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Semi-protecting all BLPs

I have advertised this discussion at Misplaced Pages:Village_pump_(policy)#Discussion_about_semi-protetcing_all_BLP_articles.. Corvus cornix_talk 23:52, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

I'd sort of thought this was a perennial proposal, but I can't find anything about it in the last year's worth of this page's archive, so I'm raising it. Why not semi-protect all BLPs? I think it would cut down on a lot of the problems we have with IPs, whether maliciously or in good faith, adding BLP-violations to articles. Of course, it wouldn't be a cure-all - BLP violations can be found in articles that are not themselves BLPs, for one thing. For another, a determined BLP-violator would only have to register an account and wait a few days, but I don't think most malicious BLP-violators are that determined (it seems likely, although not certain, that this could have prevented the Seigenthaler incident, for example, and also some of Don Murphy's more legitimate complaints). The cost of this would be that Misplaced Pages would become ever so slightly less welcoming to newcomers, but barriers to participation on Misplaced Pages are already lower than they are almost anywhere else on the net; you don't even need to provide an e-mail address, for crying out loud. Thoughts? Flames? Sarcasticidealist (talk) 22:51, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

I do not recall this being discussed before. Nevertheless, I think the proposal has merit and the downside, quite minimal. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 22:55, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

I think we'd need a clear tagging formula, living+yes just doesn't do it {{BLP}} does, IMHO< and should be tagged on any article mentioning living people and then, sure, semi-protect. Thanks, SqueakBox 23:06, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

I can definitely see that there would almost have to be some way to make it "automatic" given we have over a quarter of a million articles currently tagged as blps. Exactly how to remove the protection would be a problem. Would it be automatic upon death, or something else? If the former, couldn't I adjust the article to say, for instance, Terje Aa died yesterday as a registered user, thus unprotecting it, and then log off and edit the article with unrelated vandal-like material as an IP? Knowing which material added later, if it's done well, would potentially really screw up several articles about less widely watched pages. Any ideas? John Carter (talk) 23:37, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Presumably, admins wouldn't un-semi-protect unless the subject's death was properly-sourced (I'd hope that the semi-protection would be done by an adminbot, I think unprotections could be done manually by human admins). Sarcasticidealist (talk) 23:54, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

For the initial run, most BLPs can probably be found via two categories: Articles in Category:Living People, and articles whose talk pages are in Category:Biography articles of living people (I love how we have two categories for the exact same purpose) - any that that misses, obviously, would have to be done as we find them. --Random832 (contribs) 00:08, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

We should tag all articles containing living people, and all living people we ,mention in the encyclopedia without articles should be tagged as well. Thanks, SqueakBox 00:29, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

If the bot could be made to run regularly, it wouldn't be a problem to add others, as they'd be automatically added in the next bot run. In response to SqueakBox, I'm not entirely sure what is meant there. I'm assuming that if an article about a dead politician contained information about a scandal which occurred earlier regarding a person still living, or something similar, is what he's addressing. I would agree to that as well, although it would be substantially harder to find them all and might conceivably wind up semiprotecting more articles than we anticipate. John Carter (talk) 00:33, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

What about a dead person like Alexander Litvinenko or a case like Disappearance of Shannon Matthews where the blp issues are not such a problem with the little girl) for whom we have no reliable sources for BLP controversy but there are huge issues for 2 people mentioned int eh article (for whom we have masses of reliable sources). Yes it is scandals and controversies in the real world that are especially problematic. Thanks, SqueakBox 00:43, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

(edit conflict)I think, if this were to be implemented, we could use a bot for the initial run, and after that, just have people who are watching the category, or the {{blp}} template's usage, semiprotect those pages as they come. How many BLP articles are created/tagged in a day anyway? Dansiman (talk|Contribs) 00:59, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

(ec) About 1/8 of our articles are blps. I think that means at least 1/8 of the articles created probably are as well, considering that we tend to have more biographies than any other single thing deleted on the basis of notability concerns. John Carter (talk) 01:07, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I think this idea has many of the same weaknesses as banning all anonymous editing. Remember that more than three-fourths of anonymous edits are intended to improve the encyclopedia. And yes, an anon is less likely to be familiar with BLP than a registered user ... but an anon is also less likely to be familiar with WP:NPOV, WP:V, WP:NOR and various other policies and guidelines. Should we, say, semiprotect all articles on controversial subjects to maintain their neutrality? I suppose one could argue that BLP is the absolute most important policy in the entire encyclopedia, but that idea smacks of legal paranoia. When BLP problems arise, regardless of whether the offender is an IP or a registered user, we remove the offending content, along with the various other ways of dealing with the issue. Is that somehow not good enough? szyslak (t) 00:49, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I think the answer to that is a simple no. Thanks, SqueakBox 00:52, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

If you will not explain yourself coherently and make rude dismissive comments rather than answering people's questions, you can hardly expect others to accept your views. --erachima formerly tjstrf 01:04, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Ooh err I was just trying to be concise and give a simple response. This is serious stuff and I apologise if I offended you as it was far from my mind. I am thinking lots about this issue and really I take you seriously and I take you seriously. Thanks, SqueakBox 01:24, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

(ec) Agree with Squeakbox. The problems arise in whether anyone actually notes the changes made. I am not myself a recent changes patroller, and never have been, so I can't speak from experience here. But I believe it is unreasonable to say that the dedicated patrollers can necessarily keep up with every change made. If I were to try to damage the article on a living person, I would probably make a series of small edits over a comparatively quick period of time, say a few days, all of which built on each other. If a patroller came along later and see the changes made over time, they might reasonably infer that the changes made were all based on news reports released over that period, as such is far from uncommon.

The carefulness about content relating to living persons isn't so much legalism as the fact that I think many of us know people have enemies out there, and not all of them are stupid enough to be easily caught. This can be particularly true now, with elections in the US coming up in a few months. I'm not sure how many of you are from outside the US, but tactics, particularly in local elections, often are contemptible. I worked in state legislature elections in California I don't want to talk about, and which I dismiss on the basis of my being in college at the time, where I would have been appalled by what I was doing if I didn't know the opponent was behaving even worse. And not so much on the basis of law but public outcry, I definitely do not want to see that sort of thing happen here. John Carter (talk) 01:07, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

See? This is a far more helpful post.

Personally, since our (in great part BLP-motivated) stable versions system is nearly ready to roll out, I would suggest that if we want a layer of technical libel protection that our efforts would be better focused on overcoming the opposition to implementing stable versions, rather than trying to get them all semi-protected. The effect would be roughly the same, and stable versions have a much higher chance of actually getting consensus for implementation than any sort of massive semi-protection would. (Szyslak's opinion is shared by a large number of editors, since allowing IPs to edit is a deeply grounded wikipedia principle. Stable versions would let them still edit after a fashion even on pages which were marked to display approved revisions only.) --erachima formerly tjstrf 01:17, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

(ec) I agree with John Carter to a point, but maybe we could semiprotect such articles when potential BLP problems arise? To address your example of active political candidates, do most or all such articles experience this problem? Out of the many thousands of elected federal, state and local officials in this country, I'd imagine a good majority of them sail to re-election with little or no serious opposition. In any case where we run into trouble, let's use semiprotection when the need arises. And yes, there are many unwatched stubs about living people, but perhaps we can encourage more vandal fighters to engage in random page or BLP patrol. I still don't see the need for pre-emptive protection, which is currently disallowed by the protection policy. Also, erachima's idea to focus on stable revisions has a lot of merit. szyslak (t) 01:23, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

It's incomprehensible to me that all policy and guideline pages are not semi-protected. It's one of those utopian bit of nonsense ideas that "widespread consensus" policy pages can be edited by any dingaling who passes by. Likewise BLP's should have that same minimal protection. Make a dingaling vandal at least spend the time making an account before being able to vandalize the page of a living human. 2005 (talk) 02:10, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I think this is a very good idea. If we can't have BLP-lock, this is a good start. Set up a bot to take a rough cut, with loose parameters, and if some get protected that shouldn't that's better than missing a few. It will take a while for us to work through the policy implications of Stable Versions so this is a good thing to do meanwhile (and perhaps beyond, if google and other bots will be looking behind the stable version itself at the in flux newer revisions) ++Lar: t/c 03:06, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I think this is a bad idea. This is allowing BLP paranoia to start cutting into "You can edit this page right now". To semi-protect an entire class of articles preemptively goes against the core principle here. Protection is temporary and only when needed due to actual abuse -- not predicted abuse. Living people are the most likely topics for people to want to edit, and they should be editable by anyone, for the same reason registration isn't required on Misplaced Pages. Equazcion •✗/C • 06:19, 3 Apr 2008 (UTC)

Well of course, if I were waving my magic wand, I'd require registration, with an Amazon comments level of real name verification, and full disclosure of the name publicly, before I'd allow editing. But that's neither here nor there. That BLPs are an attractive nuisance ("the most likely topics for people to want to edit", as you say) is precisely why they should be semi protected at the least, if not subject to BLP-lock. 1 in 1000 means 250 problems at any given time, and the incidence is far higher than 1 in 1000 and we are failing to deal with the problems. ++Lar: t/c 11:51, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Spot on. No to not doing something just because flagged revisions might, some day, actually be rolled out here. Not ready now. If we choose to do this, and we will sooner or later even if we wait for flagged revisions, Misplaced Pages would still be the 💕 anyone can edit. Why wait? Angus McLellan (Talk) 12:43, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

