[WikiEN-l] Defamatory Biographies - another problem looming forWikipedia?

Tue Dec 20 03:14:33 UTC 2005

On Tue, 20 Dec 2005, Andrew Gray wrote:

> There's a lot of articles that
> are obviously biographies - I happen to be looking at [[Reginald of
> Durham]] just now - but which aren't categorised by birth/death simply
> because they're not known. However, it's equally obvious that he is,
> in fact, dead...
>
> Hmm. Moving back to a more general theme...
>
> [[Category:Living people]]
> [[Category:Dead people]]
> [[Category:People not known to be dead]] (might do with a better title)
> [[Category:Fictional people]]
>
> Assume for a second we have the manpower to go and slap one of these
> on every biography we can find - so anything with death or life cats,
> anything categorised "as a person", anything with a stub notice that
> makes it look like an individual. Great.
>
> 1) Will the category system fall over horribly? Two of those cats will
> certainly have tens of thousands of entries, and no subcategorisation.

I'm sometimes amazed at how much work various people are willing to expend
on categorizing & recategorizing stubs. I can't help think that the effort
expended on moving an article labelled {{bio-stub}} to (say)
{{German-bio-stub}}, then {{German-scientist-bio-stub}}, then suplimented
with tags like {{biologist-stub}} & {{European-woman-stub}}. Having a
project like this for these kinds of people to expend their need for
organization would be A Good Thing.

(And for the record, when I find an article with more than one stub tag
attached, I always reduce the number to one. Don't like it? Then turn
the stub into an article, & we'll both be happy.)
>
> 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...

I would assume that insisting that people provide sources for allegations
that would be considered derogatory by a prudent person would solve
much of this kind of trouble. Even if it's "common knowledge" that a
given person is a criminal, unless one can provide clear proof of the
allegations the subject may sue just to dissuade the next person. (A guy
by the name of L. Ron Hubbard was notoriously successful with this tactic.)
>
> 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...
>
When I used to do New Article Patrol on a regular basis, I found myself
wikifying new articles, rather than tagging them for deletion. (Despite
the kill-happy reputation of AfD, I found it far easier to subject these
articles to a scrubbing than listing them.) Then I saw David Gerard's
comment about 90% of new articles were dreck, & started to suspect my own
judgement. So I lost interest in that chore.*

Then again, I've added an article or two which one could make a plausible
case they should have been deleted on sight. I haven't noticed anyone
pulling the trigger on them yet.

Geoff

[*] This is not to blame David. I admit that sometimes I am likely to
hear criticism where none is meant; yet sometimes Wikipedia is a far
more critical environment than it is a supportive one.