This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Back on 10 April 2018 I raised an issue on this talk page (now archived) about a sexual assault allegation in a BLP article. Received a useful response from User:Masem at Talk:Dan Spitz. Concerning allegations that have only been made in social media but with no reporting to authorities or corroboration from reliable media outlets, Masem said "BLP strongly recommends not including this information even if it can be sourced." I have come across a couple more such things: see Timothy Heller (accuser) and Melanie Martinez (singer) (accused). Thanks to the Me Too movement, people are talking about this problem in earnest, and that's important, but WP already has rules on unconfirmed statements in the biographies of living persons. I suggest that the BLP team discuss some sort of policy on this new breed of allegations. Thanks. --- DOOMSDAYER520 ( Talk| Contribs) 21:36, 1 June 2018 (UTC)
I have posted a question about image size for BLP infobox portraits. Please see: Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Politics#Images for more info. Thanks - wolf 00:37, 29 June 2018 (UTC)
The subject of an article I watch objected to having their (properly sourced) DOB listed. I have restored it with just the year, per WP:DOB on this page, but what happens if the subject still objects? Jdcooper ( talk) 10:43, 28 May 2018 (UTC)
Galobtter, out of interest and for future reference, if the source is a secondary source and the subject complains, what is the procedure in that case? Jdcooper ( talk) 17:28, 28 May 2018 (UTC)
The privacy policy WP:DOB needs to be modified. In particular, the sentence "[i]f the subject complains about the inclusion of the date of birth [...] err on the side of caution and simply list the year, provided that there is a reliable source for it" needs to be modified or removed. First of all, the last part is redudant since per WP:BLPRS we do not include any information that is not backed by reliable sources anyways (regardless of whether it is birth dates, college degrees, or the persons membership in the Communist party).
But more importantly, why does it matter if "the subject" complains? As far as I know this is the only instance where we give subjects final editorial approval of article content. On the basis of privacy of all reasons? As User:David Gerard put it (when he first deleted WP:DOB in 2006 after it was added unilaterally without prior discussion) this is “ridiculous paranoia,” since if someone's DOB is published in say Who's Who or Library of Congress authority files, then what is the point of deleting the information from Wikipedia? What layer of privacy does it add? I understand that part in WP:DOB on "phone numbers, addresses, account numbers," but date of birth is different.
In short: date of birth is an essential part of every biography, in Wikipedia and elsewhere (for a good reason, encyclopedic articles open with DOB). I don't see why our general WP:BLP policies shouldn't apply; that is, if the information is unsourced we delete it, but if there is a publicly accessible reliable source, we keep it. Subject's privacy concerns notwithstanding, because if we can find reliable sources on somebody's DOB so can everyone else. -- bender235 ( talk) 16:21, 7 July 2018 (UTC)
Wikipedia only includes full names and dates of birth that have been
widelyextensively published by multiple reliable sources, or by sources linked to the subject such that it may reasonably be inferred that the subject does not object. In either case, the source or sources must be cited in the article.
"identity thief's life a little harder". There are reasons why the month and year are valuable to a reader—but why is a day of the month of any conceivable value to a reader? I think that Wikipedia is more easily machine-analyzable than the vastness of the Internet. Bus stop ( talk) 12:21, 14 July 2018 (UTC)
"I have spent waay more time lurking this discussion than I intended to". OK. Don't let me cause you to waste any more of your time. We are weighing conflicting interests. No one is arguing that there is absolutely no value in the day of birth. But including that information is less useful to the reader than the month or year, and that piece of information could be used in identity theft. As for machine-readability, Wikipedia is only one website and it has a predictable formula, thus facilitating machine-readability. Bus stop ( talk) 13:20, 14 July 2018 (UTC)
This
edit request to
Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
Dear Wiki, I am writing to request for the edit of a major verifiable character assassination clause '... until being dismissed for plagiarism". I have never been dismissed on any breach of professional ethics. If anything I have, out of ethics or other priorities, resigned from a lucrative academic position or declined an offered of a coveted academic fellowship at places like the LSE in UK.
You may verify that I have never been dismissed from LSE with Professor Mary Kaldor at LSE <redacted> or Professor Tim Allen at <redacted>, professor of government and head of international development department at LSE, who knew me and my work first-hand.
My detractors have even set up webpages attacking, among other things, my authenticity of my PhD from the University of Wisconsin at Madison (1998) while the Burmese language newspapers - which cheer-lead the genocide of Rohingya and whip up Islamophobia among the Buddhist majority - run slanderous Burmese language articles on the front pages, declaring me "national traitor" and "enemy of the state" while the military was engaged in ethnic cleansing of Rohingyas in the fall of 2017.
Because of my uncompromising activism against my own country's genocide against Rohingya muslims - I am a Buddhist, not Muslim - I have been subjected to relentless and nasty character assassination attempts and trolls on line. I did not set up this page as "ZARNI (activist)". This was set up by those whose intent was to destroy my credibility and integrity by pigeonholing me as "activist" - and nothing else. I am a writer, political commentator, scholar, grassroots organizer, human rights advocate - not simply "Rohingya campaigner".
This article published in N. America's reputable TRICYCLE touched on the issue of slanderous, below-the-belt attacks on me as a human rights activist.
https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/voices-inside-rohingya-refugee-camps/
I would like to permanently removed that nasty clause from the Wiki entry. Thanking you in advance.
Sincerely,
Maung Zarni
UK: <redacted> & <redacted> M zarni ( talk) 09:52, 24 July 2018 (UTC)
Hi all. Do we find academia.edu to be an acceptable source for citations in biographies of living persons? My gut says it's way too close to self-published but I'm occasionally wrong. Please ping me if you respond as I will not be following this page. Rap Chart Mike ( talk) 13:34, 26 July 2018 (UTC)
Should WP:BLP and WP:CSD be changed in such a manner?