It's just not gonna happen, for the reasons I already specified. You can edit this page right now. There are no terms and conditions, aside from occasional temporary, individual article protections in the event of actual recurring abuse. Implementing this suggestion will require changing that basic principle; which will, in turn, require changing protection policy, and that'll require a large central discussion. If it happens, a lot more will need to happen beforehand; and I doubt it'll happen at all. Equazcion •✗/C • 19:09, 3 Apr 2008 (UTC)

I strongly oppose this suggestion. This is "the encyclopedia that anybody can edit". We've already limited creation of articles by anons, which was supposed to be an experiment but became a de facto policy, and now we're going to prevent anons from editing a huge number of articles? Not only would this be a public relations nightmare, it would severely damage Misplaced Pages in as-yet unforeseeable ways. Corvus cornix_talk 23:44, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

It would be the opposite of a public relations nightmare. WP has been heavily criticized for allowing anyone to edit living bios. Even with semi-protection, anyone could still edit them; they'd just have to open an account and wait a few days, so the only thing that would be stopped are thoughtless, spur-of-the-moment edits, and it's hard to argue that that would be a bad thing when it comes to BLPs. SlimVirgin 23:50, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

It's not often that I agree with SV, but she's quite right here. Black Kite 23:57, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Ditto. The public relations nightmare of the genuinely disgraceful anyone can anonymously post evil garbage on BLPs had to be addressed. No one in the outside world can understand the practice of allowing anonymous comments. Sure we have a polcy against slander stuff, but it strikes the world as utter bullshit given the practice of allowing totally anonymous contributions to bio articles. requiring a login is basic human decency. Requiring three days before editing a bio article is common sense. Anyone could still edit BLPs, but requiring the maturity of a 3 day old should not be controversial. Adopting such a policy would do more than a little to repair the Misplaced Pages's poor reputation regarding bio articles. 2005 (talk) 00:19, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

I have a lot of college sports articles on my watchlist and during the college football season, if I sit down after being away for a day, I can spend two hours reverting unreverted libel. These are college kids whose bios are getting vile accusations put in there by rival fans and, due to the extremely high ratio of articles to editors in this topic area, it can go for a long time without being noticed. This absolutely needs to change - if we lack the resources to instantly revert the vandalism, the articles need to be s-protected. --B (talk) 05:21, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

So protect those articles during the "vandalism" season. When there's a problem with a specific car model, you don't issue a recall for every car the manufacturer ever made. Protection? Okay. Preemptive, project-wide, permanent protection? Heck no.--Father Goose (talk) 06:42, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Wait until after Flagged Revs

May I suggest that any major changes to semi-protection standards wait until after we see how Flagged Revisions effect vandalism on this site? If, in the Flagged Revs system, we set all BLPs to only show the last assessed version, than the public will not see vandalism by default. This has the potential of both making many vandals ignore BLPs as not worth their time, and could potentially eliminate most liability issues since vandalised versions will be more hidden. If, after Flagged Revs is up and running we still have a problem with BLPs, we can come back to this discussion. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 06:31, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree, I think implementing stable versions on BLPs is a better method of dealing with the problems with BLPs while still allowing good contributions with IPs to be included in the articles. Davewild (talk) 07:04, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

If we can implement Flagged Revisions in a reasonable timeframe, this would be the way to go. The relevant proposal (Misplaced Pages:Flagged revisions/Sighted versions) means to start with the currently semi-protected articles; the next step could be to apply it to BLPs on a large scale. --B. Wolterding (talk) 08:05, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

That sounds much more reasonable than blanket protection.--Father Goose (talk) 10:14, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I am opposed to massive scale experimentation with either semi-protection or even the newer flagged revisions. Both approaches massively alter the wiki-model and are certain to have unexpected consequences. Let a smaller wiki find out what the upsides and downsides are first. --Kim Bruning (talk) 12:56, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

What about an incremental scale experimentation? One should certainly not apply it to all BLPs in the very first step. --B. Wolterding (talk) 12:58, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Maybe... I'm seriously worried that we're abandoning the wiki-model. This would be fairly ok if there was some kind of decent rationale for it, but mostly I just see it being whittled away as a consequence of ignorance. Please tell me I'm wrong? --Kim Bruning (talk) 13:02, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, in which way is this rationale not decent? --B. Wolterding (talk) 13:07, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Sighted versions needn't be bad... as long as we still display the *newest* version to the reader. I don't think that would alter the wikimodel too much. --Kim Bruning (talk) 13:15, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

That would ignore the actual benefits of sighted/stable/fixed/whatever versions, which is to discourage vandalism and edit warring by preventing vandals and edit warriors from having their changes immediately visible to the world. Instead, people will be forced to build consensus in order to get changes to move into the stable version. If we just wanted a permanent link to a previous version, we already have the tools to do that. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:56, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Which is not the current wiki-model as we know it. Let's be cautious and let de.wikipedia try this out for say 6-12 months and see how they do. --Kim Bruning (talk) 14:32, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

If we keep the newest version of an article as the default viewed by IPs, then sighted versions can't do any harm. All it would do is add a button saying this this article might be compromised, and that the reader can click here to see a version that we promise is referenced and free of vandalism. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 18:14, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

I think any language that suggests that we're in any position to guarantee the balance of accuracy of any article would be a serious mistake. Sarcasticidealist (talk) 18:18, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Kim: The "wiki-model" means doing things and trying things, in a search for what works. It's not some sort of commandment or religious principle about what can and can't be done. BLPs are broken, today, and something desperately needs doing. So don't claim that the "wiki-model" prevents trying something to resolve that, please. I am not opposed to a controlled experiment, say only do this to half of all the BLPs and take measurements, if we can decide what needs measuring and how to do it accurately. But I say just do them all. What bots can do, bots can undo (if notes are taken to record what was done)... ++Lar: t/c 14:07, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Nah, I actually agree with you mostly. The problem is that this would immediately have large-scale effects, where most experiments don't. We should let de.wikipedia play with this first. Or only do very small experiments first. --Kim Bruning (talk) 14:32, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Let's construct an experiment here then, unless we're sure that de.wikipedia's findings will map over accurately. Heck, semiprotection may not help at all, for the very reasons given by others (it doesn't stop editing, it just delays it, it doesn't stop editing to BLP articles, it just pushes scurrilous info to other articles, etc...) but there IS a BLP problem and something needs doing. ++Lar: t/c 16:55, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

The wiki model Kim is referring to is the editability by all without registration. Lar, you've already stated your fantasy that Misplaced Pages be basically the opposite of that, so you'll of course have to excuse me if I doubt the objectivity of your "we must save the BLPs" motivation for wanting to protect articles large-scale. Those of us who don't want to dramatically change the site so that it's sign-up only, like every other site was prior to web 2.0, are not in favor of this. Equazcion •✗/C • 15:39, 3 Apr 2008 (UTC)

Sorry for doubting your objectivity or expertise, whoever you are, because I should have realised you have vastly more experience with writing NPOV biographies, with solving BLP problems, wwith working OTRS tickets, with dealing with the concerns of people who have been smeared, etc, than the average admin has. Or maybe you're just talking out your hat, can't really be sure, although your contrib history doesn't really settle the matter. What was it you were up to the last time we encountered each other? Oh yes, I remember, you were edit warring over inserting yourself into a category and then lashing out at everyone for restricting your freedom to amuse yourself by it after being repeatedly warned about it. So, no, I doubt your objectivity when you cast aspersions on my motivations, just as you doubt mine when I say there is a problem and it needs fixing... As for what model Kim was referring to, I'll defer to Kim on that... Kim seems to be agreeing with me, though. ++Lar: t/c 16:55, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Mmmm. I could describe what you were doing at the time as well, but I'm of course not going to sink to Springer-level as you've done. Looking at a person's history rather than arguing the merits of this issue isn't really that helpful. Anyway, to respond to the one thing you said that actually did have to do with this issue, I wasn't doubting your motivation, as in, accusing you of having an ulterior motive. I was doubting you objectivity, meaning that based on the above-referenced comment, you might have a pre-existing bias in discussions about whether or not to protect articles en-masse. While most of us here feel BLP is an important issue and want to assure the accuracy of our BLP articles, we also feel the need to balance that with our openly-editable wiki priority; whereas you would of course have no problem enforcing BLP via across-the-board semi-protection, since you feel all of Misplaced Pages shouldn't be openly editable by "just anyone" anyway. I hope this clarifies things. Again let me repeat, this is not an accusation. It's more of a "no-duh". Equazcion •✗/C • 17:43, 3 Apr 2008 (UTC)

Well no, not at all, because I'm pretty good at keeping the distinction between how I think things OUGHT to be and how things actually ARE very clear. While I might want to wave wands and change things round, that's not going to happen any time soon, if at all. So, my focus HERE is on what can be done to fix the problems we have within the context of what's doable. If semiprotection is a solution (which I'm not convinced it is, although I'm hopeful) it is. That has nothing to do about ideology, it has to do with the wiki way... the notion that things get tried and if they work great, if they don't, fix things up till they do, or try something else. So basically, you're way off the mark, I'm afraid. ++Lar: t/c 19:28, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

When someone has a bias they don't necessarily realize it's affecting their judgment. This suggestion goes along with your ideals, so there's really no way to tell whether or not your biases have affected it. Least of all your assurance that it hasn't. Equazcion •✗/C • 19:35, 3 Apr 2008 (UTC)

You miss my point. You've apparently concluded that I *want* to restrict editing. That's wrong. I don't *want* it, I just fear it's becoming necessary. That's not a bias, it's a regret. ++Lar: t/c 13:30, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Both of you, drop it. If you must snipe at each other, take it to user Talk pages. You're not adding to this discussion anymore. -- Kesh (talk) 23:03, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

