not to remove things like "so-and-so likes apple pie." Or "so and so has a dog". Overly bold editors are removing such mundane uncited things simply because they are being WP:DICK. Perhaps the proposal should be discussed but reverting based on the statement that we have to cite every, single, non-controversial, statement is utterly ridiculous. You want to read an article with one hundred footnotes? I certainly don't. Wjhonson 16:44, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
Should they have their own articles? There is a discussion about this going on on the living persons noticeboard. I have complained but am not sure what to do next. For one thing I am using my real name here and I don't know what kind of people I would be going up against if I made a big thing about this. Steve Dufour 18:03, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
A CFD has been proposed to merge Category:Ex-members of the Ku Klux Klan into Category:Ku Klux Klan members, because categories for people shouldn't distinguish between past and present status. However, I'm concerned that because "members" implies present status (something that a category's description can't ameliorate because that doesn't show up in the articles that are tagged) this could be libellous if they've in fact renounced the KKK. I'd appreciate some other thoughts in that CFD. Postdlf 18:36, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
On my watchlist, I recently noticed on the article on Katharine McPhee that a controversial subject regarding a Sirius satellite radio show was added (tabloid gossip, perhaps?).
I am not sure what to make of it. It seems offensive but also kind of relevant. (Key phrase: kind of.)
I'm aware that articles are to be comprehensive to the person's life and career. Is this going too far or is it ok? I'm neutral- neither against or for inclusion.
The guy has an article. Would the statement be more suitable on that article than on hers? Whatever the consensus is, feel free to make the changes. Or not, if it's perfectly fine. Elle Bee 19:04, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
David Barton is a controversial figure, for various reason cited in his article. Please review the diff between myself and another editor. We have been engaged in a reverting battle and I'd like other opinions. diff Wjhonson 20:58, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
I work on a lot of Bollywood actor/actress pages, and I see a great many edits concerning the stars' romantic lives. If the star is married and not known to be carrying on an immensely public affair, editors generally leave the star alone. We end up with "X married Y and they have two children." However, single stars are the subject of laser-like focus by gossip columnists, gossip which editors then insert in WP. It's the latest hottest stars who get this treatment; no one seems to care very much about the dalliances of Dilip Kumar. So we get statements like "X has had relationships with A, B, and C; X dumped B for C." Some of this is referenced to gossip columns and some of it is inserted without references and like kudzu, keeps re-appearing even after it has been weeded out.
A great many of the Indian editors seem to think that this is a proper use of WP and get irritated with me when I replace it with "X is single." Myself, I see it as a mis-use of WP. I don't think who dates who is at all notable, unless there's some huge controversy or the matter ends up in court. Or someone writes a tell-all roman à clef that becomes a best-seller. Retailing gossip is just so ... vulgar. So invasive. So unkind.
I should perhaps note that my position on this has changed over the years. When I first started editing here, I would let that sort of stuff pass, as long as it was referenced. Over time, it has come to seem more intrusive and more irritating.
I don't edit non-Bollywood star biographies, but I imagine that this happens in other places as well. (Not to all stars -- the Nathan Fillion article, which I do follow, is blessedly bereft of gossip.) Is there a policy that applies to salacious concentration on single stars' dating lives? Zora 04:14, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
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Ahem. If a person does not want their bio printed at all, then whatever you do to it, and no matter how you mess with it, you cannot be acting with the highest standards of love and respect for the dignity of others. In that case, these standards ("verifiable" writing, and love) are simply incompatable, even if you wish otherwise. At best, you may simply be an enabler or co-violator, who acts to mitigate the invasion of privacy, by acting to decrease the outrage. But that doesn't count if you give your assent to the whole process. Giving a drink in a torture chamber doesn't make you a saint if you assent to torture chambers. Being kind to a person in prison doesn't count if you assent to the imprisonment of a person who doesn't deserve to be there at all. If you've got two burglars in a house arguing over whether or not to steal just cash, but not an antique ring which might cause the owner some extra anguish, and one burglar starts talking about "standards of love and respect for the dignity of others," then you know somebody is mightily confused. People who care about love and respect for others don't violate their houses AT ALL. Nada. They don't engage in legalistic niceties about what's kosher to steal and what isn't. I hope that's enough metaphors for the day and that the point comes across. S B H arris 20:17, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
Wow. I see that metaphors do not work. Torture, and aggressive actions with bother people and invade their privacy, are bad things. Wikipedia does not have to be bound to print lies in a bio. There is an intermediate state where people should be able to choose EITHER between having a bio (in which case it is fair game subject to WP:V and BLP and so on), or not having one AT ALL. Being the target of a bio on your life which you don't want here, is a bad thing. Many people arguing that this kind of thing should continue (for OTHERS), cannot seem to imagine themselves in the position of being the target of an unwanted bio on Wikipedia. Why is that? It continues to mystify me. Is it that they never expect to do a notable thing in their entire lives? Is it that they hate people who do do notable things so much, that they don't care about their privacy? What's going on, here? Wikia founder Angela Beesley, who now wants her bio deleted, and cannot get it done, does not seem to have been able to envision her current curcumstance, before the fact. Why not? I don't know.
Jimbo evidently doesn't like his own bio, and has diddled with it in ways which the average wikipedian cannot (this has all been admitted and appoligized for, by Jimbo). And yet Jimbo continues a policy which caused and causes HIM pain, and which he has every reason to think would cause the average bio target even MORE pain than he got, since they don't have the POWER on Wikipedia that Jimbo does; and YET Jimbo does this, while speaking of treating other people with love and respect. Again, this is a mystery to me, and I could use explanation. Jimbo? You didn't like it when it was done to you, and yet you're in a better position than everybody else is, to mitigate what this process does to its targets. You KNOW it's bound to hurt others more than you. So what gives? S B H arris 19:48, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
As for the rest of what you say, other encylopedias before now have been protected by space limitations from biographizing only the very most notable of living people--- people who have in nearly all instances sought notability, or who acted in ways in which notability would be a foreseen consequence. Even so, shorter enclycopedias play with fire. When persons of lesser notability are profiled by newspapers (as for obituaries) or by publications (Who's Who) they are given the kind of editorial control not seen here on Wikipedia. The NY Times even famously is courteous enough to send notable men their own obituaries years in advance, for editing. Wikipedia however, is large enough to be qualitatively a very different thing-- its size resulting in notability creap, which I have noted and don't want to repeat myself about. However, it's a real effect and not to be triffled with, since a personal bio is coming to a place near you. Why have you been so careful to protect your own personal information here on Wikipedia, if you don't want to extend this courtesy to others? Inquiring minds want to know. Perhaps you've been out there fighting injustice with such vigor, that evil people are after you? Golly, me too. :). It's a common problem, don't you know. Wiki bios don't help. S B H arris 21:38, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
complaint by Mr. Bush. 24.59.105.229 12:41, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
As for hatred of one group by another, I threw it out as a possibility. You know there is hatred in the world. Celebritites do get hated for merely being famous. Ask one. Celebrities also routinely are subjected to invasions of privacy which you or I would find appalling. Sometimes by people who don't hate them or have bad intentions. Hoards of souvenier-seeking tourists stipped all the bark off the trees in Jackie Kennedy's front yard, after she moved out of the White House. I'm sure they didn't hate her, but the effect was the same and due to things of this nature she had to follow many an American celeb and flee to Europe just as though the intent had been bad. Let us not make Wikipedia the same kind of influence, whether the intentions are good, or no. S B H arris 23:13, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
BTW, I note that Angela Beesleys bio is nominated for deletion ONCE AGAIN (fifth time, now). Unless she's bothered in a major way by all this, her behavior is inexplicable. It's almost like this whole thing was some kind of torture for her. Silly me. S B H arris 17:50, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
I am trying to update an existing article regarding a national radio talk show host. The host has very little information in electronic format/internet sources.
I asked the host for material his publicist may have or other links that may provide more information and received an email from the host. Instead of providing links or third party information, the person provided answers to questions which were in the email (history, family, career, etc).
Is it OK to expand an article based on this as a source? If so, how would one cite it?
Jaymzyates 04:12, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
I am hereby proposing the following change/clarification. Currently, policy reads: While many well-known living persons' exact birthdays are widely known and available to the public, the same is not always true for marginally notable people or non-public figures. I would like to add the following sentence: For the purposes of this paragraph, any candidate representing a major party (i.e., after the primary or convention) for the US House, US Senate, or Governorship, shall be deemed a person who is public enough that their birth date can be included.