This RfC was created here, because it is related to admin behaviour, involves at least two separate policies, and this is a highly trafficked discussion page.---
Coffeeand
crumbs 21:26, 29 July 2018 (UTC) Then moved here.---
Coffeeand
crumbs 22:11, 29 July 2018 (UTC)
Taking human dignity and respect for personal privacy into account when adding or removing information, especially in articles of ephemeral or marginal interestis that they were concerned we weren't deleting biographies as often as they felt we should.) ‑ Iridescent 2 22:26, 29 July 2018 (UTC)
Over at WT:MOS, Yndajas has raised an off-topic thread about deadnaming of the transgendered. Said party has been pointed to this page about 5 times but continues re-discuss the matter on a page where the issue is not going to be resolved, so I'm opening this discussion for them. (I suppose WT:V or WP:VPPRO could also have worked, but this seemed the most narrowly tailored policy-not-guideline talk page).
The gist (with various drama elided):
I see no obvious way to resolve this, but I do know that WT:MOS can't make up a new change to sourcing policy for bios of living people; it's the wrong venue no matter what the potential outcomes of such a debate might be.
PS: The deadname was incidentally mentioned in the WT:MOS thread in a (good faith) post of the subject's website as evidence [3] (turned out to be their old website [4]); it has the deadname as its domain name. This might need to be WP:OVERSIGHTed, though I already redacted the link, so it's only available in the old diff. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 14:09, 29 July 2018 (UTC)
To respect trans people, when we write about them once they identify as trans and begin to transition, we write about them using their preferred name. This is very common in the library world, when we replace the dead name of an author in authority records with their preferred name so that every catalog record about a book or article they had written will be retrievable using their preferred name.
While it is true that Wikipedia cannot control the artifacts out in the world which have the dead name of a person, we can be respectful and change dead names to preferred names for living persons--especially if they personally request such a change.
RachelWex ( talk) 01:27, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
@
Yndajas: Re "bickering, drama": that was in reference to the ad hominem and other unconstructive material I collapse-boxed in the original thread. I'm not implying that the entire discussion is bickering and drama, or I would not have bothered bringing it here. About '"transgendered" is an outdated and offensive term', The GLAAD Media Reference Guide doesn't agree, and simply suggests it's a redundant construction and inconsistent with other terms; I don't see much out there about it being "offensive" other than material written by TG language-reform activists. I'll avoid the term on the basis of redundancy. Your old site is maintained, because it's live and that's not free. It's not like a wicked gang of thugs is forcing you to have that site up and running. If you cared as much about deadnaming in the real world as you seem to here, you would have taken that site down a long time ago. So why are you "activisting" about deadnaming on Wikipedia? It smacks of
WP:POINT. And linking or referring to it is deadnaming yourself, since the entire domain name consists of nothing but that deadname with a .co extension. You're free to do that all you want, but in my view it torpedoes your argument here. "There is no article about this person (and likely won't be)" is not drama, it's an observation that we have zero evidence you are even potentially
WP:Notable for anything other than having run for local office a few years ago. Approx. 99.9884% of living persons are not notable, minus some percentage of bios we definitely need to have but don't have yet (we have about 870,000 BLPs, and the world population is about 7.5 bil ±100 mil), Ergo, saying you likely will not be notable isn't an insult, it a statistical near-certainty. You are clearly searching for ways to find offense in everything people say when you aren't getting what you want, and that
won't fly here. I'll let others address the rest of this; I brought you to this page for that reason – others who spend more time on BLP matters are much better able to address ideas like "using notability as a criteria for not deadnaming trans people creates a two-class system where you must earn your right not to be deadnamed", and other more substantive statements than the trivia I've responded to.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 01:25, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
Right now the BLP1E section of this page says, not-very-clearly:
The significance of an event or individual is indicated by how persistent the coverage is in reliable sources. It is important for editors to understand two clear differentiations of the People notable for only one event guideline (WP:BIO1E) when compared with this policy (WP:BLP1E): WP:BLP1E should be applied only to biographies of living people, or those who have recently died, and to biographies of low-profile individuals.
Does that mean biographies of all low-profile individuals, living AND dead?? That means that the "1 EVENT" rule is enough to torpedo all BLPs, and biographies of (dead) low profile individuals ( WP:LPI). Or just living low-profile individuals? But this implies it is NOT enough to torpedo BIOs of dead people who sought the lime-light and had no problem with self-promotion. For example, what about a BIO for the world's shortest man (a Tom Thumb) if he gave newspaper interviews and accepted awards? All else in his fame in the fruit of his being short (1 event). Perhaps this rule doesn't work on BIOs of 1E (dead) people even if they do NOT self promote, as we don't care about the privacy of dead people as much? If that is really true, then there should be a mirror-image guideline under WP:BIO for self-promoting 1E DEAD PEOPLE (like Tom Thumb) and even for really-short dead people who never joined the circus, and were shy. In fact, if WP really intends the notability rules to change when a person dies, it should very clearly (somewhere) spell out how. It doesn't. I cannot logically infer it, as the language is not clear. We need a clear "WP:BDP" (biography dead people) policy. S B H arris 09:35, 13 August 2018 (UTC)
Waycross (band) doesn't seem to meet WP:GNG. While they did chart on a major Billboard chart, they utterly fail WP:V. Literally the only sources I found are a college newspaper (which only gives WP:ROUTINE coverage due to one of the members being an alumnus of said college), and a single post from an unreliable looking blog. A search for "Ben Stennis" + "Waycross" turns up absolutely nothing. Even Gbooks has zero results. The only hits for the song are lyric databases, YouTube uploads, and false positives. Literally the only reputable source I have that even gives the names of the members is the Joel Whitburn Hot Country Songs book, which is already given a citation in the article alongside the college newspaper and a now-broken link to CMT's upload of the video. As far as I can tell, there is not a scrap of information out there on these guys. Usual country music sources like Country Standard Time, Taste of Country, and Roughstock.com also turn up nothing. While the song "Nineteen" does have an article, it's still very short and focuses mainly on Billy Ray Cyrus's cover of it.
tl;dr: I am convinced that these guys utterly fail WP:BAND due to the lack of sources. Is my assessment accurate? Should someone take this to AFD? Ten Pound Hammer • ( What did I screw up now?) 03:55, 17 August 2018 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Suppose there is a Wikipedia article about a living USA musician in which it is not mentioned that he was convicted of rape and is a registered sex offender. The source for this is a Megan's Law website with an entry that clearly identifies the musician by a "mugshot" photograph, name, date of birth, etc; with no other secondary sources about the conviction available. The entry notes the musician's offense as Rape By Force.