You miss my point too. ++Lar: t/c 13:30, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

• I'd like to mention one aspect of "Sighted versions" that has not been pointed out yet. The plan is not (as it may seem in other parts of this thread) to mark a large number of pages "sighted" by a bot. Rather, an editor needs to identify the page as vandalism-free, well sourced, clear of libel, etc. and then mark it sighted. (Everything else would be rather counter-productive.) So in either case, the number of "sighted" pages would only increase gradually. --B. Wolterding (talk) 19:41, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for that, Bert. So we're now talking about shelving this proposal in favour of doing something unspecified with a technical feature that we really hope will be added any time now and which will, if properly implemented, very slowly address some of our BLP issues? I don't mean to suggest the sighted versions would be a bad thing - it looks like a pretty solid proposal to me at this point - just that it doesn't seem to be a full enough fix that it justified dismissing the idea of universal semi-protection. Sarcasticidealist (talk) 20:42, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Article vandalism is something we've always had to deal with. Granted it's a more serious issue when BLP is involved, but we do our best, as has always been the case. If there's a complaint by a person who has an article here, we deal with it and fix it. There hasn't been an incident thus far that's been so serious as to suggest protection of all articles on living people is necessary. Sure it would make things easier if we could just protect everything that could potentially cause problems, but that's just not what we do here. "You can edit this page right now" is important, and I don't see that anything's changed recently that would cause us to abandon that principle even partially. An openly-editable medium is going to have issues like this, everyone knew that going in. We deal with them as they arise, and that's always worked out fine in the end. I don't see what the sudden hubbub is about to make such a drastic change. Equazcion •✗/C • 21:00, 3 Apr 2008 (UTC)

(ec) I understand what you're saying. Our fundamental disagreement, I think, is your apparent belief that dealing with material denegrating living people "as it arises" is sufficient. I don't think it is.

And I'm not an extremist about this. I don't think we should confine our BLP articles to people who also appear in paper encylopaedias. I don't think we should delete articles upon the request of the subject. One of my AFD closures is currently at WP:DRV, because I closed as keep when a number of editors believe it should have been deleted out of BLP concerns. So I'm fine with hvaing coverage of a wide range of living people; we just need to do a much better job of protecting them than we do. Sarcasticidealist (talk) 21:05, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Okay, so we'll find a way to protect them better. And I'll also point out that just because something goes to DRV doesn't mean it'll be overturned. If attention needs to be called to our deletion criteria or the behavior of closing admins, then let's by all means bring that up. But we have to take care in making sure our solutions don't begin to cut into our core principles. Semi-protecting an entire class of articles permanently and preemptively goes against everything this project was built on. Equazcion •✗/C • 21:14, 3 Apr 2008 (UTC)

Actually, I consider Sighted Versions a better fix than semiprotection. First, it allows at least some "unregistered" editing, while semiprotection does not - a reason why the proposal has been rejected over and over again. Second, Sighted Versions provides a better level of protection: While there would be many Surveyors (who can mark pages as sighted), the bar would still be much higher than just having an idle account for 4 days. Thus also vandalism by newly registered accounts would be stopped. As for the bot-protection in masses, this applies to both semiprotection and sighted versions. An automated protection would be possible, but probably not useful, since you would be protecting something which you have never seen (and which might in turn contain vandalism). --B. Wolterding (talk) 21:04, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I accept all of those arguments. But by your own statement earlier, isn't it likely to be years before even a significant portion of our BLPs have been flagged? The other thing semi-protection has over sighted revisions is that it's (mostly) pre-emptive, whereas sighted revisions do us no good until somebody gets around to flagging a version of an article. Also, you say this proposal has been rejected "over and over again". That was actually my impression earlier as well, but I couldn't find any evidence of it having been proposed even once. Can you? Sarcasticidealist (talk) 21:11, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Try going through the WP:Village pump (proposals) archives. "Let's semi-protect everything" and its variants are put up every few days, and semi-protecting BLPs specifically comes up probably two or three times a month.

Also, pre-emptive protection is specifically considered a bad thing. --erachima talk 21:15, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

(ec) I know current policy considers pre-emptive protection a bad thing. You'll note that I'm arguing for a policy change. Citing existing policy to object to a proposed policy change is, if you'll pardon my saying, begging the question. Thanks for the link to WP:VPR, though; I monitor WP:VPP pretty closely, but don't spend much time at the proposals pump; I'll look through the archives. Sarcasticidealist (talk) 21:30, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

See also Misplaced Pages:Editors should be logged in users, Misplaced Pages:Disabling edits by unregistered users and stricter registration requirement. These examples do not refer specifically to BLPs; but the arguments given there seem to apply as well. --B. Wolterding (talk) 21:18, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

If-then

I have seen no persuasive evidence that users who are unregistered (or registered 1-3 days ago) are significantly more likely to cause problems than users who registered 4+ days ago. If this were actually true, if account registration was a non-trivial hurdle which actually helped weed out malicious users, (if there was any statistical data to support this) we might as well "semi-protect" all articles, i.e. require the additional step of creating an account to edit anything in main-space.

This goes hand-in-hand with the fact that inappropriate content can be added anywhere. Let's say somebody is outright determined to libel a living person but can't edit the person's article... or edit anything linking to or from it. Hitting "random page" until they find something they can edit wouldn't be an unlikely approach (particularly if they get an error message explaining the exact reason that they can't edit the page—our interface is generally quite good about spelling out everything). Say they find one of the few pages (maybe 5% of the total, being generous—I really don't know) which don't already mention at least one living person by name.

There are roughly two possible effects this would have on deliberate "BLP violations" (that is, "edits which deliberately malign a living person", not "edits which deliberately violate a particularly complex policy which most editors are oblivious to"... seriously, do the math):

1. Patient people will create an account and post the same crap a few days later.
2. Impatient people will post the same crap to an unrelated article which nobody is watching.

Even if we have a bot to automatically update some sort of list of all pages mentioning a living person by name, I doubt any sort of bot would be high-tech enough to see the problem with "the inventor of the Segway currently owes $18,275 in unpaid parking tickets", and in an obscure stub like 14917 Taco, the statute of limitations for said tickets would run out long before a human editor found it.

Even putting "wiki-models" and foundation issues completely aside, I'm afraid technical approaches like this would, much like the ban on unregistered page creation, only create another false sense of security. — CharlotteWebb 14:23, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Not to mention cut down on new user participation and make the community even more insular? --Kim Bruning (talk) 14:33, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Choir, Kim. But I think the number of administrators who don't see a problem with that would surprise both of us. I'm trying to stick to practical concerns here because I know most people will disagree with us on ideological ones. — CharlotteWebb 14:57, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm worried about those administrators. Should have watched RFA more thoroughly. Regret it now. --Kim Bruning (talk) 15:08, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

For the record, I'm all in favor of the anyone can edit model. If it works. I just don't think it does any more, based on what I have seen here of late. Too much at stake. ++Lar: t/c 16:57, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Holy shit. That's a huge statement. Care to explain? (If too large for this margin, please try on my talk page, or per e-mail) --Kim Bruning (talk) 17:04, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

See this blog post. Took me a while to pull it together, sorry for the delay. I hope I'm wrong about what I say there. ++Lar: t/c 04:01, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

(Regarding that blog post) If you want to argue it on a legal basis (we must protect ourselves against lawsuits!), then there's a particular person who's responsible for deciding Misplaced Pages's strategy for dealing with them. Have you spoken to him about this issue yet? What has he said?

Also, bringing up Siegenthaler is increasingly irrelevant as our BLP policy and procedures mature. We certainly do want to avoid future incidents like that, but the big thing about that incident is that were were totally unprepared for it at the time, and that's what made us look like idiots. We have multiple ways of preventing and responding to such problems these days, and with Stable Versions coming, we'll have even better measures in place. Near-total lockdown, which is essentially what you're proposing, is a gross overreaction to a problem which is important but probably not as world-ending as I believe you are claiming.--Father Goose (talk) 07:03, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