Thoughts? -- Sholom 00:35, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
(outdenting) This is not strictly relevant to this discussion since we are not a "covered entity" but I think it does provide some evidence about general privacy expectations. Under the US HIPAA law, date of birth is considered "protected health information" and must be protected from unauthorized access. Given the general trend that European law is usually more privacy-friendly than US law, I'm a bit surprised to hear that Norway publishes all birthdates online. I guess it just proves that there's an exception to every rule. Rossami (talk) 23:29, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
A few rebuttal points: there is generally no right of privacy for information when that information is publically available. HIPAA applies to information privately collected in medical records, that's not what we're talking about here, and so is completely irrelevant. (BTW, even Census records are available in 72 years, not 100!). Look, every candidate who was running for House had their birthdate easily and publicly available on the internet. How does it make sense that all these election-web-sites can have the information but Wikipedia can not? Recall, all I am talking about are people who are running for US Congress for major parties. If their own websites, or other publicly available websites, list the birthday, why can't WP? This isn't a violation of privacy, this is a simple matter of collecting publicly available information -- Sholom 20:54, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Ignoring the armchair legal philosophies for a moment, I can give countless examples of people who use WP to look up birthdates for constructive or informative purposes - and I've never yet heard of anybody using Wikipedia to commit credit-card fraud. This is paranoia at its finest. None of us are using top-secret information from classified sources to divine birthdates (in fact, that would contravene WP:V), but the simple fact is that any celebrity who has never told anyone their birthdate...we don't list birthdates for. We only list the birthdates of people whose birthdates are widely available in the public domain. Ergo, I strongly suppose any suggestion that would emasculate Wikipedia "for fear that somebody might try and use Donald Trump's credit cards" Sherurcij ( Speaker for the Dead) 06:53, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
I recently became aware of the Brandy Alexandre which has an interesting history. Basically her real name has been revealed somewhere else (and recently a wikipedian also got it from a website profile). However Brandy has made it clear that she does not want her real name linked to her pseudonym and we don't have any reliable sources so we don't mention it. However in the talk page, there is still discussion of the fact that her name was made available in this other place (primarily in the issue of whether we're allowed to mention it or what it was about).
Does anyone else think this kind of discussion should be removed? Basically, even if inadvertedly, we're telling people "hey we can't tell you her real name but if you want to know it you can easily find it out from this other place". Obviously we don't actually say it's definitely her real name but looking at the circumstances, most people can come to their own conclusions. Indeed I did very easily. While we usually tolerate a lot of junk in talk pages, libelious info is something we don't.
This isn't libelious AFAIK but we tend to treat personal info the same way at least from Wikipedia:Oversight. Do we need to go as far as perma removing all connection between her name and this other place or even her and this other place with oversight? Or am I just being to privacy paranoid? Or do other editors think it's stupid for us to try and hide something that is out there? P.S. For obvious reasons, please refrain from mentioning what this other place is here. Nil Einne 13:12, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
It could be libelous, if the person whose real name is being discussed is NOT a famous porn star. Going around naming real people as porn stars is not a good thing. Without a real source, such "outings" should be regarded with great suspicion, as they could easily be malicious attempts to hurt some real person who is not a porn star.-- Jimbo Wales 01:06, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
Has there been any discussion here regarding the above category. It seems to be designed to encourage editors to find the missing date. Meanwhile our policy here indicates that for most living persons this information is best left out. Should there be a statement on the category page to that effect? - MrFizyx 02:18, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
I have a question as to how WP:BLP handles a certain type of problem, that can be laid out this way. Suppose that there is a club called the Bunny Club, it’s a gentleman’s only club that is roughly a cross between a Masonic lodge, and Club Med. Many wealthy and influential people are club members; however, it is a private club, and does not make its membership lists public. Now conspiracy theorists spend a lot of time contemplating that all these rich and famous people getting together in private is not a good thing. So they, the conspiracy theorists, spend a lot of time tying to figure out who’s a member, and then spend more time “outing” them by making their names public. Now apparently nothing that bad goes on when club members get together, because some people out themselves, and leak it out that thy are members, and don’t seem to show a lot of guilt concerning their membership. Soon lists start to float around, some people on the lists are in fact members, even admitting it publicly, and other names on the lists are more speculative.
One day someone starts a page here on Wikipedia concerning this Bunny Club, and all the information concerning the club gets dumped onto that page. The creditable, the non-creditable, and anything in-between; its all there with Wikipedia’s name on it.
Some of the claims are pretty wild by conventional standards, but to the crowd that wears tinfoil hats, the claims are entirely credible. Some claims are not only wild, but criminal. Being a gentleman’s only club, it starts making the rounds that the club supplies prostitutes to its members, and not only prostitutes, but under aged ones. Other things pop up, dark tales of conspiracies, etc.
So now we have a page in Wikipedia that on the one hand contains a list of well known public figures, while a few paragraphs down you have allegations of prostitution, so forth and so on. No specific individual is said to have partaken, but it is implied that any or all could have.
Now if this was the end of the story, it would not be so hard to fix the problem, assuming that the above is in fact a problem to be dealt with. However, there is another angle to the story, the conspiracy theorists who accept the whole thing as gospel truth. Worse, some of them are editors right here on WP, and they will fight you tooth and nail, using most any pretense they can think up to keep you from removing their version of the “truth”.
It seems that they see themselves as heroic figures in a David v. Goliath type battle. Goliath is more formally known as the Illuminati, the Globalist, the Trilateralists, -if you will “The Man”. It appears that Wikipedia is their sling-shot, a way to get the word out and awaken the masses; Wikipedia to them is a way to expose “The Man” and his sinister plots. And any editor who fails to see the greater good of what they are doing, and dares to challenge their sources, or whose version of the truth differs from theirs is either a simpleton unable to think for himself, or is secretly an agent of “The Man”.
The problem is that right now the claims made on the Bunny Club page do not tie directly to any one individual. It’s all done indirectly. So it is hard to get a lot of support for using WP:BLP for indirect claims; and its simply not worth the headaches of challenging the sources in order to remove the claims. Thus some of the claims will likely hang around for sometime to come. Some of the worst claims have been removed, but only after minor edit wars, and one edit war is still going on. Referring the problem to the Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard has produced more giggles than results.
Would it be possible to address indirect claims through a rewording of WP:BLP? Or am I overstating the role WP:BLP was meant to play?
Thanks, Brimba 02:54, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
Does wikipedia have a policy regarding pages that were created specifically so that editors can avoid following WP:BLP rules? The page Views and controversies concerning Juan Cole has been the site of massive edit wars over material attacking Cole (much of it coming from blogs). A couple of editors have insisted on including every scurrilous sentence published on any blog anywhere about Professor Cole on this page, while a couple of other editors (myself included) have had to go out of our way researching responses to these attacks (which in some cases get deleted and are only allowed to remain up after extensive edit wars). The editors bent on attacking Cole make no bones about the fact that the page was created precisely to avoid having to follow the rules of WP:BLP. Is there a precedent for such activity? I am of the opinion that the page should follow BLP rules because the page is an offshoot of Juan Cole, and the subject of that biography is the central subject of this page. The anti-Cole editors, predictably, disagree. Is there a process to get a ruling on this issue? Or should the whole page be AfD'd? Any suggestions are welcome.- csloat 05:40, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
I have made the following proposal on
WT:CSD.
Please comment.
Robert A.West (
Talk) 02:42, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Never mind. If
WP:SNOW ever applied to an idea, it was this one. I'm going home to lick my wounds. (just kidding!)
Robert A.West (
Talk)
04:33, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Above is an interesting comment:
This got me thinking. Maybe this has been discussed before, but in case it hasn't, here goes.
Proposition:
Shouldn't there be a policy that requires notification of the subjects of articles before the articles progress too far? This isn't for the sake of asking permission, but of common decency. They, of all people, should have a right to some say in the matter, or at least knowing that they should keep their eyes open. Articles can be started by fans, but can also be started by enemies who will gain an unfair advantage by editing "behind the back" of their intended victim, so the potential victim deserves to be forewarned. Such a policy could save a lot of time and grief, both for the subject, the involved editors, and for Wikipedia. -- Fyslee 21:40, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
If this did anything it would create more edit warring and associated problems. COMMENT: As opposed to the legal and bad-press and bad-faith problems which it surely has created and will continue to create? The German Wikipedia solution, BTW, which works just fine, is to simply prohibit bios (that is, per se dedicated articles on a single person) on living persons. It works well, and there's usually not as much edit-warring about who's dead, verses who's merely notable (We can take a consensus on Jimmy Hoffa.) S B H arris 19:01, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
"Hello, Mr. Al Capone the third? My name is SlutEdit from Wikipedia. That's not my real name, because my real name is none of your business. I'm calling to tell you that I've started a biography on you. You do not have the right to edit it, and you do not have the right to decline the honor of your own bio on Wikipedia. Resistance is futile. If you have any problems with this, just call the Wikipedia office. By the way, you should watch your bio for the rest of your life, in case someone vandalizes it. Thank you for your understanding and support. Your continued donations keep Wikipedia running!"