Surely everybody can agree that it would be good to note the rape conviction in the article about the musician, but there seems to be opposition to using the the only available source from some editors.
Is it appropriate to use the source to establish the rape conviction in the musician's article? -- 83.177.85.253 ( talk) 11:50, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
Do not use trial transcripts and other court records, or other public documents, to support assertions about a living person.Galobtter ( pingó mió) 13:29, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
Hi all, was looking at Jason Bateman and was tempted to remove a line about him having endorsed Bernie Sanders, and another line about him being a fan of a sports team, as both seem rather trivial to me. Is there a consensus in favor of including or excluding such information? If not, should we try to establish one? Cheers. DonIago ( talk) 14:09, 21 August 2018 (UTC)
Requesting any input on a question raised at Talk:The Cutting Room Floor (website)#What name to use for one of the designers/maintainers of this website? The issue is this: we do know the real name of the person, who is mentioned in several places in the article text. He uses only his online handle at the subject website. The article as originally written (in March) used his real name with a mention of his online handle. He has now asked us, in an off-wiki message, not to use his real name, but to refer to him only by his online handle. Does BLP policy offer any guidance on this situation? Are we required to use his real name since it has been published elsewhere, or can we respect his request to be named only by the handle he uses in his work for the subject? -- MelanieN ( talk) 18:37, 18 August 2018 (UTC)
I note that guiding spirit of BLP is "We are not here to make people sad" it it's reasonably avoidable.
I note also that BLP now applies to recently deceased persons. Dead people don't have feelings and don't care about their reputations -- they are dead, as dead as Charlemagne. The section on this says BLP applies to "material about the dead that has implications for their living relatives and friends". So this establishes the precedent that that the feelings/welfare of groups of people other than the subject are in play.
The "Legal persons and groups" section says "This policy does not normally apply to material about corporations, companies, or other entities regarded as legal persons". Towns are not any of these things, although they usually are legally constituted entities (if not unincorporated), but not a Legal person according to that article, it doesn't seem. This distinction may be splitting hairs, but on the other hand the section does deliberately and specifically make the point of applying only to legal persons.
The entire section says:
This policy does not normally apply to material about corporations, companies, or other entities regarded as legal persons, though any such material must be written in accordance with other content policies. The extent to which the BLP policy applies to edits about groups is complex and must be judged on a case-by-case basis. A harmful statement about a small group or organization comes closer to being a BLP problem than a similar statement about a larger group; and when the group is very small, it may be impossible to draw a distinction between the group and the individuals that make up the group. When in doubt, make sure you are using high-quality sources.
So... writing negative stuff about a town will make a lot of people sad. Nothing in this policy mentions towns either way. So I'd think it doesn't apply... but should it?
It is a tough call. Most of our town articles whitewash the history of towns, and I'm sure you can figure out why. So since rules (are supposed to) codify practice, this'd be another reason to add towns here.
For the example that makes me ponder this question, see Talk:Cleveland, Texas#RfC: 2011 rapes. IMO stuff like this is useful info for the reader to to answer the question "what is the deal with this entity" on an encyclopedic level in addition to the usual stuff about when it was founded, how many parks it has, what the climate is, what highways run near it, etc. However, that is debatable, and it probably makes the people in Cleveland, Texas sad, certainly damages its reputation, and probably causes some material damage to the town, and so if it was a living person we would probably not include it... Herostratus ( talk) 01:28, 18 August 2018 (UTC)
Daniel Baldwin is one case. He's a probably a B-list celebrity but his cover photo is a mugshot from an arrest, because that's the only publicly available headshot.
/info/en/?search=Talk:Daniel_Baldwin#Less_judgemental_photograph
It seems this is far from ideal, and a policy might be appropriate to use no photo at all if this sort of photo is the only one available.
-- Geekeasy ( talk) 00:06, 26 August 2018 (UTC)
The section §Recently dead or probably_dead outlines how a person whose date of birth is 115 years or more ago can be presumed to be dead. However there are many cases, such as Yusra (archaeologist), where birth dates are unknown and we only have dates where the person did a noteworthy event. This tends to be the case for a lot of stubs, such as L._Doran (an Indian cricketer who played in the 1950s). This policy page currently offers no guidance on these cases.
Action: Add the following to
§Recently dead or probably_dead: When a date of birth is not known, a person is assumed to be covered by this policy if the earliest event in their lives mentioned in the article occurred within the last 100 years.
This is a conservative policy, (like the 115 year rule). Almost all such events which would be in scope here would be have done while the person was over 15 years old. -- LukeSurl t c 13:20, 13 August 2018 (UTC)
If dates of death and birth are unknown, editors should use reasonable judgement to infer from dates of events noted in the article if it is probable the person was born within the last 115 years is therefore covered by this policy, leaning on the side of caution.. I think this reflects current practice. -- LukeSurl t c 09:32, 29 August 2018 (UTC)
I keep getting reverted by the same editor who claims I'm vandalizing these articles when trying to edit the following statements (green) in accordance to what the sources used to support them say (blue). Are these BLP violations?:
"Providing logistical support for terrorist operations". [5] what the source says: "She was responsible for directing some MEK operations from Iraq, suggesting that she was sent to the US and then to Canada, to act in an organizational capacity."
"In 1982, she was accused of leading a terrorist attack against the Iranian government on behalf of the organization". [6] what the source says Samadi became a member of the MEK in 1980 and was an active fighter for the organization against Iranian targets in the 1980s, including alleged terrorist attacks in Tehran in 1982
"Providing logistical support for terrorist operations". [7] what the source says Robab Farahi-Mahdevie was alleged to have masterminded the 1992 attack on the Iranian embassy in Ottawa
There are a few more, but may be best to keep it concise for now. Thanks for the feedback. Stefka Bulgaria ( talk) 21:19, 29 August 2018 (UTC)
Per WP:DOB (which is partially motivated by WP:AVOIDVICTIM, according to 1, 2, etc.), it seems imperative that BLPs do not contain unsourced dates of birth. Is there any reason a BLP would be allowed to contain an unsourced date of birth? wumbolo ^^^ 13:29, 25 August 2018 (UTC)
Already raised and answered at WP:ELN#Infobox link to The Maria Butina Legal Expense Fund. -- SarekOfVulcan (talk) 20:46, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
An issue has been raised about appropriate external links and the personal website included in an infobox for someone accused of a crime awaiting trial. If possible reference What_Wikipedia_is_not#PROMO, What Wikipedia is not promotion, in your response.