I was asked why I hold a particular view, (that, regrettably, the anyone can edit model may have issues as the project has grown in scope and import) and that blog post is an explanation of why. It's not a call to action. It's not legal advice, just a view. But if you think that the project's "multiple ways of preventing and responding to such problems" are going to solve every problem, or even most, I believe you're mistaken. I believe they don't always work, and as the stakes increase, that's possibly going to cause the project greater and greater problems. Sooner or later, someone will sue, someone with big enough money to draw blood. Mike Godwin is an awesome lawyer, make no mistake, but his being with the project is not an impenetrable shield. Further, I've got my real name out there, and you don't. Therefore I have more at stake here, more standing, than you do (or any other pseudonymous or anonymous editor does), so forgive me if I worry a bit more than you do. That was my choice from the get go, but I'm entitled to worry if I like. Note that it's not "near total lockdown", that's a mischaracterization. It's only increasing the responsibility for what contributors contribute. ++Lar: t/c 13:39, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, now I'm even more convinced that you're overreacting. Do talk to Mike. I've emailed him about legal issues in the past and he made sense. See if he can put your mind at ease. Or if he can affirm your feeling that we are not living up to our responsibilities, legally.--Father Goose (talk) 04:52, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Regarding CharlotteWebb's statement: what, exactly, is the issue with ideology? It is, IMO, fundamental to the concept of Misplaced Pages that certain basic ideas be maintained and defended. An abandonment of these ideological concerns in favor of practical concerns leads us to lose sight of the meaning of the project. --Wikiacc (¶) 21:28, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Concur with Charlotte Webb's observations above. I have a fair number of non-biographical articles on my watchlist that are regularly "vandalised" and many of those improper edits include information about real people. I've found very nasty stuff about developers in articles about software programs, seen academics trashed in what appear to be pure science articles, and that doesn't count the slurs on current residents of stately homes, or the routine "John is teh gay" edits. People who want to insert BLP violations into Misplaced Pages are quite capable of finding ways to do it that do not involve editing a biographical article. I'll also add that there are plenty of examples of registered users creating coatracks in non-biographical articles to pillory people, and plenty of biographical articles containing BLP violations (both excessively positive and excessively negative) are regularly edited by registered users. Risker (talk) 15:10, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree with most of this. My own experience is that I see no discernible difference in behavior between newish accounts and anon IPs. I think the current discretionary semi protection generally works OK, for BLP and non-BLP. I would agree with protection of policies, but that's another matter. Crum375 (talk) 17:14, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Agreed that newish accounts are often IPs who've been restricted. Also agreed that instituting semi-protection on all BLPs, including potentially ones that don't previously exist, is also problematic. I guess the questions is do we have enough people to prevent the problems from occuring and potentially lingering, and are there people who are good enough to vandalize without being caught for a good long time. So far as I can tell, the answers to the last two are not favorable. Germany, based on my limited knowledge of it, is a much more homogenous area than at least the US is, and vandalism by people who dislike a subject enough to effectively vandalize articles is I think probably less likely there. In the US, things are very different. We have more paid political and PR operatives and more articles, both of which could create more problems. On that basis, my guess would be to maybe not institute semi-protection immediately, but maybe create a controlled experiment, where a few blps are semiprotected, while a statistically significant number of similar articles aren't, let things run no more checked than usual for a month or two, and then examine the results at the end. If the results indicate that semi-protection of blps would decrease vandalism by a significant enough amount or degree, then we'd have cause to institute it. If not, then there'd be no real benefit. I would think maybe 1,000 blp articles, although maybe 10,000 would be better, with possibly a slightly larger than normal number of "political" bios, might be enough to run an effective study. It might be difficult to design, but it would give us results without necessarily impacting things too seriously too quickly. John Carter (talk) 17:26, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

The "design" stage would be easy. The hard part would be counting the results, to compare the number of "vandalism" edits and "BLP violation" edits (significant overlap, yes, but neither is a sub-set of the other) to compare with the total edits for each article. I wouldn't trust a bot to accurately do this, and I wouldn't trust a human to objectively do this . — CharlotteWebb 17:46, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I wasn't thinking in terms of number of edits, because that can be misleading, but rather the, admittedly subjective, analysis of the final results at the end of the experimental period, which could probably be determined by the number of unreverted incidences of vandalism. It would require having people willing to fact check everything added in the interim, and that might take a while, but I think the results could be meaningful. John Carter (talk) 18:57, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree that in some cases, the two consequences you've identified will take place. But can you tell me with a straight face that you don't think an awful lot of the impatient ones will get frustrated and go do whatever it is kids these days do on the internet? Moreover, while I agree that BLP violations could be inserted into articles that don't have living people as their subject, at the very least those BLP violations wouldn't enjoy quite the privileged position in Google search rankings that the article on the subject itself would - not precisely "do no harm", but at least "do less harm". Finally, a lot of argument amounts to pointing out ways that people could circumvent this. Absolutely, they could. I'm not pretending that this would eliminate BLP violations, but I think for the low cost of semi-protecting our most vulnerable class of articles, we could greatly reduce BLP violations - not by 100%, maybe not even by 50% (although that's sort of my blind estimate), but certainly by a non-trivial proportion. Sarcasticidealist (talk) 17:41, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

True, they could always post the same crap on some other site and we wouldn't care. Not because we are callous or because we can safely say "it's somebody else's problem" (even though would be true), but because it will not affect the quality of our articles, which is our paramount concern as an encyclopedia (well, actually it might affect us if somebody tried to use the other site as a source, but we already have ways to deal with that).

I think there is a misunderstanding between us. Sarcasticidealist refers to kids being bored on the internet, resorting to garden-variety vandalism with no objective other than personal amusement, whereas John Carter is talking about malicious attempts to damage a person's reputation, especially for political reasons. To some of us, it boils down to whether the user expects others to believe what is posted, or to recognize it as some sort of joke. To others, it makes no difference at all. To the editor, it's a matter of how much trouble they'll go through to post it. — CharlotteWebb 18:23, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

To be clear, I'm talking both about bored kids and malicious defamation (and I actually think there's a finer line between those than you might think). This edit could have been bored kids or a political opponent, but I think we can say that there's at least a fifty-fifty chance that it wouldn't have happened had the article been semi-protected. I reverted nearly instantly, but I think I'm the only editor watching that article regularly; if I'd been retired, on a wiki-break, or had just missed the edit on my watchlist (it's a long watchlist), it could have stayed there for weeks, been replicated in Wikipeda mirrors, etc. Semi-protection of BLPs would substantially reduce (not eliminate) that kind of thing, and that benefit to me far outweighs the cost of telling well-intentioned IPs "Sorry, BLPs are semi-protected; while we encourage you to edit Misplaced Pages, you'll either need to register or go edit non-BLP articles". Sarcasticidealist (talk) 18:56, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Google and the art of stable versions

On a side-note, if we are still inordinately obsessed with the implications of being a top ten site and Google's personal favorite (maybe someday we will get over ourselves). What do you think about setting "robots.txt" to only allow Google to index the latest "stable version" of living-person articles (or possibly all articles) if/when such a system is put into place? — CharlotteWebb 18:23, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

It's sort of hard to "get over ourselves" when our willingness/ability to prevent the spread of damaging misinformation has the effect it does on people's reputations and lives. But I think your suggestion is an excellent one; I'm only concerned with the "if/when". Sarcasticidealist (talk) 18:51, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

By "get over ourselves" I mean stop implying that the need to "get the article right" is some sort of by-product of being a high-traffic web site favored by popular search engines rather than a chapter from Journalism 101. — CharlotteWebb 13:41, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm not a technical expert but as I understand it that will occur more or less automatically since google will only see the flagged version since it will be treated like a non-registered user. Am I missing something? JoshuaZ (talk) 19:47, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I think you're missing that <weasel>some say</weasel> that they do not wish or expect flagged revisions to work this way. Take Kim Bruning: Sighted versions needn't be bad... as long as we still display the *newest* version to the reader. Angus McLellan (Talk) 00:02, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, this was partly targeted toward Mr. Bruning's philosophy toward "stable versions" systems. I would like to know whether "still display the *newest* version to " would be a compromise acceptable to him. — CharlotteWebb 13:41, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

More on the rationale for this

I thank all the editors who have so far provided their thoughts. I'd like to address a few of the points raised and expand a little bit on my rationale for my proposal. With regards to the flagged revs suggestion, when is that being rolled out? Eight months ago, it was expected to be available “in a few months”. I agree that it could help, but I think a lot of people – myself included – are losing patience waiting for an unspecified date when we can start figuring out how to implement a technical feature that may be able to help BLP violations. With regards to suggestions that there is no difference between IPs an newish accounts as far as BLP vandalism goes, I can’t agree, but neither side has any statistical evidence to back this up one way or another. Let’s pretend, though, that IPs and newish accounts are each responsible for similar amounts of BLP damage. First of all, reducing this damage by half by implementing semi-protection seems like a pretty good deal to me, even if 50% of the damage remains. Second, the “newish accounts” doing the BLP damage are often ones that were created just before doing the damage; some percentage of the creators of these accounts are never going to return to Misplaced Pages anyway, and semi-protection would prevent these accounts from doing their damage as well.

Finally, I’d like to discuss the suggestion, made by Lar, that the “anyone can edit” model doesn’t work so well anymore. I disagree, mostly. I think Misplaced Pages works quite well using that model. The trouble is that the ‘’way’’ it works is eventually: articles, on the whole, improve over time, eventually reaching a relatively stable state of relatively high quality. Along the way, there are going to be inaccuracies and omissions and NPOV violations and what have you, but a thousand Misplaced Pages editors editing under a thousand accounts eventually make the article good. I love watching that happen, and accept that the temporary inaccuracies and omissions and NPOV violations are just the cost of that. Except when those inaccuracies and omissions and NPOV violations harm living people; in that case, we can’t just say “well, the article will improve eventually,” or “well, people Googling John Seigenthaler, Sr. will eventually no longer be met with allegations of his involvement in the Kennedy assassination at the top of their Google search results.” We have to instead say that we’re going to do everything reasonably within our power to take “do no harm” seriously, and make sure that, ‘’at any given moment’’, BLPs are, if not perfect, at least not defaming their subjects.

I’m not proposing any significant challenge to the “anyone can edit” ethos, and I’m not proposing any serious increase in the barriers for newcomer participation to Misplaced Pages. All I’m saying is that if we need to recognize a distinction between vandalism that hurts the quality of the encyclopaedia, which is bad, and vandalism that hurts living people who have done nothing to deserve it, for which “bad” isn’t strong enough a word. Sarcasticidealist (talk) 17:35, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

As the signpost has reported here flagged versions are being tested at the moement for two to four weeks. We then need to demonstrate a consensus for turning it on. Flagged versions preserves the 'anyone can edit' ethos much better than semi protecting BLPs and for a little wait longer seems much preferable to me. Also consider the length of time I forsee trying to demonstrate a consensus for introducing stable versions and agreeing the practicalities of what we want them to be. By the time we have done this flagged versions should hopefully be ready for implementing. We should start now. Davewild (talk) 17:54, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

To IP or not to IP

This whole thing is apparently based on the assertion that IPs are up to no good. Researchers at Dartmouth performed a study which suggests otherwise: . I personally have seen plenty of registered and IP vandals, and positive edits coming from both IPs and registered users -- as have we all.