68.92.156.246
15:04, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
Dear English wikipedians,
we had a debate in persian wikipedia which i'd like to know your comment on. can we publish simple information (like places of study) on a person based on his autobiography? this person is an outlawed political activist ( Ali Javadi) so he does not use his real name so the matter cant be checked with univeristies. I (the editor of article) have used phrases like "he claims to have studing in Newmexico state university". is that counted as "vefriable"? if not, how simple information on some one's background can be verified if he doesnt use his real name? isnt good to use autobiography as a refrence and then declare that these are only self-claims?
the translation of article is visible in " Ali Javadi". (altough in persin i have done some edits including adding "he claims..."). please give us your view on that. -- Arash red 16:21, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
" Defamation" is a legal term. It does not mean, "any unsourced material". Do not use templates to attack editors who place unsourced material. Be very sure you understand what is, and isn't defamation before you use the templates. For example, "garbage smells" is not defamation, it is the truth. It may or may not require a source depending on how much it is common-knowledge. Do not use blp1, 2, etc for removing or edit-warring over inocuous remarks. "Paris Hilton likes banana pie" is not defamation. It may be silly, but it's not slander. Similarly "Bill Clinton was once arrested for jaywalking" is not defamation either, believe it or not. The sort of "crime" if you will, has become mundane i.e. no one cares. "Negative" is not the same as "defamation". Do not accelerate a conflict by throwing lighter fluid on it. Wjhonson 15:19, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
Lately in an article I edit quite frequently, there has been a drive to include derogatory content based on a number of partisan sources. When asked for neutral, third party sources the editors who have been challenged have presented someone who's neutrality is suspicious. A simple google search leads to a number of websites which question his objectivity, although he works for a mainstream newspaper. My question is, when dealing with questionable content such as this and the only sources are either partisan or "dubious", how should I continue? Thank you. (Should I crosspost this to RS as well?) Kyaa the Catlord 21:39, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
I started a biopgraphy on astronomer, William G. Tifft, and discovered one of the few sources of biographical information, and want to include it. But another editor disagrees. I would appreciate some input, described on the Talk:William_G._Tifft page. -- Iantresman 17:05, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
I am having a dispute with an editor who very selectively summarizes a particular quote that he thinks violates BLP writing style. See [5] [6] In contrast I think that it is important to stay close to the source to avoid omitting and distorting information. Andries 19:25, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
(ed conf) <<<Outdent. An exceptional claim is easy to spot. For example, a highly contentious statement that has not been reported in reliable sources, and that is based on the opinion of a single journalist, may be considered to be exceptional. If it was not, one could argue that it will be widely reported in multiple sources. As for your assertion that it is not rare that clergy engages in sexual abuse, you may be surprised that it is indeed rare. Yes, there has been huge controversies in the US recently about this issue that have raised public outcry, but nonetheless these cases are very rare indeed. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 22:57, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
<-- We've got a whole article devoted to
Roman Catholic sex abuse cases. But aren't there multiple sources making allegations of sexual impropriety in this case? Is the newspaper article the only source available? -
Will Beback ·
† ·
22:51, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
The discussion on Wikipedia talk:Speedy deletion criterion for unsourced articles seems to have stalled out with opposition to use of it as a general policy, but there was a recognition that BLPs need high standards for sourcing. Would there be a support for a policy that biographies of living persons, even if they claim notability and escape a7, should be speedy deletable if they cite no sources? No sources means nothing can be verified, and that's essential to know if what we write is true. Night Gyr ( talk/ Oy) 21:24, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
But without a source, you can't know what would be considered defamatory or controversial. If I write an article that says "Johnny smith is a republican activist" and Johny smith is a rabid democrat, he might be pissed. This isn't a question of improving sourcing, this is a question of needing sources vs. allowing baseless, unverifiable statements about living persons to stay just because they sound reasonable. Night Gyr ( talk/ Oy) 00:34, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
Notability is far from the most important inclusion criterion. Too many people here treat notability like the law, but notability is not fundamental, it's just a shortcut to help make sure policy is followed. Also, notability doesn't require sourcing to prove claims to fame--it just requires that the claim be made. Night Gyr ( talk/ Oy) 07:07, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
I assume that images of living people come under this policy if the caption makes an assertion, or the placement of the image invites an assumption. Thus, a user placed an image of three young people in threesome with an assertion that this was a picture taken just before an encounter, but with no source cited. I deleted as potentially a BLP violation. Was I right to do so? 68.238.241.22 09:21, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
Should the language in a deletion debate conform to BLP when the subject is a living person? Guettarda 22:48, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
To be specific, I was thinking about Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Dan James Pantone - I really do think that the language there, especially of the nomination, is a bit too strong. Since I am involved in the debate I am probably not the best person to judge, so I would appreciate if someone would have a look at it. Guettarda 14:06, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
This book, published by Doubleday and written by Hoover Institute research fellow Peter Schweizer, contains chapters entitled things like, "Hillary Clinton — Greedy Speculator, Corporate Shrill, and Petty Tax Avoider" and " Ralph Nader — Bourgeois Materialist, Stock Manipulator, and Tyrannical Sweatshop Boss". Is listing these titles a violation of WP:BLP? // Lawyer2b 03:00, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
I have created a template, {{ blpdispute}}, for use in WP:LIVING disputes. It's analogous to templates like {{ POV}} and {{ disputed}}, in that it attracts attention to problem biographies, warns editors and readers of a dispute and provides a resource, in Category:Disputed biographies of living persons, for collaboration in bringing articles in line with WP:LIVING. Any thoughts? szyslak ( t, c, e) 06:32, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
Why should living people get precedence over dead people? Can't estates of the erstwhiles sue as well? — Rickyrab | Talk 19:32, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
How does this policy apply when it is disputed whether or not the individual in question is alive? It's seems reasonable that it would continue to apply following unconfirmed (yet, perhaps, still notable) reports of a person's death. However, at the other end of the specturm, one can imagine Elvis Presley, etc. who some claim are still alive. Just thought it would be good for the policy to address this explicitly if some consensus can be developed. savidan (talk) (e@) 00:25, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
We have a category, Category:Possibly living people, for cases where it's not definitively known whether someone has died, usually because there is no reasonably recent news about them. I think we should consider merging the former cat with Category:Living people. Putting someone in the possibly living cat excludes them from the the living people RC and could be a potential loophole in the process of preventing WP:LIVING problems. While the category contains many people who are more than likely dead, it contains others who are probably alive. I'll go ahead and nominate it for merger on WP:CFD. szyslak ( t, c, e) 08:32, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
We shouldn't include potential libel about anyone, even if they're dead. The only difference is a stricter enforcement of the standard, so there's no harm in treating these articles as if they're about living people. Since they're such high profile figures, it's probably worth it anyway. Night Gyr ( talk/ Oy) 09:04, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
How would any of those not pass muster? All accusations are sourced from secondary sources (historians) and reported as such, rather than indisputable fact or simple tittilation. BLP is a strengthened enforcement of existing policy, and things that wouldn't pass muster under BLP wouldn't pass muster period, BLP just means that we should be more aggressive about enforcing compliance. I said potential libel because if the person was alive then things could be libel, and it's not libel to report that accusations have been made (as long as the existence of the accusations is true, and we don't take their word as fact). As the quote goes on what material is unsuitable... "This is true of all information, but it is particularly true of negative information about living persons." Night Gyr ( talk/ Oy) 14:39, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
Your two points are in stark contrast. You say that reviving dropped accusations can be considered harmful, and then you say that there has been an extensive evaluation and discussion of these claims (which means that they haven't simply been dropped). What I'm not seeing is how any historical article would fail our standards, which is what I asked. The "tales told" were written about in reliable secondary sources, which would permit inclusion even in articles about living people. We include allegations about Vince Foster against the Clintons, as spurious as they may be, because the accusations themselves are written about in reliable sources, and for historical allegations it's no different. Your point was that applying BLP standards to historical biographies would be harmful, but I have yet to see an example of where it would actually cause trouble for content otherwise in compliance with policy. Night Gyr ( talk/ Oy) 16:38, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
You could yank that material right now as unsourced and controversial. WP:V says so. Henry VII was passed as an FA in 2004--standards have risen since then. Inline citations are a requirement for FAs now. None of the stuff you point to is actually in compliance with existing policies other than BLP. Night Gyr ( talk/ Oy) 17:25, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
We do repeat a lot of the gossip-type stuff written about Britney Spears, when found in reliable secondary sources. We don't ignore the existence of such claims if they've been noted by reliable secondary sources. The PhD analysis is not the same as a gossip rag because thesis work is generally peer-reviewed and otherwise more reliable than the average issue of a tabloid, so you can't make a straight equality between the two. It's still perfectly legitimate to remove any unsourced material pending sourcing, regardless of the subject of the article. The claims that were pointed out would be perfectly legitimate to remove with a request for a source to support their readdition. My point is simply that BLP is a more vigorous enforcement of existing policy, so there's no harm in applying it to people who may be alive, rather than only people who are definitely so. All of wikipedia would be better off if we had such a stringent requirement for sourcing. Night Gyr ( talk/ Oy) 20:16, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
I'm talking about its substantive effects on the encyclopedia. I wish we did treat people no different from buildings, and had just as high standards with strict sourcing requirements for all articles. Policy says unsourced material may be challenged and removed by any editor at any time but people are hesitant to apply it and be called deletionist or attacked for removing something "everyone knows" is true yet is noncompliant with policy. I also think many of the pieces of data the policy is concerned with are already excluded by other policies, or simply by its irrelevance. WP:NOT#DIR means that we don't include things like addresses, phone numbers, birthdays (where they're irrelevant) etc. We're not going to be making personal data public when we limit ourselves to already published material like we generally should. I understand the change in motivation for the policy, but the substantive effects on articles should not be exaggerated, simply because all other articles deserve to be held to just as high a standard. It's better for us to have a single correct and sourced article than it is to have a hundred cruddy ones. Night Gyr ( talk/ Oy) 22:37, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
Moved to Wikipedia talk:Conflict of interest WAS 4.250 22:24, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
Several times now I have seen debates erupt about the use of mugshots in articles about living people. Recent examples include Sultaana Freeman and Al Gore III. Would it be reasonable for us to state in the BLP guidelines, that for non-public figures, it is generally not appropriate to include police mugshots in their Wikipedia articles? This may seem obvious, but it seems that every time this comes up there has to be a debate before the image is removed. For public figures I think there is some wiggle room, but for non-public figures I think this is a pretty safe rule to go by. Obviously, very few people are going to be happy about having mugshots of themselves in their Wikipedia article, especially if they are not well known enough to be able to define their own public image. In many of these cases it seems editors are resorting to mugshots simply because they can't find any other images, or worse, to smear the person in question. Enacting a rule about this would help ensure respect for people's privacy and may even prevent a lawsuit or two. After all, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a tabloid. Kaldari 02:25, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
If the musgshot doesn't look like a mugshot then it would probebly be OK. There have been a few such pictures. The Vanilla Ice article had one (now deleted). // Liftarn
I've always been planning to query this. Per above, I would actually go further since I'm of the opinion any photos should be used with caution. People have a right to privacy and if people aren't public figures, I would suggest we shouldn't include their photo unless there is a good reason why we would should be showing it. For example, I removed another photo from the Sultaana Freeman in agreement with some discussion on the talk page since I don't feel there is any good reason why we should be showing a photo of her and she clearly doesn't want her face to be seen by the general public. (The photo didn't have copyright information specified and given it was from a yearbook, I doubt it would come under a suitable copyright anyway). Given her specific case, the drivers license photo can perhaps say but everything else IMHO is unnecessary at the current time. (Obviously depending on how notable and publicly identifiable she becomes this may change)
Similarly, another case I'm familiar with is Amir Massoud Tofangsazan. This article had an image with uncertain copyright status for a while. While this has been removed a while back, I'm of the opinion even if we do get a suitably licensed photo we shouldn't include it. Although this guy's photo has been splashed all over the internet, he still IMHO is entitled to a resonable degree of privacy and given his limited noteability, I don't see any reason to include a photo of him.