Specifically, can the personal website listed on a Wikipedia page of someone accused of a crime contain a link to a legal defense fund or information that might support the defense of that individual? Can you be specific about why or why not?
Under what circumstances can a link to a legal defense fund be included in a Wikipedia article? For example, does it matter if the legal defense fund is controlled by a trustee? Geo8rge ( talk) 20:36, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
This page says that "public documents" are not good references. Could somebody clarify that in the article (and list more examples), I don't know what is and what isn't a "public document". -- 213.149.61.113 ( talk) 22:28, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
The concern is twofold. One is the possible misuse of primary sources in order to make claims which no one has deigned to repeat in a secondary reliable source. The second is the issue of privacy inherent in most court records to begin with, and the ability to promoote matters which are legally confidential in a public venue (such as legal addresses of celebrities, names of minor children and the like). We are not saying "public documents are false" but we are saying that Wikipedia relies on secondary reliable sources, just as primary medical papers are not generally accepted as sources, even though we do not accuse them of not being factual. I think this covers the issue. It appears obvious, moreover, that the intent is to include arrest records and other documents which may contain similar material. Collect ( talk) 23:36, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
WP:RS says reliable independent secondary sources. Arrest records and offender databases are primary. They should only be used for uncontroversial facts. If multiple reliable independent sources say X was arrested, or X is in prison, then the official record can support the date of arrest or the place of imprisonment. We can't use these for sources for the fact of arrest or imprisonment, not least becasue there may be someone else with the same name. Guy ( Help!) 21:58, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
Opinions are needed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of notable people and groups accused of sexual misconduct since the Me Too movement. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 16:52, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard#famousbirthdays.com on whether FamousBirthdays.com should be used as an RS for birth dates if there are no other collaborating sources. (BLP issued due to several recent questions about birth dates) -- Masem ( t) 23:17, 20 September 2018 (UTC)
I'm not making this an formal RfC to avoid the hassle and be more informal, but...
In the "Legal persons and groups" subsection I propose to change the text as follows (emphasis added here to show additions, not to be in the actual page text):
...A harmful statement about a small group or organization or inhabited place comes closer to being a BLP problem than a similar statement about a larger group; and when the group or organization or inhabited place is very small, it may be impossible to draw a distinction between the group and the individuals that make up the group...
Reading the existing text, it seems clear to me that inhabited places would certainly fall under this rubric. So let's include them. (They may already be included, on the grounds that "persons inhabiting a town" is a "group"; this is arguable). And if they shouldn't included under the rubric, it should be specifically stated "This does not apply to inhabited places" for clarity.
The reason that inhabited places falls under the rubric is, I mean after all stuff about towns can make people feel as bad as stuff about groups, and can damage reputations to a degree -- "Oh you're from that town where they had the [arguably borderline-to-include bad event]" or "Nope, don't show me any houses in that town where they have the [bad situation described with perhaps arguably somewhat marginal references]" and so on.
Also: rules are supposed to follow practice. As a practical matter, towns are whitewashed to an extent anyway, as you can imagine -- people who live there are pretty persistent about that. But it's somewhat random. So it should be codified (or DE-codified, it there's a desire to push back against that.) Herostratus ( talk) 01:35, 15 September 2018 (UTC)
OK fine, but it appears that the situation is unclear. One person above says "I don't think we should expand BLP to include towns.." which indicates that she doesn't think it applies now, while the next person says " Towns are small groups of people..." which indicates that she does thinks it already applies. So I mean probably we should clarify? Like maybe add something like this to the end of the section:
This does not apply to inhabited places, which are not considered groups, organizations, or legal persons for the purposes of this rule.
Advantage here is clarity. Clarity avoids arguments in individual cases (not about the content but about whether BLP applies), which wastes time and results in different answers for similar cases. OTOH adding this might go against usual practice, which rules aren't supposed to do. OTOOH, maybe this is not that much of an issue and adding any further elucidation is unnecessary rulecruft. Herostratus ( talk) 09:27, 25 September 2018 (UTC)
BLP1E says, The significance of an event or individual is indicated by how persistent the coverage is in reliable sources. If an article is created very quickly (which is bad per WP:DELAY), we can't know if the coverage will be persistent (e.g. WP:10YT). I propose that WP:RAPID is deprecated in cases where BLP1E applies. WP:AVOIDVICTIM is part of BLP policy, and everyone ignores it in favor of other non-BLP policies and guidelines. Furthermore, the WP:AVOIDVICTIM policy is almost useless, because most damage is done by the mere existence of an article about a victim. wumbolo ^^^ 11:57, 29 September 2018 (UTC)
There is a consensus for the proposal. The text has been added.
In what cases should BLP policy apply for articles about persons for whom there is no confirmation of death, nor a date of birth? -- LukeSurl t c 14:30, 29 August 2018 (UTC)
Currently the §Recently dead or probably dead section has instructions regarding the applicability of this policy for persons for whom it is not known whether or not they are still alive. This states that, for such persons, BLP applies if they were born in the last 115 years. However this assumes the date of birth is known, which is often not the case — especially for stub articles. Practically, the only chronological information to go on are usually one or two dates when the person did something. Examples of these, with links are to current versions at time of this post, are:
There should be some guidance regarding whether these are BLP-covered, as the current policy is silent.
I suggest the following text to add to the end of the
§Recently dead or probably dead section.
If the date of birth is unknown, editors should use reasonable judgement to infer—from dates of events noted in the article—if it is plausible that the person was born within the last 115 years and is therefore covered by this policy.