I can't help but think that this proposal is really just a form of xenophobia directed at unregistered users. It's certainly true that banning IPs from editing would eliminate all IP vandalism. But of course it would eliminate all good IP contributions as well, and there are plenty of them. If you're a vandal-fighter, I'm sure you want to make your life easier and prevent all vandalism, but that has to be balanced against our actual mission: building an encyclopedia. We have been accomplishing that mission by welcoming everyone in the world to contribute to the encyclopedia.

We all came in through the same door people are suggesting we now close. We all became Wikipedians by stepping through that door. This proposal is something like a project-scale form of ownership: we control this thing, we keep it pure, everybody new coming along is just going to fuck it up. But Misplaced Pages still has a tremendous amount of work to do, and we can use every hand we can get. Everybody who proves themselves to be a vandal gets banned; everybody who contributes productively gets a star star chucked at them.

We do a reasonable job of keeping libel out of BLPs. We don't do a perfect job, but we don't have to do a perfect job. Section 230 gives us some breathing room to make errors, and we are diligent about not abusing that breathing room. Keeping BLPs pristine is not our job; writing BLPs (and other articles) is our job. Keeping bad info out of them is part of our job. I applaud those who take it upon themselves to do that part of the job, but that part of the job should not compromise the overall job: writing the encyclopedia. Let others write the encyclopedia. Help them write the encyclopedia. Let them help us. Don't shut the door on them because occasionally an idiot strides in with them. We have plenty of ways to deal with idiots that don't require us to shut the doors.

Let's not give in to the temptation to turn Misplaced Pages into the encyclopedia that anybody who got here first can edit.--Father Goose (talk) 02:59, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

To be clear, my arguments in favour of protecting BLP are not legal arguments; they are moral arguments. Morally, I believe that we do have to do as close to a perfect job as we can reasonably do of keeping inappropriate material out of BLPs - no matter what section 230 says. Sarcasticidealist (talk) 07:42, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

...but not no matter the cost. Doing our best while continuing to be an openly-editable medium must suffice. Equazcion •✗/C • 07:45, 4 Apr 2008 (UTC)

Let's not pretend that we're dealing in absolutes: IPs can't create articles, new accounts can't edit pages that have been the target of vandalism, and nobody can edit fully protected pages without consensus. It's not a question of whether Misplaced Pages should be an openly-edited medium - all concerned agree that it should be, but all concerned also agree that this openness shouldn't be absolute - it's a question of to what extent it will be openly-edited. There is no sacrosanct principle of Misplaced Pages that would be violated by semi-protecting BLPs. Sarcasticidealist (talk) 08:42, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Sure there is. I've said this before: preemptive or permanent article protection is just not something we do, let alone both on an entire class of articles. Protection is always temporary and when needed due to abuse. Once protection becomes preemptive rather than responsive, that's when the open-edit principle starts to crack. True, new users and IPs can't move or create new articles, but neither of those prevent anyone from "editing this page right now". Your solution would create such a prevention. It'd begin Misplaced Pages down a dangerous path... "Misplaced Pages, the encyclopedia anyone can edit, as long as you're not looking to edit something we're afraid of getting sued over". Even this one suggestion alone, minus the future prediction, still means "you can only edit this page now if it's not about a living person". That's a far cry from our current occasional temporary measures. Equazcion •✗/C • 08:48, 4 Apr 2008 (UTC)

If, as someone posted above, approximately 1/8 of all Misplaced Pages articles are BLPs, that's pretty absolute. I don't have anything against semiprotecting articles against active vandalism, or any similar pragmatic steps, but this kind of wide-scale lockdown to target a problem that we are already dealing with pretty well is totally out of scale.--Father Goose (talk) 10:04, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. I think this proposal is a solution in search of a problem. Tabercil (talk) 05:36, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

The 💕 that anyone can edit?

On the Main Page, the very first thing a visitor to Misplaced Pages sees is "Welcome to Misplaced Pages, the 💕 that anyone can edit". One of these days, we as a community are going to have to decide whether that's still true, or we are now "the encyclopedia with a relatively open admission policy that most can edit, except for one-eighth of our articles, because we're too afraid of getting sued". szyslak (t) 22:34, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

This is a massive change that violates m:Foundation issues. Simply put, it cannot be implemented. Phil Sandifer (talk) 22:38, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Thank you. One of the Foundation issues is "Ability of anyone to edit articles without registering". I'm quite willing to believe this is a foundation principle, but is it fair to ask why it is? Wanderer57 (talk) 23:24, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

The Misplaced Pages has some plainly contradictory ideas. There is no massive change involved here. It is ALREADY not true that not everyone can edit it -- spammers, blocked users, etc, can't. Also, already no one can add contentious content to BLPs. And non-registed users can't make new articles. So let's keep the silly stuff out of this. Anyone can register, thus anyone can edit. There is no fundamental principle in danger here, unless you consider the ability of anonymous users to be scumbags and write nonsense on BLPs to be some wonderful principle. The current policy is simply hateful and gives the encyclopedia a much worse reputation. It should be changed for reasons of common decency, let alone practicality. If a person can't be bothered to take two minutes to register, they have no business being able to say anything on this site about another human being. About Scrabble or World war II, fine, but living human beings, no. 2005 (talk) 23:46, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

How about "anyone can edit, except those who have lost the right to do so because of previous misbehavior"? The huge difference here, as others have pointed out, is that protecting all BLPs is a pre-emptive measure. As Phil Sandifer and Wanderer57 pointed out above, this proposal violates Foundation issues. I would advise supporters of this proposal to petition the Wikimedia Board of Trustees for a change in Board policy, if it's that important to you. You call the current policy "hateful". Hateful to whom? Do you accuse opponents of this proposal of violating BLP by acquiescence, or of otherwise engaging in immoral behavior? szyslak (t) 00:35, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

About what 2005 terms "the ability of anonymous users to be scumbags and write nonsense on BLPs": Registered users are just as "able" to violate BLP. If you are physically able to edit the encyclopedia, you are physically able to violate any policy or guideline until you're blocked. Of course, one is prohibited from doing so, by our policies and by common decency. szyslak (t) 00:42, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Then there is no issue, so we can just adopt this change! What registration requires is the feeble commitment to spend a few minutes before slandering someone, while also leaving a more clear trail of the slanderer than the IP address does. However much reason there is to not allow IPs to create an article about some drinking game are 1000 times less important than preventing IPs from slandering or vandalizing articles about people. It's simply absurd to stake out this opposite territory. Go fight for allowing IPs to create articles before opposing a common sense follow-up on established policy. Protacting people is more important than protecting us from vanity drinking game articles. 2005 (talk) 02:20, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Why isn't the existing BLP policy good enough at "protecting people"? szyslak (t) 03:14, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

In response to a couple of people, yes - there are cases where we find it necessary to restrict the ability of "anybody" to edit. However we have, in accordance with our core principles, attempted to minimize this. Pre-emptive protection crosses the line from what is necessary to what we are afraid of, and should not be done without Foundation approval. Phil Sandifer (talk) 02:39, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Prempting IPs from creating new articles is not "minimizing". It is an enormous net that is existing policy. Obviously no Foundation approval is necessary to take this new step since it is a tiny step compared to the larger prohibition. If IPs can't create articles about drinking games, then prohibiting them from editing BLPs is obviously not prohibited by general philosophy, so let's focus on real reasons to make this change or not. The question is whether this would be good for the encyclopedia or not, not platitudes since precedent is clear -- pre-emptively blocking IPs from some editing tasks is clear existing policy. 2005 (talk) 03:07, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, blocking IPs from performing certain tasks is justifiable. However, we need to draw a line somewhere. Otherwise, why don't we just end anonymous editing altogether, or require identification of editors? szyslak (t) 03:15, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Assume good faith

Another objection that hasn't been addressed: Semi-protecting all BLPs does not assume good faith. It carries a sweeping assumption of bad faith targeted at our IP editors. szyslak (t) 00:38, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

See above. No more than existing policy. Besides that, this is no argument. BLPs have rules beyond good faith. All editors are simply not allowed to add certain things, whether they do them in good faith or not. 2005 (talk) 02:22, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

That has nothing to do with assuming good faith. Yes, people violate BLP "in good faith", but people also violate NPOV, V and NOR in the belief they're doing the right thing. Anyway, you seem to be arguing that BLP "trumps" AGF, that we don't have to assume good faith when people are editing BLPs. No official policy "trumps" any other. Our policies work together, not against each other. szyslak (t) 02:44, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

No, you wrote AGF "trumps" this, which of course it doesn't. AGF has no bearing here. So let's move on. 2005 (talk) 02:59, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

AGF does trump the idea of semi-protecting BLPs, as does the Foundation issue of allowing IPs to edit. Do you mean to say our BLP policy somehow requires mass semi-protection? I was saying all our official policies are equal in importance. AGF is an official policy, and so is BLP. One does not trump another. szyslak (t) 03:07, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Your circular logic is making me dizzy. If IPs can be prevented from starting articles, they can be prevented from editing BLPs for the same reasons. It's just silliness to ignore the obvious precedent. The only issue if whether to broaden the precedent, so let's focus on that. 2005 (talk) 21:40, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

By that statement do you mean to suggest that precedent should be considered before policy and Foundation issues? --Wikiacc (¶) 11:41, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