We don't currently have a specific policy in BLP on photos but IMHO we should. (We do cover privacy in general of course). What do others think? Nil Einne 15:43, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
I was going through the archives and noticed someone said that we shouldn't worry about the privacy of birthdates because in California and some other US states, you can get anyone's birthday for a $75 subscription to some websites. As soon as I read this I thought it was a silly argument and I just wanted to raise this issue again to point this out. Really I don't think it matters if people's right to privacy is not respected in the US. It is in many other countries, often in law. Of course, if someone's birthdate is available from a reliable source, then obviously it isn't just about whether the information is already publicly available but whether we should respect people's right to privacy when they have limited notability Nil Einne 15:55, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
I want to explore introducing a process for deleting BLPs and their talk pages if the subject of the bio requests it, so long as the subject isn't an important public figure. We're all aware of cases where Wikipedia bios allegedly caused problems for subjects who weren't really public figures. Yet subjects have very little recourse, and we have no formal mechanism for dealing with them and no consistent policy to apply.
The BLPfD policy would have to include a way of deciding which bios it's in the genuine public interest to retain (i.e. in the interests of the public, rather than something the public is simply interested in).
Once a complaint is received from the subject, there would be a presumption in favor of deletion. The process would be something like this:
I'm posting this here to test the climate. Is this the kind of thing that editors could support in principle? SlimVirgin (talk) 19:18, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
I feel it's arrogant of us to presume that Wikipedia has the right to do that to anyone. Would you want us to do it to you? Imagine you were now, as a young man, to go on a shoplifting spree, triggered by a clinical depression, and a few reporters pick up on it because you're actively involved in some local charities, so you scrape through their, and hence our, notability criteria. Would you really want to fail to get a good job over that in 20 years time because your employer saw the Wikipedia article? The court recognized you were depressed at the time, and gave you a telling off so you could put it behind you, but Wikipedia in its wisdom decides it knows better, and that in fact you must never be allowed to put it behind you.
These cases are really happening. Surely you can see the unfairness of it.
As for how to determine we're really dealing with someone, that's a minor issue and easy to organize. If you know someone works at Smith&Co, and you get an e-mail from X@smithandco.com, that's good enough. SlimVirgin (talk) 20:26, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
"Actively involved in some local charities" is not a sufficient mark of notability, and any such article could be removed regardless of whether or not the information was damaging. As I've said before, we already have the mechanisms to remove articles about genuinely non-notable subjects. CJCurrie 20:34, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
Please don't remove items from the list of test cases, especially if you think they are obvious keeps. Test cases help ensure that we don't write policies that would get obvious-keeps deleted. Kla'quot 06:13, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
As for (6) and (7) I oppose deleting the discussion (as opposed to editing it and deleting some of the page history; what we would do for a personal attack or a revelation of personal information on an editor.) Consensus can change, and discussions make mistakes; but how can a decison to delete an article on these grounds ever going to be reconsidered? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 04:28, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
It is unnecessary because enough mechanisms already exist to handle such cases. A living person only warrants a biography if xe satisfies the WP:BIO criteria. If xe satisfies the primary notability criterion, then xe will be the subject of multiple non-trivial published works from independent sources. As such, there will be be plenty of source material for a biography, and all of the handwringing above about narrative becomes entirely moot.
If xe doesn't satisfy the PNC, then (failing the applicability of any secondary criteria) we shouldn't have a biographical article, and again the above handwringing is moot. The John Doe streaker example is a good example of a person who does not satisfy the PNC. Whilst the single sentence may be verifiable, giving it a whole article to itself, with John Doe as the subject, is the wrong way of including it in Wikipedia. See Wikipedia:Notability#Dealing with non-notable topics. Notability is, in part, about including verifiable information in the right way. The right way to include the verifiable sentence is to mention it within an article with a wider context. For this, the sources are the guides. If the act of John Doe streaking is only mentioned in the sources in the context of discussions of the game itself, then the verifiable sentence should be included in Wikipedia in like manner: in an article on the game itself, and not in a biographical article.
For deciding whether the WP:BIO criteria are satisfied, we have AFD. Biographical articles that fail the WP:BIO criteria are regularly either merged or deleted having gone through AFD. Whether the person xyrself objects to having a biographical article is irrelevant. If the PNC is properly applied, any biographical article that passes muster will have copious sources for it to be based entirely upon; and thus any complaints by the subject will be a matter to be taken up with the sources themselves, not with the encyclopaedia at all. Thus the proper focus is not to consider the opinions of the subject; it is to apply the PNC properly. Concentrating upon the opinions of the article subject actually detracts from this. It takes the focus away from looking to see whether the PNC is satisfied.
The opinion of the article's subject is not and should not be a criterion, either for inclusion or exclusion. We don't include articles simply because people want to have themselves included in the encyclopaedia, and we don't exclude articles simply because people want to have themselves excluded. The criteria are WP:BIO, and should be applied uniformly and dispassionately. AFD is the tool of long-standing for this.
The proposal is ill-conceived and a bad idea for several reasons. The most obvious is that it is trivially easy to game. Consider Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sophie Ellis-Bextor, for example. There is no way for an administrator, or any other Wikipedia editor for that matter, to know that it actually is the subject of the article that is complaining, as opposed to an imposter or a simple anonymous troublemaker. Another reason is the idea of "nationwide importance" that the proposal incorporates. That is a badly flawed metric, incorporating as it does both problems of systemic bias and problems of subjective judgements on the parts of Wikipedia editors.
Time spent on this proposal would be better spent encouraging editors to use the existing mechanisms properly and fully: to mercilessly apply the sword of verifiability to all biographical article content, and to ensure that deletion discussions concentrate upon citing sources to show that the PNC is satisfied rather than veering off into irrelevant tangents. Uncle G 05:08, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
Moreover, your question "Do we really want biographies of non-notable people to be limited to what showed up in the police blotter twenty years ago?" is unanswerable, having as it does a premise that is simply false. We don't actually want biographical articles for non-notable people. Therefore asking what we want them to comprise is unanswerable. I repeat what I wrote before, with emphasis on the part being missed: Whilst the single sentence may be verifiable, giving it a whole article to itself, with John Doe as the subject, is the wrong way of including it in Wikipedia.
The sources do "fix it". Wikipedia should reflect both what the sources say and how they say it. As such, if the single verifiable fact is part of a discussion of a larger topic in the sources, then it should be included in Wikipedia in the same way. See the big coloured box at User:Uncle G/On notability#Dealing with non-notable things.
