On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 6:00 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 27 March 2012 17:20, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
So you have been arguing that without the BLP
policy, and without the
noticeboard set up to help compliance with the policy, just the same
close
investigations of the actual reliability of
sources that nominally fall
within "RS" would be going on? I don't agree, and I wonder if anyone
else
does. I'm not the biggest fan of
noticeboards, qua unchartered processes;
but in this case it seems to be working, and having WP:BLP there fairly
clearly has something to do with it.
The key point to remember about BLPs is: no eventualism. If an article
about someone dead 200 years says something nasty and wrong, that's
not great, but it's not urgent. If an article about a living person
says something nasty and wrong, that is urgent, and we can't just
assume the wiki process will on balance fix it in the fullness of
time. It's the simplest possible way of doing it and it's a vast
improvement over the previous situation. It's not perfection, but
calling it a "failure" is hyperbolic.
"No eventualism" is one principle that I would like to see spelled out in
BLP policy, in the Writing style section.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons#Writin…
People do tend to treat biographies like a research pad for all the things
that an author might justifiably want to include in a five-volume,
2,000-page biography.
The problem is, the other 1,999 pages never turn up, leaving something –
often something trivial, titillating, or unflattering – that might be
worthy of mention on page 1,547 as the biography's main point.
Andreas