This is effectively the most cautious side of current practice. Note the use of the word plausible which instructs editors to be very conservative. Practically, editors could assume a person may have been as young as 16 for most types of events, unless it is noted they were a child. -- LukeSurl t c 14:30, 29 August 2018 (UTC)
This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Back on 10 April 2018 I raised an issue on this talk page (now archived) about a sexual assault allegation in a BLP article. Received a useful response from User:Masem at Talk:Dan Spitz. Concerning allegations that have only been made in social media but with no reporting to authorities or corroboration from reliable media outlets, Masem said "BLP strongly recommends not including this information even if it can be sourced." I have come across a couple more such things: see Timothy Heller (accuser) and Melanie Martinez (singer) (accused). Thanks to the Me Too movement, people are talking about this problem in earnest, and that's important, but WP already has rules on unconfirmed statements in the biographies of living persons. I suggest that the BLP team discuss some sort of policy on this new breed of allegations. Thanks. --- DOOMSDAYER520 ( Talk| Contribs) 21:36, 1 June 2018 (UTC)
I have posted a question about image size for BLP infobox portraits. Please see: Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Politics#Images for more info. Thanks - wolf 00:37, 29 June 2018 (UTC)
The subject of an article I watch objected to having their (properly sourced) DOB listed. I have restored it with just the year, per WP:DOB on this page, but what happens if the subject still objects? Jdcooper ( talk) 10:43, 28 May 2018 (UTC)
Galobtter, out of interest and for future reference, if the source is a secondary source and the subject complains, what is the procedure in that case? Jdcooper ( talk) 17:28, 28 May 2018 (UTC)
The privacy policy WP:DOB needs to be modified. In particular, the sentence "[i]f the subject complains about the inclusion of the date of birth [...] err on the side of caution and simply list the year, provided that there is a reliable source for it" needs to be modified or removed. First of all, the last part is redudant since per WP:BLPRS we do not include any information that is not backed by reliable sources anyways (regardless of whether it is birth dates, college degrees, or the persons membership in the Communist party).
But more importantly, why does it matter if "the subject" complains? As far as I know this is the only instance where we give subjects final editorial approval of article content. On the basis of privacy of all reasons? As User:David Gerard put it (when he first deleted WP:DOB in 2006 after it was added unilaterally without prior discussion) this is “ridiculous paranoia,” since if someone's DOB is published in say Who's Who or Library of Congress authority files, then what is the point of deleting the information from Wikipedia? What layer of privacy does it add? I understand that part in WP:DOB on "phone numbers, addresses, account numbers," but date of birth is different.
In short: date of birth is an essential part of every biography, in Wikipedia and elsewhere (for a good reason, encyclopedic articles open with DOB). I don't see why our general WP:BLP policies shouldn't apply; that is, if the information is unsourced we delete it, but if there is a publicly accessible reliable source, we keep it. Subject's privacy concerns notwithstanding, because if we can find reliable sources on somebody's DOB so can everyone else. -- bender235 ( talk) 16:21, 7 July 2018 (UTC)
Wikipedia only includes full names and dates of birth that have been
widelyextensively published by multiple reliable sources, or by sources linked to the subject such that it may reasonably be inferred that the subject does not object. In either case, the source or sources must be cited in the article.
"identity thief's life a little harder". There are reasons why the month and year are valuable to a reader—but why is a day of the month of any conceivable value to a reader? I think that Wikipedia is more easily machine-analyzable than the vastness of the Internet. Bus stop ( talk) 12:21, 14 July 2018 (UTC)
"I have spent waay more time lurking this discussion than I intended to". OK. Don't let me cause you to waste any more of your time. We are weighing conflicting interests. No one is arguing that there is absolutely no value in the day of birth. But including that information is less useful to the reader than the month or year, and that piece of information could be used in identity theft. As for machine-readability, Wikipedia is only one website and it has a predictable formula, thus facilitating machine-readability. Bus stop ( talk) 13:20, 14 July 2018 (UTC)
This
edit request to
Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
Dear Wiki, I am writing to request for the edit of a major verifiable character assassination clause '... until being dismissed for plagiarism". I have never been dismissed on any breach of professional ethics. If anything I have, out of ethics or other priorities, resigned from a lucrative academic position or declined an offered of a coveted academic fellowship at places like the LSE in UK.
You may verify that I have never been dismissed from LSE with Professor Mary Kaldor at LSE <redacted> or Professor Tim Allen at <redacted>, professor of government and head of international development department at LSE, who knew me and my work first-hand.
My detractors have even set up webpages attacking, among other things, my authenticity of my PhD from the University of Wisconsin at Madison (1998) while the Burmese language newspapers - which cheer-lead the genocide of Rohingya and whip up Islamophobia among the Buddhist majority - run slanderous Burmese language articles on the front pages, declaring me "national traitor" and "enemy of the state" while the military was engaged in ethnic cleansing of Rohingyas in the fall of 2017.
Because of my uncompromising activism against my own country's genocide against Rohingya muslims - I am a Buddhist, not Muslim - I have been subjected to relentless and nasty character assassination attempts and trolls on line. I did not set up this page as "ZARNI (activist)". This was set up by those whose intent was to destroy my credibility and integrity by pigeonholing me as "activist" - and nothing else. I am a writer, political commentator, scholar, grassroots organizer, human rights advocate - not simply "Rohingya campaigner".
This article published in N. America's reputable TRICYCLE touched on the issue of slanderous, below-the-belt attacks on me as a human rights activist.
https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/voices-inside-rohingya-refugee-camps/
I would like to permanently removed that nasty clause from the Wiki entry. Thanking you in advance.
Sincerely,
Maung Zarni
UK: <redacted> & <redacted> M zarni ( talk) 09:52, 24 July 2018 (UTC)
Hi all. Do we find academia.edu to be an acceptable source for citations in biographies of living persons? My gut says it's way too close to self-published but I'm occasionally wrong. Please ping me if you respond as I will not be following this page. Rap Chart Mike ( talk) 13:34, 26 July 2018 (UTC)
Should WP:BLP and WP:CSD be changed in such a manner?