If there's something that we should be convincing editors of, it is that not everything needs its own individual article. Not every name in a list of people associated with some overall topic should be a link, for example. Uncle G 02:06, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
Now the thing we are discussing, Uncle G, is whether we might exclude biographies of almost nobodies if they ask us too. You say you presented an argument. Here it is, if I might quote you: "The argument... is that.. we don't exclude articles simply because people want to have themselves excluded." I am planning to try that one on Mrs Note tonight: "I am not doing the washing up, Mrs Note, because I do not do the washing up." I'll tell her Uncle G sent me. Grace Note 04:31, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
As for your quote: I suggest going back to what I actually wrote — which is conveniently right there in front of you twice, now — and reading the next sentence. Uncle G 16:10, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
BLP articles with a low importance assessment (and I'm expecting this would be at least 75% of them) should be generally be deleted if the subject requests it (some authentication should be required if there is doubt) unless there's a good reason to do otherwise (obviously there will occasionally be debates about someone's importance). In fact most low-importance BLP's should be deleted regardless (since they are full of COI and publicity seeking, and the BLP policy is inherently in conflict with NPOV, so we should only create a BLP article if it's important enough to justify a lot of careful editing to preserve the encyclopedia's neutrality) but that's a different topic. 67.117.130.181 15:16, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
As for "In fact most low-importance BLP's should be deleted regardless": I suggest doing some New Page Patrol and seeing what actually occurs from day to day. Most biographies of living people are deleted, inasmuch as they are usually people submitting unsourced autobiographies, or unsourced biographies of their friends and relatives. Consulting Special:Log/delete, I see that three such biographies were deleted in just the 20 minutes prior to my typing these words. (They were Brandon Di Puma, Brian Russell-Simpson, and Chanroeun Saron.) Uncle G 16:10, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
More importantly, "multiple non-trivial published works from independent sources" does not necessarily comprise "plenty of source material for a biography". I reiterate points I made above, but they seem worthy of consideration if someone has yet to recognize the measure. In most professional biographical publishing houses, the threshold of "plenty" when assessing source material for a biography necessarily includes original biographical interviews with the subject. Except in the most unusual circumstances, at least a pre-publication review of a draft in consultation with the subject is expected before any major biographical document about a public figure goes to press. Unless a publisher is unconcerned about repeating other publishers' errors, one benefit of such consultation is that the subject often offers the last best chance of challenging the veracity of "multiple non-trivial published accounts." Exceptions abound -- but even in significant exceptions, such as the case of an internationally-known political fugitive, earlier biographical interviews are available. However, a collection of "multiple non-trivial published works from independent sources" might not include a single biographical interview. As I explained earlier, these published works might be about isolated events in the subject's life, but they might not come close to offering biographical insight. We are left with a collection of "multiple non-trivial published works from independent sources" paraphrased and placed under a person's name to appear as if, and indeed intended as (according to the intentions of some expressed here) a biography. Quite simply, paraphrased narrative based on a collection of press accounts about a person’s life is not necessarily a biography. To represent it as such can erode trust in a source that claims otherwise, especially among readers astute enough to recognize the difference. Jill Hemphill 20:19, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
As for your reiteration, you are missing the fact that this is an encyclopaedia. The lengthy handwringing about "original biographical interviews" and "consulting the subject" is completely ignoring our Wikipedia:No original research policy. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, a tertiary source. That means that the journalists and biographers who have performed interviews and consulted the subjects are our sources. Handwringing about a need to interview the subjects to check facts is missing the point. It has always been the principle here that Wikipedia is not set up to perform fact checking. Therefore we write, and only write, based upon sources where that fact checking (e.g. interviewing any necessary people) has already been done. For further explanation, see User:Uncle G/On sources and content and Wikipedia:Reliable sources.
As I have already written once above, all of the handwringing about narrative and interviews is moot. If someone satisfies the PNC, there will be enough source material for a full article. If someone does not satisfy the PNC, then we shouldn't have a biographical article in the first place, so any arguments based upon the premise of such articles being comprised of a sparse few facts pinned together are completely irrelevant. In such cases, giving the subject its own article is the wrong way for Wikipedia to be presenting what information there is on the subject.
So the proper course of action is to do some AFD Patrol and ensure that the PNC is properly applied at AFD, not to waste time and effort inventing additional deletion processes. It isn't a lack of deletion processes that is the problem.
To see the problem, note that not a single editor in any of the three AFD discussions of Rachel Marsden actually challenged it (or, indeed, defended it) on the depths and the provenances of the published works that cover the subject. None of the editors who are here pushing for a new deletion process have actually applied our existing processes. Uncle G 16:10, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
There's nothing about my education in the article, and my most significant achievement and life's work is barely mentioned. This Wikipedia article is an incompetent biography. -- Daniel Brandt - January 2, 2007
WAS 4.250 12:46, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
Some input on the above, in 3 areas:
Addressing one point made above by Jill and others, please go read Bodil Joensen for a biography I expanded (apologies, it's on a notable Danish porn star, but it's one where this exact issue came up). Go read it. She's dead, but the fact that a simple article discussing her porn career could be easily expanded to a balanced biography, based upon publicly available and citable sources, makes me sceptical that we really have a problem here. Also look at the article on Hani Miletski, a notable academic researcher in the same pornographic field. If someone is notable enough for a biography article, then there will usually be enough material to describe at the least their work and some basic personal information in a balanced manner (Miletski's article is an example) and often enough to do a full bio in a balanced manner (Joensen's article is an example), drawing on cited sources in each case. My point being, lack of sources doesn't necessarily seem to me to be causing huge problems for notable people's biographies in practice. FT2 ( Talk | email) 00:52, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
I'd support some form of subject input on articles which personally impact upon them. That's not a matter of dropping dispassionate objectivity, nor a charter for caving in on demands and threats. It's a recognition that Wikipedia, like it or not, has the ability to impact on peoples lives and others perceptions in a big way. That power is usually used well, but it is a power and a responsibility, and it's more important to say "is there a genuine basis for review here", than to say "make them jump through hoops to get listened to".
What I would like to suggest as an alternative to "Biographies for Deletion", would be some form of editor committee which takes third party complaints about biographies and articles which are claimed to impact them negatively (with strict criteria clarifying the bases upon which complaints will be considered), so that third parties can post if they have an issue and members of the committee can consider each objection neutrally and direct that the article be rectified in specific particulars as needed (eg a section should be reliably cited or dropped... or a balancing viewpoint should be added if the third party has provided a valid source). I'm wondering if this would achieve more than a "biographies for deletion" listing, since it would have the ability to rule on specific facts and issues, and thus rapidly address the more troublesome BPL's where (as often happens) part may be fine and part may not.
The aim would be specifically to answer concerns of the form "this article contains significant untrue or unbalanced information that impacts on me or my life", and which responds to these by stating which of the bulleted concerns seem to have no basis for complaint and are policy compliant, and which are legitimate concerns possibly needing editorial rectification. Note that we already have a page like this for copyright violation complaints, another area where third parties need to interact with Wikipedia content criteria.) FT2 ( Talk | email) 01:16, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
Last, although it would in many ways be a problematic can of worms, it seems undeniable to me that a person's view of their biography as written by another person (whoever that 'other' may be) is in fact almost always notable in the context of their already-existing bio. Should there therefore be some provision to make a person's (possibly limited length) statement in response to the bio available, as part of NPOV? ("==Statement by John Doe on this biography article==" up to say 500 words or some fixed, reasonable maximum?) Clearly there would have to be criteria to ensure no breach of copyright, no self-promotion, no spam or hate material, no other legally troublesome issues, but since it would be identified as their personal comment, NPOV would be fine. I think I'd like to give that to subjects of bios. Their viewpoint is notable, and provided it's clearly identified as their personal viewpoint, it can only serve readers, to be able to see what subjects say about the bio written on them. Yes it would be unusual, but also it is a very obvious enhancement. It adds content richness and the chance to include additional material, without detracting from existing factuality. It also would work well even in the event of someone who is upset about some negative fact reported in their bio, since then both viewpoints are shown.