The 💕 that anyone can edit, not write

On the Main Page, the very first thing a visitor to Misplaced Pages sees is "Welcome to Misplaced Pages, the 💕 that anyone can edit". Let's not lose sight of the fact that it doesn't say "Welcome to Misplaced Pages, the 💕 that anyone can write". Let's also not lose sight of the fact that our material is released under the GFDL, which means people are always free to edit and to republish as they choose. Just because a page here is protected, does not mean someone cannot publish it on their own site with revisions, or even in a book. The idea that page protection is a betrayal of our fundamental principles is a misunderstanding of what we are. Misplaced Pages is not an online encyclopedia. It is an open content encyclopedia project, which has also been published on cd-rom and some portions in print. Are those violations of our principles? Are those not Misplaced Pages? Let's put the idea to rest that the database has to be open to being written. The statement means all are free to contribute, and content is decided by consensus. The content doesn't have to be edited by all to achieve the consensus, the consensus can be hammered out on a talk page and then moved to update the content. There are many models which allow us to be the "💕 that anyone can edit". We have a serious issue here, and the most fundamental principle is that we are neutral. If people wish to edit our material and insert contentious passages, why do we have to allow them to do it here? Why can't they host it themselves? That was always intended to be part of the deal, that people build on the content we generate, and publish it themselves. People have the right to fork. It is not a principle that we as a community publish everything. There are serious concerns here for the community to examine. When it comes to living people, we as editors have legal responsibilities. There are also moral and ethical considerations. Are we committed to creating a comprehensive, neutral encyclopedia? If so, we should only include material which does not unduly bias an article, presenting only one face. That is especially so with regards biographies of living people. In fact, biographies are extremely hard for Misplaced Pages to write, because to write a biography one has to interview friends and the like, something we as Wikipedians cannot do due to original research concerns. The reason such interviews are undertaken is so that the biography can be comprehensive, balanced and considered. As we do not allow ourselves to perform original research, we clearly cannot write a biography unless we source from biographies already written. We need to consider ow we write about living people more carefully. Encyclopedic writing in the main tends to be bland and covers the main facts. I'm not saying we have to be boring, but we have to consider doing something. There are important issues at play here. Let's not forget that in some instances, a newspaper report can actually be primary source, not secondary. We need to ground BLP articles more in profile pieces and proper biographies, not the news of the day. Hiding T 09:48, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Urban Rose's thoughts

Unfortunately I've come to this conclusion. m:Foundation issues states that one of the fundamental principles of Misplaced Pages and one that is essentially beyond debate is that anyone should be able to edit WikiMedia projects without registering. Period. Unfortunately, if this is one of Misplaced Pages's core principles, what it truly means is that article creation should be allowed for anons, and no pages should be protected or semi-protected. This means that IPs should be allowed to edit the main page, high risk templates, everything. Misplaced Pages isn't "the 💕 that anyone can edit, unless you're anon, in which case you can't edit the Main Page, penis, Template:Uw-vandalism4im, etc." As you can tell, I don't think that this is what Misplaced Pages should do, but if not requiring registration in order to edit is one of Misplaced Pages's non-debatable principles, then I think that Misplaced Pages has to do this if it wants to be true to it's principles. I know that there's no way that this is going to happen, and I'm glad it's not, so my true point of view is that Misplaced Pages's core principles need to be amended to reflect reality. Please note that this is not the same as me saying, "the software needs to be changed so that anons aren't allowed to edit", but this idea that even suggesting it is out of harmony with Misplaced Pages's core principles needs to be gotten rid of (which it will, once Misplaced Pages's core principles are updated so that what is practiced is also what is preached).--Urban Rose 02:22, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm just going to take a break from discussing policy for a while. I'm sure that I'm overreacting and have said things that I'll regret later. I take back what I said about Misplaced Pages not practicing what it preaches.--Urban Rose 03:53, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Okay, what I've concluded now is this: based on what is practiced, what Misplaced Pages in fact "preaches" on the meta in saying that the ability to edit without registering is one of Misplaced Pages's underlying principles is that account creation should not be required to edit all pages, though it can still be required for some. But where to draw the line between allowing anon edits to pages and restricting anon edits to pages is what confuses me. Would allowing anons to only edit the sandbox be a violation of this principle. Technically they would still be allowed to edit the encyclopedia. This is why I'd like to hear Jimbo Wales give his view on where to draw the line, so this matter can be settled.--Urban Rose 15:10, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Criticisms of

How do articles like this square with our BLP policy and WP:UNDUE? --87.114.159.98 (talk) 22:29, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Generally they should be merged into the parent article, unless the length of this is such that something is better chopped off (in which case a summary should be left in the parent article, along with a link to the sub-article). In those cases, it's generally best to separate something other than criticism, since doing so with criticism can create a WP:POVFORK (although not all "criticism of..." articles are necessarily POV forks). Sarcasticidealist (talk) 22:32, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

BLP policy should ban "Criticism of..." articles for Living People. Currently there are 10 living people with "criticism(s) of.." articles. 5 of the 10 are politicians, the other 5 are Cindy Sheehan (her article is titled "Criticism and support of..), Naom Chomsky, Sylvia Browne (psychic and medium) and Bill O'Reilly (reporter) and now Prem Rawat. It is a way to circumvent BLP policy. As you can tell, there is nothing particularly reprehensible about these people but detractors have created the articles and it is difficult to remove them.Momento (talk) 03:23, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

No. BLP is not a reason to not be NPOV. If there is enough material about an individual to make a criticism article then we make it. BLP means we need to be extra careful about dealing with living people. BLP is not a washing machine for controversial people. JoshuaZ (talk) 05:58, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Just so you know, the IP edit starting this section was a sock of User:Fredrick day, a vandal and shit-stirrer, who has been blocked.--Abd (talk) 04:09, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

An article devoted to criticism is by its nature not NPOV. You don't need a "Criticism of..." article for Hitler, Pol Pot, Charles Manson etc, their activities speak for themselves. If a balanced BLP doesn't provide an accurate picture, then the article needs to be improved. Creating a ""Criticism of..." article is contrary to NPOV.Momento (talk) 08:30, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Criticism sections can be spun off of articles when the sections are getting too long for the articles themselves. We do this all the time. The criticisim needs to be NPOV. And actually, in my experience such separate articles more often occur for controversial people. Hitler isn't controversial, in the sense that pretty much no one thinks he was an at all ok human being. Such articles are more necessary when there is serious criticism and serious responses to that criticism. We do this all the time for articles about corporations or political organizations or similar entities. BLP is a not a magic set of initials that makes those cases any different. JoshuaZ (talk) 14:53, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

It is best if a criticism section is blended into the article rather than being separated out as a separate section. But it is better to have appropriate data in the article poorly formated than not there at all. If you see data in an article that should be better formatted, then fix it, don't delete it. WAS 4.250 (talk) 08:49, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

It depends on the context. Richard Dawkins for example has the criticism blended into the article since he has been criticized on many different points. In contrast some others have criticism sections that are separate. It really depends on the exact circumstances especially in regard to the nature and extent of the criticism. JoshuaZ (talk) 14:53, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

In fact, BLPs cases are entirely different from articles about corporations or political organizations and must be treated with a lot more care. Having a separate "Criticism" section in any BLP is giving "undue weight" to critics, as per . The Richard Dawkins article is a good example of how a BLP should be structured. Regrettably, many editors who don't like the subject have inserted a "Criticism" section and worse created a "Criticism of (name)" article to ensure their POV is prominent. I really believe Wiki should take a hard line with BLP policy and make it absolutely clear that "Criticism" sections in BLPs and "Criticism of (name)" articles are not encyclopedic and contrary to NPOV. Currently we're talking about 10 "Criticism of (BLP name)" articles and probably hundreds of "Criticism" sections.Momento (talk) 20:58, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

No. This claim demonstrates a deep misunderstanding of Misplaced Pages policy. NPOV is paramount above all else. If there is a general problem with criticism sections then they are a problem regardless of where they are. And they are not in general a problem. This is precisely why the section you lined to in NPOV but didn't actually quote says that such sections " may warrant attention" - indeed this is for reasons similar to what you outline- they are often made by people with a bone to pick with the subject. But that doesn't mean such a section or an article can't be NPOV. And the notion that what constitutes NPOV based on whether the subject is living or dead is simply wrong; BLP means we need to be extra careful about POV issues in regard to living people. It doesn't mean that what constitutes a neutral description magically changes when the subject dies. JoshuaZ (talk) 21:54, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree that criticism sections are problematic — in all articles, not only in BLPs — but in BLPs particularly, because the spirit of the policy is to enforce our best practices with extra care when it comes to living persons. I also agree that we should say something in the policy about not creating separate "Criticism of ..." articles about living persons. I can't imagine why a separate article would ever be necessary. SlimVirgin 22:05, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

There may be some wiggle room with corporations and political organizations but this is the BLP page. If any editor decided to remove the criticism woven into Richard Dawkins's article and put it in a separate article called "Criticism of Richard Dawkins" that would be counter to at least 4 NPOV issues -

1. Article naming - "Therefore, encyclopedic article titles are expected to exhibit the highest degree of neutrality. The article might cover the same material but with less emotive words, or might cover broader material which helps ensure a neutral view (for example, renaming "Criticisms of drugs" to "Societal views on drugs"). Neutral titles encourage multiple viewpoints and responsible article writing".

2. Undue weight - "NPOV says that the article should fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by a reliable source, and should do so in proportion to the prominence of each". That is specifically eliminated in a "Criticism of .." article.