This RfC was created here, because it is related to admin behaviour, involves at least two separate policies, and this is a highly trafficked discussion page.---
Coffeeand
crumbs 21:26, 29 July 2018 (UTC) Then moved here.---
Coffeeand
crumbs 22:11, 29 July 2018 (UTC)
Taking human dignity and respect for personal privacy into account when adding or removing information, especially in articles of ephemeral or marginal interestis that they were concerned we weren't deleting biographies as often as they felt we should.) ‑ Iridescent 2 22:26, 29 July 2018 (UTC)
Over at WT:MOS, Yndajas has raised an off-topic thread about deadnaming of the transgendered. Said party has been pointed to this page about 5 times but continues re-discuss the matter on a page where the issue is not going to be resolved, so I'm opening this discussion for them. (I suppose WT:V or WP:VPPRO could also have worked, but this seemed the most narrowly tailored policy-not-guideline talk page).
The gist (with various drama elided):
I see no obvious way to resolve this, but I do know that WT:MOS can't make up a new change to sourcing policy for bios of living people; it's the wrong venue no matter what the potential outcomes of such a debate might be.
PS: The deadname was incidentally mentioned in the WT:MOS thread in a (good faith) post of the subject's website as evidence [3] (turned out to be their old website [4]); it has the deadname as its domain name. This might need to be WP:OVERSIGHTed, though I already redacted the link, so it's only available in the old diff. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 14:09, 29 July 2018 (UTC)
To respect trans people, when we write about them once they identify as trans and begin to transition, we write about them using their preferred name. This is very common in the library world, when we replace the dead name of an author in authority records with their preferred name so that every catalog record about a book or article they had written will be retrievable using their preferred name.
While it is true that Wikipedia cannot control the artifacts out in the world which have the dead name of a person, we can be respectful and change dead names to preferred names for living persons--especially if they personally request such a change.
RachelWex ( talk) 01:27, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
@
Yndajas: Re "bickering, drama": that was in reference to the ad hominem and other unconstructive material I collapse-boxed in the original thread. I'm not implying that the entire discussion is bickering and drama, or I would not have bothered bringing it here. About '"transgendered" is an outdated and offensive term', The GLAAD Media Reference Guide doesn't agree, and simply suggests it's a redundant construction and inconsistent with other terms; I don't see much out there about it being "offensive" other than material written by TG language-reform activists. I'll avoid the term on the basis of redundancy. Your old site is maintained, because it's live and that's not free. It's not like a wicked gang of thugs is forcing you to have that site up and running. If you cared as much about deadnaming in the real world as you seem to here, you would have taken that site down a long time ago. So why are you "activisting" about deadnaming on Wikipedia? It smacks of
WP:POINT. And linking or referring to it is deadnaming yourself, since the entire domain name consists of nothing but that deadname with a .co extension. You're free to do that all you want, but in my view it torpedoes your argument here. "There is no article about this person (and likely won't be)" is not drama, it's an observation that we have zero evidence you are even potentially
WP:Notable for anything other than having run for local office a few years ago. Approx. 99.9884% of living persons are not notable, minus some percentage of bios we definitely need to have but don't have yet (we have about 870,000 BLPs, and the world population is about 7.5 bil ±100 mil), Ergo, saying you likely will not be notable isn't an insult, it a statistical near-certainty. You are clearly searching for ways to find offense in everything people say when you aren't getting what you want, and that
won't fly here. I'll let others address the rest of this; I brought you to this page for that reason – others who spend more time on BLP matters are much better able to address ideas like "using notability as a criteria for not deadnaming trans people creates a two-class system where you must earn your right not to be deadnamed", and other more substantive statements than the trivia I've responded to.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 01:25, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
Right now the BLP1E section of this page says, not-very-clearly:
The significance of an event or individual is indicated by how persistent the coverage is in reliable sources. It is important for editors to understand two clear differentiations of the People notable for only one event guideline (WP:BIO1E) when compared with this policy (WP:BLP1E): WP:BLP1E should be applied only to biographies of living people, or those who have recently died, and to biographies of low-profile individuals.
Does that mean biographies of all low-profile individuals, living AND dead?? That means that the "1 EVENT" rule is enough to torpedo all BLPs, and biographies of (dead) low profile individuals ( WP:LPI). Or just living low-profile individuals? But this implies it is NOT enough to torpedo BIOs of dead people who sought the lime-light and had no problem with self-promotion. For example, what about a BIO for the world's shortest man (a Tom Thumb) if he gave newspaper interviews and accepted awards? All else in his fame in the fruit of his being short (1 event). Perhaps this rule doesn't work on BIOs of 1E (dead) people even if they do NOT self promote, as we don't care about the privacy of dead people as much? If that is really true, then there should be a mirror-image guideline under WP:BIO for self-promoting 1E DEAD PEOPLE (like Tom Thumb) and even for really-short dead people who never joined the circus, and were shy. In fact, if WP really intends the notability rules to change when a person dies, it should very clearly (somewhere) spell out how. It doesn't. I cannot logically infer it, as the language is not clear. We need a clear "WP:BDP" (biography dead people) policy. S B H arris 09:35, 13 August 2018 (UTC)
Waycross (band) doesn't seem to meet WP:GNG. While they did chart on a major Billboard chart, they utterly fail WP:V. Literally the only sources I found are a college newspaper (which only gives WP:ROUTINE coverage due to one of the members being an alumnus of said college), and a single post from an unreliable looking blog. A search for "Ben Stennis" + "Waycross" turns up absolutely nothing. Even Gbooks has zero results. The only hits for the song are lyric databases, YouTube uploads, and false positives. Literally the only reputable source I have that even gives the names of the members is the Joel Whitburn Hot Country Songs book, which is already given a citation in the article alongside the college newspaper and a now-broken link to CMT's upload of the video. As far as I can tell, there is not a scrap of information out there on these guys. Usual country music sources like Country Standard Time, Taste of Country, and Roughstock.com also turn up nothing. While the song "Nineteen" does have an article, it's still very short and focuses mainly on Billy Ray Cyrus's cover of it.
tl;dr: I am convinced that these guys utterly fail WP:BAND due to the lack of sources. Is my assessment accurate? Should someone take this to AFD? Ten Pound Hammer • ( What did I screw up now?) 03:55, 17 August 2018 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Suppose there is a Wikipedia article about a living USA musician in which it is not mentioned that he was convicted of rape and is a registered sex offender. The source for this is a Megan's Law website with an entry that clearly identifies the musician by a "mugshot" photograph, name, date of birth, etc; with no other secondary sources about the conviction available. The entry notes the musician's offense as Rape By Force.
