[WikiEN-l] [Wmfcc-l] Living bio patrol on en:wp [[WP:BLPP]]

Sun Sep 10 02:45:05 UTC 2006

BLP articles may possibly be too contrary to wikipedia eventualism to keep
inside wikipedia. Perhaps a sister project on the meta and wikimedia project
scale needs to be proposed? I have had the thought in the back of my head.
Split BLP articles off to a "LiveBiography," merge them back to wikipedia
when the persons die. This would allow the sister project higher levels of
WP:RS, WP:V, WP:NPOV and WP:RS for biographical articles. We could even
allow POV criticisms, tiny minority views...via {{further}} in main
biographies and related POV articles and criticisms. By acting as a sort of
whos who directory rather than an encyclopedia, such a project could
maintain both a high standard for biographies and a place for cranks and
tiny minority views to have their say as well. Great steps would be taken to
seperate biographies from the critics. Win/Win?

Ideas? Such a fork would run concurrent with Wikipedia until it is ready to
take over.

Jason "Electrawn" Potkanski

On 9/9/06, Amgine <amgine at saewyc.net> wrote:
>
>
> On 8-Sep-06, at 9:34 AM, David Gerard wrote:
>
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BLP_Patrol
>
>
> I agree, this is a major problem when working with press and also
> constitutes a large percentage of large-issue communications with the
> Foundation Office and with OTRS.
>
> The [[WP:BLPP]] addresses many of the concerns, and is a great idea.
> However, this treats the symptoms of two fundamental issue which
> en.wp is not addressing: Who is noteworthy enough for inclusion in an
> encyclopedia, and what/how much should be said regarding living
> persons. These two issues cannot be resolved by a technical solution.
>
> The Patrol is a reasonable stop-gap measure which will address the
> problems we have now, but it is unlikely to scale well, nor is it a
> solution for all wikipedias. I would encourage the en.wp community to
> create a few objective measures akin to the USA State of Florida
> judicial "Public Persons" test. It seems to me that any encyclopedic
> living persons biography must be about a person who is, at the very
> least, a public person (that is, someone reasonably well-known or in
> a position where they are likely to be addressing a general public
> audience, such as politicians for public office, newspaper editors,
> actors, radio announcers, clergy members, corporate spokespersons, &c.)
>
> It is not reasonable to have large, in-depth biographies about living
> persons. Too much information makes is included, often with such
> detail that make an en.wp article a considerable risk to the
> subject's privacy and security (such as identity theft, among other
> things.) Deep articles are prone to bias, either showing the subject
> unfavourably or too favourably, and often give undue weight to some
> minor element of their life to push a point of view (a classic
> example are US Congressional members, whose articles almost
> universally contain extensive coverage of the most recent few years
> of public service - particularly perceived scandals - and may
> completely lack any mention of previous public positions or private
> careers.) Subjects can and do dramatically alter their lives and
> goals, and en.wp articles are not able to be relevant to these changes.
>
> For these and other reasons, en.wp should develop policy limiting
> living persons articles to primary career facts and academic
> achievements, current positions held or endeavors, and minimal
> personal facts. By presenting a minimal set of biographic facts the
> community can circumvent a large number of internal and external
> conflicts, whilst avoiding maintenance issues and keeping the
> articles relevant until such time as the subjects may be viewed in
> historical context.
>
> </rant>
>
> Amgine
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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