3. Balance -" the core of the NPOV policy is to let competing approaches exist on the same page: work for balance". Again, specifically eliminated in a "Criticism of .." article.

4. POV forks - "A POV fork is an attempt to evade NPOV policy by creating a new article about a certain subject that is already treated in an article, often to avoid or highlight negative or positive viewpoints or facts. This is generally considered unacceptable. The generally accepted policy is that all facts and major Points of View on a certain subject are treated in one article.".

The issue isn't what constitutes NPOV, that's clear enough. The issue is, what are we going to do about "Criticism of..." BLP articles that clearly violate NPOV. My proposal is to make it clear in BLP policy that "Criticism of...(living person)" articles are expressly forbidden and should be removed on sight.Momento (talk) 00:55, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Momento, you recently created Criticism of Jimbo Wales then recreated it again after it was speedily deleted. Why did you do so if you think they should be forbidden? ·:· Will Beback ·:· 04:10, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Clearly Momento was trying to make a point. I think that he has now understood that it was unwise. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 04:15, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Let's hear it from him. ·:· Will Beback ·:· 04:18, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

My widely discussed and long held POV is that "Criticism of (Name)" articles are inappropriate and a blight on Misplaced Pages. However, putting aside my POV and writing for the enemy, if "Criticism of (Name)" articles are the way of the future for Misplaced Pages then a good place to start would be with Jimbo Wales. Fortunately the tide is turning and some people who supported "Criticism of (Name)" articles are having a rethink, so I applaud WillBeBack's request to merge "Criticism of Prem Rawat"] with the main article.Momento (talk) 01:50, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Your response is characteristic of the problem. You write here that you "applaud" the request to merge the "criticism" article, but on the article talk page you insist that there is essentially nothing worth merging. And you wonder why peope think you want to simply delete criticism? ·:· Will Beback ·:· 04:46, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

I have explained this to you at Prem Rawat talk that there are three methods of merging and here it is .Momento (talk) 08:03, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

We could add something like this to the criticism section:

When handling criticism of living persons, editors should seek wherever possible to weave it throughout the article as appropriate, rather than creating a separate section devoted to it. Separate articles devoted to criticism of living persons are unacceptable.

SlimVirgin 01:10, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Responding to Andries' concern:

When handling criticism of living persons, editors should seek whenever appropriate, depending on the nature of the material, to weave it throughout the article, rather than creating a separate section devoted to it. Separate articles devoted to criticism of living persons are unacceptable.

SlimVirgin 06:52, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

That's good. I take out the first bit and stick with "Editors should weave positive and negative material throughout the article, rather than creating a separate section devoted to criticism. Separate articles devoted to such criticism are unacceptable".Momento (talk) 04:15, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Strong oppose, in some cases it is theoretically possible to weave criticisms/controversies thru the articles but it will lead to bad article. Sometimes crticisms/controversies should be dealt with per subject and cannot be dealt with chronologically without leading to tortured article. Andries (talk) 06:16, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree that it's not always possible. That's why it says "wherever possible." It should be the aim when the material allows that structure, but you're right that it doesn't always. Also, Andries, integrating criticism into the article doesn't necessarily mean it has to be written about chronologically.SlimVirgin 06:30, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Slim, I suggest toning down the word "possible" or specifying it. E.g. "reasonably possible", "possible without leading to an unnatural, badly structured, or tortured article". Andries (talk) 06:44, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

The point is not to weave good and bad like a mindless effort at "Some say the world is flat and others say it is round" kind of pseudo-neutrality. But instead to provide the information in the article where it is relevant. Criticisms in a WP:BLP wikipedia article should be related and relevant to their claims of notability and should be discussed in that article alongside those claims of notability and not provided as a list of criticisms in a section devoted to negative claims about the subject of the article. WAS 4.250 (talk) 04:40, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

I didn't realize when this first came up that it was connected to the creation of Criticism of Prem Rawat. It would be helpful if we could hear from the people involved in that why they felt it was a good idea. SlimVirgin 06:07, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Ironically, it was Jossi who created Criticism of Prem Rawat in 2004, and he explained his reason for doing so:

• Opposing views can be added here

At the time, as I recall, negative material was moved to that article so that the main article would be free of criticism. The article grew contentiously, but contained well-sourced material. In 2007, it was merged by a then-uninvolved editor who felt it violated NPOV as a POV fork. More recently, there have been complaints that the merged material has mostly disappeared and that little of the critical material is mentioned in the main article anymore.

Stepping back, the supporters of Prem Rawat on this project have been active in seeking to prohibit and remove "criticism" sections in all articles, including those of Mother Theresa and the Dalai Llama. BLP standards keep going up and that's a good thing. Personally, I believe that most biographies are best written chronologically, including positive and negative commentary contemporaneously. Other biographies are arranged topically, and the outside views can also be worked in there too. The only reason that "criticism" sections are good is that it makes it easier for article patrollers to ensure that the critical material isn't getting deleted.

Note that we have Category:Criticism of religion and it's full of articles. Category:Criticism of Mormonism has dozens of articles, but no "Criticism of Joseph Smith". OTOH, we do have Criticism of Muhammad and Criticism of Jesus. So dead religious leaders aren't necessarily an issue. (yeah right!) We have a special problem when the main article of criticism of a religion is on the living founder/head of that religion. If Jesus were alive today would we allow "Criticism of Jesus"? But what about "Criticism of Christianity"?

I think that we should suggest that only non-personal topics about living people are suitable for "criticism" articles. So "Criticism of George W. Bush" would not be allowed, but "Criticism of George W. Bush's Presidential Administration" or "Criticism of George W. Bush's Iraq Policy" would be permitted. Likewise, "Criticism of Prem Rawat's teachings" or "Criticism of Prem Rawat's organization" would be permissible articles. We can cover it in an extra line:

• Articles devoted to criticism of activities, beliefs, and organizations which mention living people are permissible.

That would prevent the disruption of many worthwhile articles. ·:· Will Beback ·:· 07:34, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks that is really helpful. Andries (talk) 07:42, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

But this would lead to unwieldy article names e.g. Criticisms of the actions and teachings of Jesus. Criticisms of the actions and teachings of Prem Rawat. Andries (talk) 08:17, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for that, Will. I'm wondering how we could elegantly word a provision to say that separate articles on criticism of an organization associated with a person are okay, but not criticism of the person himself. SlimVirgin 19:16, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

I would like to congratulate Will Beback for his helpful post above. However, after reading it, I just know somebody will ask the absurd question "does BLP apply to dead religious figures who, according to the doctrine of their followers, have been resurrected?" Now, who on earth would want to answer that? All I've got to say to that is "pick a decent standard and apply it everywhere" (this could probably be twisted around to mean "write about any subject as if it were a living person", but that would miss the point). Please don't tell me I'm delusional for imagining that things could ever be that simple, I already know. — CharlotteWebb 14:10, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

<<< Policy talk pages are not for the discussion of specific articles. That is better done in article talk page. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 18:56, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

There was also a discussion about a guideline on "Criticism" that never made it. It is now an essay WP:CRITICISM. There is also a suitable template {{criticism section}} that may be useful. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 18:59, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

With all due respect, why is this discussion occurring here rather than at WT:NPOV? Certainly any proposed rewording of the NPOV policy that is listed on this page is absolutely in the wrong place. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:23, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Quick comment on "criticisms of" articles. In general, and provided they are appropriately done, these are usually likely to be okay. The exact same criteria apply to these as any other summary style article. Roughly speaking:

1. A page that has a section which itself merits expansion may have a separate article on that section. That's so whether it is a subtopic of any topic. Many many articles have subtopic sections with their own articles expanding on them.
2. However this does not supersede NPOV. The main article contains a high quality summary of the "criticisms" article and the "criticisms" article is merely an expansion of that aspect.
3. Likewise the "criticisms of" sub-topic must be a neutral statement of the criticisms, must refer to other articles, must balance those in their appropriate context too; it must not merely be a negative list of all criticisms and nothing else. Especially, the notion that because an article may be called "criticisms of X" it is OWNed somehow by the critics and is "Intended" as a forum for their critical views, is utterly incorrect.
4. Finally, POV forks are not allowed. These are integrated articles that cover different aspects in more depth, but each aspect neutrally and respecting the others.

My $0.02 on the question. FT2  07:54, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Can we work on Slim Virgin's original proposal?Momento (talk) 21:54, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:OptOut

I think I support the idea of semi protecting all BLPs, and I also think I support the proposal above, which I have made concrete for further consideration. I know many aren't yet sure that there's a problem which needs to be addressed, but I think there is, per Doc G's work, and other thoughts and observations from around the place.

I'd also say that despite the many concerns raised above, it does look like an idea to me which is gaining ground, and could indeed have a chance of becoming the consensus view... so thoughts on how we expedite that process are also most welcome... I think we should move towards thinking about asking someone nicely to write some sort of bot in the next month or two, should further support emerge.... best, Privatemusings (talk) 03:54, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

It seems that if this opt-out gets off the ground (which I hope it does, personally) the real issue is going to be who gets it and who doesn't (in terms of where to draw the notability line) and I would imagine that in practice that line would bound to be challenged but I hope allt he same that this becomes reality. Thanks, SqueakBox 03:59, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

The idea of letting the subject of the article decide if the article is deleted seems to me to be such a departure from neutrality that it is not compatible with our project goal of using the neutral point of view as the guiding editorial principle. _(1 == 2) 04:17, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

It's already policy that we give weight (of unspecified amounts) to such requests in cases where the subject's notability is marginal. All this would be doing is defining the weight and trying to define the margins of notability (not that I support this wholeheartedly, mind you; my thoughts can be found at the proposal talk page). Sarcasticidealist (talk) 04:20, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

ah, well I think you've kinda got to squint at it to see removing an article as a statement of non-neutrality..! I don't really look at it that way - but fair enough, if you, or others, do! Privatemusings (talk) 04:21, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Based on how Misplaced Pages has handled cases like these to date, the subject of the article can always ask, which may serve as a factor in deletion discussions (or office actions), but a person can't opt out of being an encyclopedic topic (if they are one) any more than Muslims can tell us to not put pictures of Muhammad into that article.