FT2 (
Talk |
email)
01:16, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
How about a test - if said information is on a living person AND it can easily be found in a search engine search (from a non Wiki site of course) then it is fit for inclusion. If it exists and is citable BUT the subject objects to the material, we remove it. That seems pretty simple to me -- Tawker 05:17, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
What is the best thing to do for the unsourced lists in Category:Lists of people with disabilities and Category:Lists of people by medical condition? They are almost all unsourced and many have a lot of (or all of them) living people entries. I sourced a few of them like list of HIV-positive people and List of autistic people, but it's a lot of work. I also put some on prod or AFD (which is usually contested). Or I removed the person section, like on Quadriplegia which was also contested. Other examples are list of stutterers, List of physically disabled politicians and List of people with visual disabilities. Garion96 (talk) 16:23, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
Please remember the fundamental rule of categories: if an article is in a category, it must be obvious to a reader of the article why it is there, on first coming from the category description. First decat all the entries where this isn't so, and you will have left either quite reasonable cats, or empty ones. In the first case the problem is solved, and in the second case the TfD (if you explain what you've done) should be a piece of cake. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 00:03, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
This problem arises everyone now and then. Nearly all lists of people are problematic. For example, we have lists of gay people. I'm pretty sure if you look through the archives both here and the noticeboard you'll find this issue of lists has been raised before. Generally speaking, the consensus AFAIK is to ruthlessly delete people from the list unless the claim is supported by a reliable source Nil Einne 08:37, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
I stopped by because of a situation in the Sathya Sai Baba arb case. Take a look at Talk:Sathya Sai Baba/Comments. Basically I think the restrictions on talk-page content are way too onerous, especially for articles about public figures. They make collaborative editing extremely difficult. The point of talk pages is to be able to assess claims and citations, chase down better sourcing for material that appears to be correct but you don't have completely solid cites for, ask people if they have access to works cited in bibliographies, etc. The link above shows someone hassling me over an arb restriction [10], for posting a link to a carefully researched bibliography that was written by a former Sai adherent who subsequently left the movement. Keeping such discussion off of talk pages stops the articles from improving. You end up getting groups of editors collaborating secretly off-wiki instead of openly on the talk page. That is not in the wiki spirit, in my view.
The BLP policy in general should distinguish public figures from not-so-public ones. At least for public figures, the rule for talk pages should be similar to the arb ruling in Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Francis Schuckardt, which said don't remove stuff from talk pages unless it's actually libelous, rather than the current extremist practice which destroys the thoroughness and NPOV of articles. If necessary, protect talk pages from Google indexing using a robots.txt tag, or even have restricted subpages that can't be viewed except by established users (initially let's say that means those who can create new articles, i.e. account is a few days old and they've made a few edits) that can be used for more open discussion. That should totally stop search engines and slow down random snooping. More serious snoopers will use Google and find everything on other sites anyway.
Weirdly about the Sai Baba article, it extensively discusses very serious allegations about sex abuses that are not all that convincing, because those were the ones sensational enough to get attention from TV networks and big newspapers and so they're considered well-sourced. This is about a guy who claims to materialize gold jewelry from thin air, a much easier claim to refute in scientific terms than allegations that someone did or didn't commit lurid sex crimes. But those easy and straightforward refutations from Indian skeptics' journals are excluded from the article because of wikilawyering over circulation figures etc, and pointing out the obvious non-miraculous explanations of these materializations was not sensational enough to get made into TV shows.
67.117.130.181 19:25, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
I've been repeatedly confused by the phrase "unsourced or poorly sourced controversial material".
Does this mean: Material that is EITHER unsourced OR poorly-sourced-and-controversial? Or does it mean: Material that is EITHER unsourced-and-controversial OR poorly-sourced-and-controversial?
Does anyone else find this unclear? I would appreciate if a clarification were made here or on the main page.
The reason I keep stumbling on this is there are certain bio pages I watch that are contstantly begin littered with stuff like "Smith owns two golden retrievers," or "Smith's favorite rock band is Ear Damage and he once served as a guest roadie at their gala concert in Des Moines." In other words, unsourced but not particuarly controversial. I would expect this page to make the policy on handling such additions crystal clear. But it doesn't, at least to me.
Maybe another way of putting my question is, what is the policy on handling unsourced trivia? Personally I think it should be deleted immediately just like unsourced controversial material, but I don't see an easy justification for that on the policy page. Mrhsj 16:24, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
As WAS says, we shouldn't go around deleting everything that's unsourced--there's tons of it in WP, most of it uncontroversial, and there have been at least two academic studies about the number of errors in Wikipedia compared to other encyclopedias and we came out fine both times. So we don't need to go berserk removing stuff that looks correct unless there's a recognizable chance from the nature of the item that an error could do damage (mainly this is when the item says something unflattering). What we have to safeguard against is malicious editing, repetition of controversial gossip as if it were fact, etc. Beyond that, we should as usual AGF. 67.117.130.181 12:44, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
Isn't labelling someone with this drawing a conclusion on that person and breaking WP:NOR and defamatory which would break BLP? Kyaa the Catlord 17:47, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
The wikien-l links in the notes section currently [11] go to wrong posts. Will somebody find the right URL's? PrimeHunter 16:40, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
Concern has been expressed about giving the exact dates of birth of living people as it might assist in identity theft. Surely this is even mor etrue of mother's maiden name. I am constantly asked for this as a form of identification. Also, maiden name of wife would assist in identity theft if there are any adult children, even if the subject of the bio is no longer alive. I therefor epropose that maiden name sof mother and wife be excluded from all biographies where this may be a danger.-- Holdenhurst 16:24, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
Where the names are on the public record, they should be included. Similarly, where the exact date of birth is on the public record, it should be included.-- Runcorn 23:51, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
Hi, I was contesting the inclusion of material from a blog posted on the article Benjamin M. Emanuel I had deleted the information saying it was poorly sourced contentious material that claimed the father of US Rep Rahm Emanuel was a murderous terrorist and also called for the speedy deletion of the article saying that it was an attack page. My edits were reverted by Admin User: Mel Etitis, thankfully now another Admin has deleted the same things that I had. My question to the board is about Mel Etitis' claim on my talk page that I was “misinterpreting the guidelines concerning blogs”.
listed three sources #1 being the reliable Washington-Times and #2-3 being from blogs, it stated
I stated that “This page is in violation of wiki-standards concerning biographies of living persons, it cites three sources two of which are blogs which are not reliable sources by wiki-standards and therefor can not be used. The one reliable source mentioned does not claim association with Irgun but only the "the pre-independence Israeli underground" and so does not support the claims made in this article.” User: Mel Etitis explained why I was mistaken by writing on the talk-page that “The article, however, is clear about the sources of the claims that it reports, and reports them in a dispassionate, disinterested, not to say sceptical way. Blogs, etc., shouldn't be used to verify claims made by articles, but they can certainly be referred to as the source of claims that are reported.” I wrote “The use of skeptical caveats does not allow for wiki-pages to use unsubstantiated charges that come from non-reliable unnotable sources." I received no direct response to that post, but at one point Mel Etitis wrote “WP:V#SELF simply doesn't rule out the reference to a blog, it rules out the use of blogs as (the sole) source for what articles say about their subjects. if the article said that he was a murderer, and cited a blog, that would be wrong; if it says that he's accused of murder in a blog, that's very different.” Is this true? Can an editor cite any claim from a blog as long as they cite that blog and add skeptical caveats? At first I thought he was just being biased because he was an early contributor to the article and had placed claims that Benjamin M. Emanuel “was a member of the Irgun, a radical Zionist paramilitary organization” on his son US Rep Rahm Emanuel’s page on 19:47, 9 January 2007 without any references. But as he is an Admin and as another Admin User:NawlinWiki had removed my request for speedy deletion at 18:44, 10 January 2007 and wrote on the title of that edit “doesn't seem to be an attack page, has sources”, I was confused. I went to the Wikipedia talk:Verifiability page and asked if this was acceptable and they seem split on the matter see discussion here. So the Question is: Can one cite a blog that claims someone is a murderer without evidence as long as one states that this information is from a blog?-- Wowaconia 19:01, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
There is an article about Blackmore's Night vocalist Candice Night. There was a note about her given name. But then her management deleted it. What do you think about it? Is it right or wrong? Geevee ( talk) 14:05, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
Are we now to police user page content to this BLP standard or just attempts to associate user pages with notable people's biographies? E.g. Jimbo's bio points to his web page (which looks OK) but maybe not every Wikipedia account holder who is notable wants to advertise his/her edits as being contributed with such gravitas. -- 71.141.231.234 23:37, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
This page was vandalised at some point with three unnecessary occurences of the {{ failed verification}} tag. I have sorted it out, but watch out for that happening again. Jake95 17:10, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
It's not vandalism. -- PopPop PopMusic 14:00, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
Once someone is deceased, BLP no longer applies. Shouldn't the WPBiography/BLP templates come down from the articles then? What is the proper way to handle this? F.F.McGurk 16:34, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
If you look at the standard template, it says {{WPBiography|living=yes}}; just alter "yes" to "no".-- Runcorn 17:28, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
What is the policy on sourced rumors in general? Also here are a couple of particular instances I have questions about:
A recent discussion on the Village Pump about whether it was ever appropriate to list product endorsements in the articles of celebrities (consensus: yes) got me thinking about the potential problems with unsourced claims of endorsement. Many jurisdictions have a distinct cause of action for false endorsement claims, i.e., making it look like someone has endorsed a product or service when they have not, and it's not extreme to imagine this amounting to libel in even ordinary cases of endorsement.