Surely everybody can agree that it would be good to note the rape conviction in the article about the musician, but there seems to be opposition to using the the only available source from some editors.
Is it appropriate to use the source to establish the rape conviction in the musician's article? -- 83.177.85.253 ( talk) 11:50, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
Do not use trial transcripts and other court records, or other public documents, to support assertions about a living person.Galobtter ( pingó mió) 13:29, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
Hi all, was looking at Jason Bateman and was tempted to remove a line about him having endorsed Bernie Sanders, and another line about him being a fan of a sports team, as both seem rather trivial to me. Is there a consensus in favor of including or excluding such information? If not, should we try to establish one? Cheers. DonIago ( talk) 14:09, 21 August 2018 (UTC)
Requesting any input on a question raised at Talk:The Cutting Room Floor (website)#What name to use for one of the designers/maintainers of this website? The issue is this: we do know the real name of the person, who is mentioned in several places in the article text. He uses only his online handle at the subject website. The article as originally written (in March) used his real name with a mention of his online handle. He has now asked us, in an off-wiki message, not to use his real name, but to refer to him only by his online handle. Does BLP policy offer any guidance on this situation? Are we required to use his real name since it has been published elsewhere, or can we respect his request to be named only by the handle he uses in his work for the subject? -- MelanieN ( talk) 18:37, 18 August 2018 (UTC)
I note that guiding spirit of BLP is "We are not here to make people sad" it it's reasonably avoidable.
I note also that BLP now applies to recently deceased persons. Dead people don't have feelings and don't care about their reputations -- they are dead, as dead as Charlemagne. The section on this says BLP applies to "material about the dead that has implications for their living relatives and friends". So this establishes the precedent that that the feelings/welfare of groups of people other than the subject are in play.
The "Legal persons and groups" section says "This policy does not normally apply to material about corporations, companies, or other entities regarded as legal persons". Towns are not any of these things, although they usually are legally constituted entities (if not unincorporated), but not a Legal person according to that article, it doesn't seem. This distinction may be splitting hairs, but on the other hand the section does deliberately and specifically make the point of applying only to legal persons.
The entire section says:
This policy does not normally apply to material about corporations, companies, or other entities regarded as legal persons, though any such material must be written in accordance with other content policies. The extent to which the BLP policy applies to edits about groups is complex and must be judged on a case-by-case basis. A harmful statement about a small group or organization comes closer to being a BLP problem than a similar statement about a larger group; and when the group is very small, it may be impossible to draw a distinction between the group and the individuals that make up the group. When in doubt, make sure you are using high-quality sources.
So... writing negative stuff about a town will make a lot of people sad. Nothing in this policy mentions towns either way. So I'd think it doesn't apply... but should it?
It is a tough call. Most of our town articles whitewash the history of towns, and I'm sure you can figure out why. So since rules (are supposed to) codify practice, this'd be another reason to add towns here.
For the example that makes me ponder this question, see Talk:Cleveland, Texas#RfC: 2011 rapes. IMO stuff like this is useful info for the reader to to answer the question "what is the deal with this entity" on an encyclopedic level in addition to the usual stuff about when it was founded, how many parks it has, what the climate is, what highways run near it, etc. However, that is debatable, and it probably makes the people in Cleveland, Texas sad, certainly damages its reputation, and probably causes some material damage to the town, and so if it was a living person we would probably not include it... Herostratus ( talk) 01:28, 18 August 2018 (UTC)
Daniel Baldwin is one case. He's a probably a B-list celebrity but his cover photo is a mugshot from an arrest, because that's the only publicly available headshot.
/info/en/?search=Talk:Daniel_Baldwin#Less_judgemental_photograph
It seems this is far from ideal, and a policy might be appropriate to use no photo at all if this sort of photo is the only one available.
-- Geekeasy ( talk) 00:06, 26 August 2018 (UTC)
The section §Recently dead or probably_dead outlines how a person whose date of birth is 115 years or more ago can be presumed to be dead. However there are many cases, such as Yusra (archaeologist), where birth dates are unknown and we only have dates where the person did a noteworthy event. This tends to be the case for a lot of stubs, such as L._Doran (an Indian cricketer who played in the 1950s). This policy page currently offers no guidance on these cases.
Action: Add the following to
§Recently dead or probably_dead: When a date of birth is not known, a person is assumed to be covered by this policy if the earliest event in their lives mentioned in the article occurred within the last 100 years.
This is a conservative policy, (like the 115 year rule). Almost all such events which would be in scope here would be have done while the person was over 15 years old. -- LukeSurl t c 13:20, 13 August 2018 (UTC)
If dates of death and birth are unknown, editors should use reasonable judgement to infer from dates of events noted in the article if it is probable the person was born within the last 115 years is therefore covered by this policy, leaning on the side of caution.. I think this reflects current practice. -- LukeSurl t c 09:32, 29 August 2018 (UTC)
I keep getting reverted by the same editor who claims I'm vandalizing these articles when trying to edit the following statements (green) in accordance to what the sources used to support them say (blue). Are these BLP violations?:
"Providing logistical support for terrorist operations". [5] what the source says: "She was responsible for directing some MEK operations from Iraq, suggesting that she was sent to the US and then to Canada, to act in an organizational capacity."
"In 1982, she was accused of leading a terrorist attack against the Iranian government on behalf of the organization". [6] what the source says Samadi became a member of the MEK in 1980 and was an active fighter for the organization against Iranian targets in the 1980s, including alleged terrorist attacks in Tehran in 1982
"Providing logistical support for terrorist operations". [7] what the source says Robab Farahi-Mahdevie was alleged to have masterminded the 1992 attack on the Iranian embassy in Ottawa
There are a few more, but may be best to keep it concise for now. Thanks for the feedback. Stefka Bulgaria ( talk) 21:19, 29 August 2018 (UTC)
Per WP:DOB (which is partially motivated by WP:AVOIDVICTIM, according to 1, 2, etc.), it seems imperative that BLPs do not contain unsourced dates of birth. Is there any reason a BLP would be allowed to contain an unsourced date of birth? wumbolo ^^^ 13:29, 25 August 2018 (UTC)
Already raised and answered at WP:ELN#Infobox link to The Maria Butina Legal Expense Fund. -- SarekOfVulcan (talk) 20:46, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
An issue has been raised about appropriate external links and the personal website included in an infobox for someone accused of a crime awaiting trial. If possible reference What_Wikipedia_is_not#PROMO, What Wikipedia is not promotion, in your response.
