I just got a call from Murdo Macleod from Scotland On Sunday. He
wanted to ask about semiprotection, and specifically if there was
anything Scottish protected or semiprotected on en:.
I pointed him to [[Category:Semi-protected]]. There was nothing
Scottish in semi-protected, but it gave him a good overview of what's
contentious - i.e., really famous people with the power to upset lots
of people at once (e.g. [[George W. Bush]], [[Tony Blair]]) or obscure
areas with overactive partisans (e.g. [[Neuro-linguistic
programming]]).
He said he was impressed at how quickly the [[Fred Trueman]] article
updated when Trueman died recently; I referred him to the [[Kenneth
Lay]] piece from Reuters (how the article changed right after Ken Lay
died) as a good overview of how Wikipedia actually works in these
cases.
He also asked about libelous material and how we deal with it. I
explained how the living bio policy is supposed to work (that someone
might be minorly notable enough to get an article, but contentious
stuff should only be mentioned if it's directly relevant) and that in
extreme cases (e.g. privacy invasion) we could remove stuff entirely
from view, but it had to be pretty extreme.
I also showed him [[Portal:Scotland]], he seemed quite impressed by
it. (It's a very nice portal page.) I mentioned how we were setting up
Wikimedia UK to help further coverage of British-related content in
Wikipedia.
I said people looking at contentious stuff should check the history
and discussion tabs. I stressed my current soundbite: "We're far from
perfect, but we're good enough to be useful."
All this may or may not lead to a story, he needs a Scottish hook to
do a story, and there's not really a Scottish semiprotection story to
tell. But perhaps he'll see something nice on the portal!
- d.