[WikiEN-l] Defamatory Biographies - another problem loomingforWikipedia?

Tue Dec 20 03:01:54 UTC 2005

Hi,

> [[Category:Living people]]
> [[Category:Dead people]]
> [[Category:People not known to be dead]] (might do with a 
> better title)

[[Category:Schrödinger people]] ? Kind of appropriate when you're
talking about...

> death or life cats...

:)

> 1) Will the category system fall over horribly? Two of those 
> cats will certainly have tens of thousands of entries, and no 
> subcategorisation.

They would be better as "flags", except that flags don't exist. Better
because no one would necessarily want to browse that whole category...

> 
> 2) What would this achieve? We've got some good basic 
> metadata, but... among other things, it doesn't address the 
> problem of someone inserting violently libellous material 
> *elsewhere*, which can be just as bad - say, in an article on 
> that person's company, or political party, or hometown, or 
> whatever. Or tangential libel in *another* biographical 
> article, where someone may not notice it as dubious if parsed 
> as a reference to someone else...

It is marginally better because it directly addresses the "Oh my god
what happened to Seigenthaler is awful I'm going to go and check my
entry right now- EEK! EEK! where's my lawyer?" situation.

> 3) But coming back to the start... how about Seigenthaler 
> articles? No categorisation, no stub tag, not visible as a 
> bio by anything short of a human reader stumbling across the 
> damn thing and checking it. Are we going to have eyeballs 
> check every article, in case they're a missed biography? The 
> man-hours are really mounting up...

Also very few incoming links.  Could we perhaps automatically label
these pages (as I suggested somewhere) and have a "report libel" button?
That way the few users who do end up on the page can be used to give it
a quick "this looks contentious" review. We're not asking them to fact
check it, but just to report to us the possibility that it's libellous.
That could work, by reducing the burden on the anon user, while
filtering down immensely the number of pages to only the few that are
reported.

Steve