Specifically, can the personal website listed on a Wikipedia page of someone accused of a crime contain a link to a legal defense fund or information that might support the defense of that individual? Can you be specific about why or why not?
Under what circumstances can a link to a legal defense fund be included in a Wikipedia article? For example, does it matter if the legal defense fund is controlled by a trustee? Geo8rge ( talk) 20:36, 4 September 2018 (UTC)
This page says that "public documents" are not good references. Could somebody clarify that in the article (and list more examples), I don't know what is and what isn't a "public document". -- 213.149.61.113 ( talk) 22:28, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
The concern is twofold. One is the possible misuse of primary sources in order to make claims which no one has deigned to repeat in a secondary reliable source. The second is the issue of privacy inherent in most court records to begin with, and the ability to promoote matters which are legally confidential in a public venue (such as legal addresses of celebrities, names of minor children and the like). We are not saying "public documents are false" but we are saying that Wikipedia relies on secondary reliable sources, just as primary medical papers are not generally accepted as sources, even though we do not accuse them of not being factual. I think this covers the issue. It appears obvious, moreover, that the intent is to include arrest records and other documents which may contain similar material. Collect ( talk) 23:36, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
WP:RS says reliable independent secondary sources. Arrest records and offender databases are primary. They should only be used for uncontroversial facts. If multiple reliable independent sources say X was arrested, or X is in prison, then the official record can support the date of arrest or the place of imprisonment. We can't use these for sources for the fact of arrest or imprisonment, not least becasue there may be someone else with the same name. Guy ( Help!) 21:58, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
Opinions are needed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of notable people and groups accused of sexual misconduct since the Me Too movement. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 16:52, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard#famousbirthdays.com on whether FamousBirthdays.com should be used as an RS for birth dates if there are no other collaborating sources. (BLP issued due to several recent questions about birth dates) -- Masem ( t) 23:17, 20 September 2018 (UTC)
I'm not making this an formal RfC to avoid the hassle and be more informal, but...
In the "Legal persons and groups" subsection I propose to change the text as follows (emphasis added here to show additions, not to be in the actual page text):
...A harmful statement about a small group or organization or inhabited place comes closer to being a BLP problem than a similar statement about a larger group; and when the group or organization or inhabited place is very small, it may be impossible to draw a distinction between the group and the individuals that make up the group...
Reading the existing text, it seems clear to me that inhabited places would certainly fall under this rubric. So let's include them. (They may already be included, on the grounds that "persons inhabiting a town" is a "group"; this is arguable). And if they shouldn't included under the rubric, it should be specifically stated "This does not apply to inhabited places" for clarity.
The reason that inhabited places falls under the rubric is, I mean after all stuff about towns can make people feel as bad as stuff about groups, and can damage reputations to a degree -- "Oh you're from that town where they had the [arguably borderline-to-include bad event]" or "Nope, don't show me any houses in that town where they have the [bad situation described with perhaps arguably somewhat marginal references]" and so on.
Also: rules are supposed to follow practice. As a practical matter, towns are whitewashed to an extent anyway, as you can imagine -- people who live there are pretty persistent about that. But it's somewhat random. So it should be codified (or DE-codified, it there's a desire to push back against that.) Herostratus ( talk) 01:35, 15 September 2018 (UTC)
OK fine, but it appears that the situation is unclear. One person above says "I don't think we should expand BLP to include towns.." which indicates that she doesn't think it applies now, while the next person says " Towns are small groups of people..." which indicates that she does thinks it already applies. So I mean probably we should clarify? Like maybe add something like this to the end of the section:
This does not apply to inhabited places, which are not considered groups, organizations, or legal persons for the purposes of this rule.
Advantage here is clarity. Clarity avoids arguments in individual cases (not about the content but about whether BLP applies), which wastes time and results in different answers for similar cases. OTOH adding this might go against usual practice, which rules aren't supposed to do. OTOOH, maybe this is not that much of an issue and adding any further elucidation is unnecessary rulecruft. Herostratus ( talk) 09:27, 25 September 2018 (UTC)
BLP1E says, The significance of an event or individual is indicated by how persistent the coverage is in reliable sources. If an article is created very quickly (which is bad per WP:DELAY), we can't know if the coverage will be persistent (e.g. WP:10YT). I propose that WP:RAPID is deprecated in cases where BLP1E applies. WP:AVOIDVICTIM is part of BLP policy, and everyone ignores it in favor of other non-BLP policies and guidelines. Furthermore, the WP:AVOIDVICTIM policy is almost useless, because most damage is done by the mere existence of an article about a victim. wumbolo ^^^ 11:57, 29 September 2018 (UTC)
There is a consensus for the proposal. The text has been added.
In what cases should BLP policy apply for articles about persons for whom there is no confirmation of death, nor a date of birth? -- LukeSurl t c 14:30, 29 August 2018 (UTC)
Currently the §Recently dead or probably dead section has instructions regarding the applicability of this policy for persons for whom it is not known whether or not they are still alive. This states that, for such persons, BLP applies if they were born in the last 115 years. However this assumes the date of birth is known, which is often not the case — especially for stub articles. Practically, the only chronological information to go on are usually one or two dates when the person did something. Examples of these, with links are to current versions at time of this post, are:
There should be some guidance regarding whether these are BLP-covered, as the current policy is silent.
I suggest the following text to add to the end of the
§Recently dead or probably dead section.
If the date of birth is unknown, editors should use reasonable judgement to infer—from dates of events noted in the article—if it is plausible that the person was born within the last 115 years and is therefore covered by this policy.
This is effectively the most cautious side of current practice. Note the use of the word plausible which instructs editors to be very conservative. Practically, editors could assume a person may have been as young as 16 for most types of events, unless it is noted they were a child. -- LukeSurl t c 14:30, 29 August 2018 (UTC)