I propose that all claims that a living person was paid to endorse a particular product or service be expressly treated as inherently "controversial," so that they are to be removed if they are not reliably sourced. Thoughts? Postdlf 16:08, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
What should one do when you notice an editor that is adding things to a bio that seem to indicate a possibility of the user being a subject of that biography, or affiliated to a subject? I noticed User:75.80.55.135 adding some things that seemed to suggest just that. The way the user is adding things has got some of the edits reverted though (not because the edits were really malicious though). And I wanted to make sure that the user, if indeed a subject or affiliated with a subject, doesn't leave wikipedia with a bad experience, which is the general idea of WP:LIVING#Dealing_with_edits_by_the_subject_of_the_article I think. So I left a message on the talk page, and I just wanted to make sure if I handled that right. If I am not being too presumptuous, or on the other hand if I am not assuming too much here, and if what I did was at all needed. What do the rest of you think?-- Codemonkey 03:59, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
I thought your message was very well-considered and thoughtful, Codemonkey. Too often the subject of an article, obviously concerned about how they are presented, finds themselves thoroughly bitten by editors who are trying to do the right thing. Gently nudging the "outsider" to what is after all only our internal, inward-looking idea of what the right thing is should be approved, and I approve it in your case. Good work. Grace Note 08:21, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
It may be that the current policy is unrealistic and should be more flexible. Those people in the very many directories extant, such as Burkes, Debretts, Who's Who, Kellys, Whittakers, Who's Who in Scotland, Dods, etc., all carry the full dates of birth for living people/people in the public domain. David Lauder 14:22, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
For something to be controversial, by definition, it must have already caused a controversy. I'm pretty sure the idea of this policy is to prevent things from getting to that stage, so I think we should change it to "potentially controversial". - Amark moo! 02:44, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
There has lately been a bit of controversy and heated debates about including the dates of birth for certain articles. Here I would like to propose some sort of change to clarify matters further to prevent such wide interpretation of the policy as has been done. The current text is:
Wikipedia includes exact birthdates for some famous people, but including this information for most living people should be handled with caution. While many well-known living persons' exact birthdays are widely known and available to the public, the same is not always true for marginally notable people or non-public figures. With identity theft on the rise, it has become increasingly common for people to consider their exact date of birth to be private information. When in doubt about the notability of the person in question, or if the subject of a biography complains about the publication of his or her date of birth, err on the side of caution and simply list the year of birth rather than the exact date.
I would like to open up discussion on altering the bolded part of that quote. Certain possible ideas that have come up have been:
I'm leaving a note on the village pump to get some opinions about this as well, but I'd be much interested in opening up a discussion here about this. Cowman109 Talk 16:53, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
As far as WP:V is concerned I'm wondering if it should be a 100% cite policy for each and every statement in an article, since users are using it that way already under the assumption that any statement could be potentially controversial.
I don't necessarily think that a 100% cite policy is a particularly good or workable one, but if that is what we effectively have then the article should say so. Artw 03:15, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
What is unclear about this from the policy?
Undue weight applies to more than just viewpoints. Just as giving undue weight to a viewpoint is not neutral, so is giving undue weight to other verifiable and sourced statements. An article should not give undue weight to any aspects of the subject, but should strive to treat each aspect with a weight appropriate to its significance to the subject. Note that undue weight can be given in several ways, including, but not limited to, depth of detail, quantity of text, prominence of placement, and juxtaposition of statements.
CyberAnth 04:44, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
I fully support an interpretation that each and every statement beyond what is clearly common knowledge be cited in BLPs - especially in BLPs.
Apart from such a standard, determining what is or is not "controversial" is clearly a subjective exercise. It is therefore inherently error-prone. Within the space of that proneness is risk - risk of liability. These are hard facts, folks.
What is or is not "controversial" must therefore become a strictly objective exercise. The sole and exclusive way for that to happen is via strict adherence to WP:V. And even WP:V itself is very clear that any statement not cited may be removed.
The perennial incantations of many editors and admins - "BITE" and "POINT" and "CIVIL" - are typically rouges to allow irresponsible editorship to go on. "I like it" - "this is my nest" - "this may spillover to upset my articles" - these are the more likely causes underneath the incantations.
Yet it has all along been the responsibility of editors to know WP content policies before adding material to the project - especially with regards to BLPs. And they are forewarned of this at numerous turns, including when they sign up, and on BLP article Talk Pages.
It is time - far, far past time - to require real responsibility in editorship on BLPs. While this may cause some transitory upsetting of "nests", that is an entirely acceptable thing if it serves to produce the desired outcomes, and to alleviate even the potential for liability. And besides, the only reason it might be upsetting to some is that the culture here has been far too lax with BLPs.
A helpful analogy here is the mass deletion of replaceable fair use images by a cohort of admins. Yes, it upsets some editors' "nests" - editors who had a responsibility to know better in the first place. Yet given the GFDL, and despite the upsetting, it is for both the the long and short-term good of the project. If you are reading this, it is therefore in your interest as well.
Jimbo has well stated that "WP:BLP is essential the future of the project in every regard and must be taken very very seriously in all respects." [12] I invite others to join me in taking these words to heart, and following it with commensurate actions.
CyberAnth 21:11, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
CyberAnth, a few seperate points about your edits based on this policy:
So, who is going to define "clearly common knowledge" then? " Otto Waalkes is a German comedian and actor. His perhaps most famous trademark are the 'Ottifanten' ('Ottiphants'), elephant-like comic characters of his own design." is clearly common knowlege for me (and every other German out there), but I'm sure it's not common knowledge in the US. Whose common knowledge are we going to use? -- Conti| ✉ 21:50, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
I just cited the elephant pre-occupation in the article.
I suggest the following as particularly pertinent from Wikipedia:Common knowledge:
Anything the reporting Wikipedians don't have direct personal experience with. Most of us don't have personal experience with space travel, or the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. But many of us have experienced popular music, know our local geography, and are familiar with the meanings of words within our local communities, although, as always, if your edit is challenged, no matter how convinced you are that you're right, you must cite a reliable published source.
CyberAnth 22:31, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
Since meeting WP:BLP relies heavily on the citation and reference tags, which are complex to use and quite frankly not something a new or casual user is likely to bother themselves with, perhaps anyone who is not a longstanding user should be banned from editing articles where WP:BLP applies altogether? In the long run it can only save trouble. Artw 21:37, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
I think that this suggestion is completely against the idea of Wikipedia. Users should never be forbidden from editting articles just because the individual contained within the article is alive. The Earth has over six billion people, and while less than one percent of them could be construed as notable for coverage in Wikipedia, we should not restrict new users to write solely about historical (read deceased) individuals.— Ryūlóng ( 竜龍) 08:35, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
There is a problem at Boris Stomakhin with contributors edit warring. The problem is that the sources for the negative comments are all in Russian. Not only is it impossible for non-russian speakers to read them, we can't even tell if they are reliable" or not. For example, "death to all russians" is sourced to [13]. So, what guidance is offered? In a sense, these sites fail "verifiability" for most of us William M. Connolley 12:56, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
The default position is that in BLPs, "You must get it right", or when unwilling to do this, perhaps find another area.
So my feeling of it is, my sense of it is, that the living biographies part of Wikipedia, which is one of the most difficult and most important areas, is one where we're really seeing a really massive movement towards higher quality. A lot of people in the community are really committed to that.
And the few people who are still sort of in the old days, saying, "Well, you know, it's a wiki, why don't we just... ", yeah, they're sort of falling by the wayside, because lots of people are saying actually, we have a really serious responsibility to get things right. [14]
CyberAnth 09:12, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
Comment. Many articles are going to need to use foreign sources if Wikipedia is to avoid Western bias. There are many Wikipedia contributors who speak other languages. It should not be difficult to find an impartial editor (or even an admin) who speaks the relevant language and can check the validity of the source. Wikiprojects on countries that speak that language and translation projects are a good place to look. Also as Rossami points out most people have userboxes whith their language proficiencies which add them to relevant categories. Off the top of my head, Mikkalai is a native Russian speaker, you could approach him. WJB scribe 14:31, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
Support and comment. I agree with William M. Connolley. But the reason of this editing war is actually violation of LP policy by User:Vlad fedorov. Please see my arguments here Talk:Boris_Stomakhin#Violations_of_LP_policy. Biophys 16:52, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
Translation of the material needs to be provided for verifiability. See WP:V#Sources_in_languages_other_than_English ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 18:24, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
I was wondering what kind of "warning" I should give a user who edits an article to state a person has passed away? See Jaco van der Westhuyzen. It seems like a pretty serious thing to be claiming. I did a search on google news and he seems to be almost certainly alive and well. - Shudda talk 23:43, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
A lot of heat has been thrown about lately due to the aggressiveness that BLP allows editors to utilize in conforming to the guideline. I think that the project would benefit from adding a request that any of the following be fulfilled:
If these are done, and there is no response, then removal of controversial and unsourced material should be utilized as a last resort. We are a community and we will work a lot better if we communicate instead of forcing some individuals to work from scratch (and do not quote Talk:Ron Jeremy#WP:BLP, I'm tired of that whole situation).— Ryūlóng ( 竜龍) 08:46, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
A compromise option might be to create some templates which could be placed on an article's talk page (and possibly the talk pages of regular contributors), noting that material incompatible with WP:BLP has been removed, but can be restored if properly cited. Unless the information has been purged from the article's history, editors should be able to see what material has been removed, and therefore what citations need to be found before the material is restored — and the template could point this out. Applying a template like this might help reduce the emotional response when material is removed. This way, the material is still removed ASAP (to cover Wikipedia's collective ass from lawsuits), but regular editors of an article might feel less affronted. — Josiah Rowe ( talk • contribs) 19:48, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
I think Josiah's idea is good, with some very important caveats. The sum total of WP:BLP is not satisfied by simple adherence to WP:CITE, although it is is a very common misconception among Wikipedians that it does. Often, the problematic issues are more nuanced but problematic just the same. For example, say a biography (or more properly, something under the guise of a biography) contains numerous sentences explaining the person generally, but the rest of the article is little other than a slugfest of controversies and criticisms, placed in most often by that person's critics. In this case, and even if each item is properly cited, WP:Undue weight is the concern - and an undue weight problem is a BLP problem. Another example is often found in the sections on the subject's viewpoints and beliefs. When a subject's views are expressed primarily from the perspective of his or her critics, even if properly cited, this violates WP:NPOV, and as such it too is a BLP problem. So, perhaps a way to deal with this is to make a talkpage template that says, "Material incompatible with WP:BLP has been removed from this article. Further information may be available in this article's edit history." I think such a template is a good idea for articles that show no recent edit history and/or no obvious evidence that the article is in recent editors' watchlist. CyberAnth 20:56, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
(It would be good to link the word "history" to the page's history, but I don't know how to do that.)Material has been removed from this article in accordance with Wikipedia's policy on biographies of living persons. This policy states that "editors should remove any controversial material about living persons that is either unsourced, relies upon sources that do not meet standards specified in Wikipedia:Reliable sources, or is a conjectural interpretation of a source." Care should also be taken to avoid giving undue weight to minority viewpoints.
This page's history will show the information that has been removed. If it is possible to restore that information with citations from reliable sources, and while maintaining a balanced tone, editors may do so. However, please do not restore content that violates WP:BLP. Thank you.
Could some people please take a look at Banjee and then weigh in at Talk:Banjee#WP:BLP on whether {{ BLP}} belongs on that talk page? One editor thinks it does, because the article has a photograph of an (unidentified) living person and mentions another living person by name. I think it doesn't, because the article isn't a biography of a living person, but rather an article about a group of people. — An gr 17:28, 3 February 2007 (UTC)
Do we really need the list of articles about living persons that have been contentious? This looks to me to be irrelevant to a policy page, and I would suggest it is removed. Enchanter 21:08, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
Biography of Living Persons Administrators ("BLP Admins") carry out a specialized, narrowly tailored administrative role within Wikipedia. Please see WP:BLPADMIN to offer your thoughts on this proposal. CyberAnth 03:24, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
I hope this isn't the wrong place to post this. I posted a report yesterday at WP:AN/3RR, but nothing was done. I appreciate that administrators are working on a voluntary basis, and may not have had time to look into my complaint.
Gillian McKeith is a living person who writes books on nutrition. She uses the title "Dr Gillian McKeith", but her doctorate is not recognised by the authorities in the area where she obtained it. (Correspondence course, and payment of fees.) She appears regularly on television, and claims to be able to diagnose and cure health problems by examining peoples faeces, which I believe she does on her TV programmes.
A user Briantist started inserting "aka the poo lady (passes herself off as doctor)" into the first line of the article. Several users have reverted him, but he keeps reinserting it, sometimes under the pretext of reverting vandalism.
He made four reverts yesterday, and I left a message on his talk page and also on the article talk page. I asked him to revert himself. He replied that "the rule doesn't apply if you are restoring items that have references which are being replaced by opinion". I've read the 3RR policy page carefully, and I can't see that it says that. (In any case, his edits are not being replaced by "opinion"; they're just being removed.) He added "Also, it's not me who appears on TV every week at about 830pm forcing people to smell and look at poo!" (This can all be found here.)
I reported him, but no administrator took any action following my report, and I accept that. However, he came back today, and made two edits, which I think violated the spirit of 3RR. He had been changing "Gillian McKeith" to "Gillian McKeith aka the poo lady". Now, he changed it to "Scatalogically infamous Gillian McKeith". [16] And he had been adding "passes herself of as doctor". Now he added "who sells herself as Dr Gillian McKeith". [17] I reverted him, and he reverted me with "rvv". [18]
I apologise if I shouldn't bring this here, but I think this is more than a content dispute. I've read various policy pages, and feel I'm now familiar with several of them, but I find this one more difficult to absorb, because the idea of "negative, unsourced" is rather subjective. Briantist insists that his claims have references, and I believe it's quite true that her doctorate is unaccredited, and that some people call her "the poo lady", but I think the living Gillian McKeith might well object if she saw such inflammatory langauge in the very first sentence.
It doesn't seem to be a 3RR matter any longer, because his more recent reverts were not within the twenty-four hours. But I'd really appreciate some help from someone experienced who has a good understanding of the BLP policy. Thanks. ElinorD 11:51, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
I saw this the other day, but was busy. I agree with Tom about "passes herself off as". However, I find "scatologically infamous", and "sells herself as Dr Gillian McKeith" if possible, even more problematic. [20] [21] [22] To begin an article with "Scatologically infamous Gillian McKeith" completely violates WP:NPOV, WP:NOR, and WP:BLP. While NPOV and NOR violations do not absolve a user from the obligation to adhere to 3RR, violations of BLP do, and any editor should feel free to continue taking out such material, without regard to 3RR. The insertion of such material is borderline trolling, and I wouldn't hesitate to block someone for it (after warning), even if he did not violate 3RR. I'm rather busy at the moment, but I think an administrator should keep an eye on that page, as there seems to be an ongoing problem. [23] Even the talk page (because talk pages are subject to BLP too) is problematic. [24] Musical L inguist 13:17, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
The purpose of BLP is to not to remove things like "so-and-so likes apple pie." Or "so and so has a dog". Overly bold editors are removing such mundane uncited things simply because they are being WP:DICK. Perhaps the proposal should be discussed but reverting based on the statement that we have to cite every, single, non-controversial, statement is utterly ridiculous. You want to read an article with one hundred footnotes? I certainly don't. Wjhonson 16:44, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
Should they have their own articles? There is a discussion about this going on on the living persons noticeboard. I have complained but am not sure what to do next. For one thing I am using my real name here and I don't know what kind of people I would be going up against if I made a big thing about this. Steve Dufour 18:03, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
A CFD has been proposed to merge Category:Ex-members of the Ku Klux Klan into Category:Ku Klux Klan members, because categories for people shouldn't distinguish between past and present status. However, I'm concerned that because "members" implies present status (something that a category's description can't ameliorate because that doesn't show up in the articles that are tagged) this could be libellous if they've in fact renounced the KKK. I'd appreciate some other thoughts in that CFD. Postdlf 18:36, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
On my watchlist, I recently noticed on the article on Katharine McPhee that a controversial subject regarding a Sirius satellite radio show was added (tabloid gossip, perhaps?).
I am not sure what to make of it. It seems offensive but also kind of relevant. (Key phrase: kind of.)
I'm aware that articles are to be comprehensive to the person's life and career. Is this going too far or is it ok? I'm neutral- neither against or for inclusion.
The guy has an article. Would the statement be more suitable on that article than on hers? Whatever the consensus is, feel free to make the changes. Or not, if it's perfectly fine. Elle Bee 19:04, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
David Barton is a controversial figure, for various reason cited in his article. Please review the diff between myself and another editor. We have been engaged in a reverting battle and I'd like other opinions. diff Wjhonson 20:58, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
I work on a lot of Bollywood actor/actress pages, and I see a great many edits concerning the stars' romantic lives. If the star is married and not known to be carrying on an immensely public affair, editors generally leave the star alone. We end up with "X married Y and they have two children." However, single stars are the subject of laser-like focus by gossip columnists, gossip which editors then insert in WP. It's the latest hottest stars who get this treatment; no one seems to care very much about the dalliances of Dilip Kumar. So we get statements like "X has had relationships with A, B, and C; X dumped B for C." Some of this is referenced to gossip columns and some of it is inserted without references and like kudzu, keeps re-appearing even after it has been weeded out.
A great many of the Indian editors seem to think that this is a proper use of WP and get irritated with me when I replace it with "X is single." Myself, I see it as a mis-use of WP. I don't think who dates who is at all notable, unless there's some huge controversy or the matter ends up in court. Or someone writes a tell-all roman à clef that becomes a best-seller. Retailing gossip is just so ... vulgar. So invasive. So unkind.
I should perhaps note that my position on this has changed over the years. When I first started editing here, I would let that sort of stuff pass, as long as it was referenced. Over time, it has come to seem more intrusive and more irritating.
I don't edit non-Bollywood star biographies, but I imagine that this happens in other places as well. (Not to all stars -- the Nathan Fillion article, which I do follow, is blessedly bereft of gossip.) Is there a policy that applies to salacious concentration on single stars' dating lives? Zora 04:14, 9 February 2007 (UTC)