It's not gonna happen.--Father Goose (talk) 07:20, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Rather than repeat myself endlessly, I'll link to my lengthy comments at Wikipedia_talk:OptOut#Violation_of_a_foundation_issue and say I think this is a Bad Idea that should not be implemented. MBisanz 08:01, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

To quote m:Foundation issues: "The Wikimedia projects as a community have certain foundation issues that are essentially considered to be beyond debate. People who strongly disagree with them sometimes end up leaving the project". Allowing the subject of an article to have the sole decision over the deletion of an article not only violates NPOV, but also the foundation issue which states the "wiki process" is the decision mechanism on content. We simply do no outsource our content decisions, we use consensus. _(1 == 2) 17:27, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, this problem is already handled by OTRS. I would rather not have it codified, because this is something that really needs to be on a case-by-case basis. If a person reaches a certain level of notability, even if they didn't ask for it and didn't do anything to encourage it, then Misplaced Pages needs to have an article on that person. There isn't really a good way to define that notability threshold in absolute, unambiguous terms.

The only way I could see this getting off the ground is if OTRS is really bogged down with requests of this nature. If that is the case, then I could maybe see a very narrow (more narrow than the ones currently proposed) set of criteria to get automatic approval for self-BLP deletion, just to lighten the workload on OTRS. I'm not an admin, so I don't know what the workload is like over there. But that's the only way I would even consider supporting this, is if OTRS is so overwhelmed it is about to collapse. If the resources are there, this needs to be case-by-case. --Jaysweet (talk) 17:35, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Though OTRS chronically runs behind, it is in no way horribly bogged down such that a fundamental shift of this nature seems warranted to me. Please note I am speaking here purely as an editor and not as an OTRS volunteer. Phil Sandifer (talk) 17:42, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't know if opt out is the solution since it would be inconsistently applied. It would be hard to draw a line as to who gets opt-out treatment vs. definate public figures. One idea is to not allow original biographies which is technically original research. If no outside biography can be found, whether it's the subject's personal glowing webpage bio or a print encyplopedia's version, then there should not be an article due to OR. That may help with the problem. MrMurph101 (talk) 23:01, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:BLP subject response

I have set up this new proposal which allows subjects of BLPs to post an on-wiki response to their biography, and have it linked to from the article. Sjakkalle (Check!) 08:20, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Abuse of date of birth

In addition to identity theft, could a date of birth be abused to obtain other private information about a person, such as their home address? (The living person I have in mind is John Yoo) Thanks, Andjam (talk) 10:05, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Designated agent

There may be a discrepancy between the Designated Agent listed on this page and the one at http://wikimediafoundation.org/Designated_agent ... I'm not sure which one is correct. (you need a wikimediafoundation wiki log in to see the text there so I am reproducing the address:

   Jimmy Wales, Designated Agent
   Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
   200 2nd Avenue S
   Suite 358
   St. Petersburg FL 33701

Not sure what should be changed, if anything. ++Lar: t/c 01:49, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

See User talk:Anthere#designated agent. Bottom line: it is a legal term refering to something that must be changed by a formal government process, and the Chair of the Board is on the case. I expect our lawyer to act on this ASAP. WAS 4.250 (talk) 11:40, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Unauthorized

Would all the BLP's on wikipedia be considered unauthorized? If so should something be done about it? MrMurph101 (talk) 03:47, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, they are clearly unauthorized. Do you perceive this as a problem and, if so, why? Sarcasticidealist (talk) 03:49, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

It could be. I'm not saying that all blp's should be deleted because of this but wondering if it should be noted somewhere. Published biographies have to note they are unauthorized but I don't know how something like wikipedia fairs with this issue or whether it matters or not. MrMurph101 (talk) 03:59, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't believe there's any law requiring published biographies to disclose whether or not they're authorized. Sarcasticidealist (talk) 04:09, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

"The general legal rule is that an author can write a biography without the subject's permission providing that the biography is accurate and does not invade the subject's right of privacy, misappropriate his/her right of publicity, infringe copyright protected material of the subject, engage in unfair competition or violate a breach of confidence with the subject." In any event, this is a legal question, and legal questions are resolved by the Foundation's office and its legal counsel. I do think there are important ethical dimensions to Misplaced Pages BLPs, but those are already being discussed in enough places. Sarcasticidealist (talk) 04:12, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I was just curious and wanted some clarity about it because I wasn't sure. MrMurph101 (talk) 04:21, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

"Authorized" biographies are published with a "sympathetic point of view"; Misplaced Pages's biographies are meant to adhere to a neutral point of view, which may or may not be to the subject's liking.--Father Goose (talk) 23:40, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Sensationalistic titles

What should an editor do when they encounter a good source with a sensationalist title, and the material from that source does belong (NPOV, undue, etc...) in the article? (Many news report "titles" are meant to grab potential readers attention, which is contrary to this policies goal of understating and underplaying controversial materials.) Ideally, of course, use an equally reliable source that covers the same material without the problematic title. But if that isn't (yet) possible, what should be done?

I've seen two ArbComm cases where one of the issues was the usage of such sources. Here are the sources that were problematic: , . For the second, it is the sub-title that is problematic, so I'd think using just the main title would be an acceptable (if imperfect) citation. For the first, there is no other title, and omitting the title would lead to an incomplete citation, which is unsound sourcing. So what should be done? This is a problem that is going to recur, given the economic pressures under which newspaper headlines are written, and the "right" answer isn't obvious to me. GRBerry 18:57, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

If the sensationalist title belongs to an article in a sensationalist publication, then there's a good chance that it may need to be removed altogether. However, in the case of a sensationalist title in The Guardian or some other reliable publication ... I don't think we can be responsible for the titles chosen by others. As long as the title appears in a proper context (i.e. a "Notes" or "References" section), there should be no confusion with regard to what claims our article makes about the person. Black Falcon 22:08, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Robot detection of articles about people

Shouldn't it be possible for bots to detect (with 90% accuracy) whether an article is about a person? For example, Faisal Faisal isn't listed in living people, but you could deduce that the article is about a person based on the category "Iraqi people stubs", which is descended from the "People" category. A human being would then have to determine whether the person is living or not, but at least that's a sorting job. Andjam (talk) 14:01, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

The latter can usually be determined by the presence of a birth date and the absence of a death date, if it matters. However, this can create false positives if the person is dead but the death date is missing. When Category:Living people was created it was mostly populated by a bot using this sort of logic, e.g. . To keep this category as accurate as possible we would need bots to repeatedly and continuously cycle through all articles. Now that a "hidden category" feature is available, it might be helpful to add non-living people directly to Category:Dead people to decrease the amount of redundant checking in each cycle. Also a (hidden) Category:Non-biographical articles could similarly be added a second list of pages for a bot to permanently ignore while updating Category:Living people, if one wanted to make this more efficient. — CharlotteWebb 10:25, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

Sounds good. Andjam (talk) 12:43, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages policy on names of teens in the news?

I looked at Misplaced Pages:Biographies of living persons#Privacy of names. What is Misplaced Pages policy on including the name of a teen who is a victim? The victim's name is available from various news sources such as the Associated Press, the New York Times and the Orlando Sentinel. (Google search gets "about 202,000" matches for the victim's name.) --EarthFurst (talk) 04:14, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

We balance the need for the information in order for the article to be encyclopedic, the ability of the information in a high visibility site to cause harm, and undue weight considerations amomg other concerns. The incident and article you are refering to have no need for the name to be in the article, could do harm (newspaper accounts grow old and in a year's time will not be in google news and some will be off the web altogether), and the incident itself in that article has a bit of undue weight proiblem. WAS 4.250 (talk) 11:13, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Essay: Misplaced Pages:No original biographies

Misplaced Pages:No original biographies. Not a policy proposal, but codifying something I've heard here and there. Feel free to comment/edit to your heart's content. – Luna Santin (talk) 01:04, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

People who may or may not be living

I know there are categories handling people who may or may not be living, such as "Possibly living people" or "Disappeared people", but this policy page doesn't explicitly state that this policies apply for such people. That is, if in doubt, the policy applies. Should this be clarified? I'm also going to mention this issue at Template talk:WPBiography. Andjam (talk) 13:10, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

IMO, it should be stated specifically that when there is uncertainty the policy applies.

On a related matter, I think it should be said that a person's death is NOT a carte blanche that things can be added that were unacceptable before their death. Wanderer57 (talk) 15:53, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

Reversing the ALF default for BLPs

I want to re-propose a simple solution to many of our BLP problems. This has been proposed several times before in different forms, including here last year, by Jimbo on the mailing list, and by Doc Glasgow.

The proposal is to add the following to the section on AfD-based deletion:

When the biography of a living person is submitted for deletion, whether at the request of the subject or not, the default presumption in favor of retention is reversed. That is, if there is no consensus to keep the BLP in the opinion of the closing admin, the article will be deleted.

• Support. I believe we have a responsibility to do this, both to the project and to the people affected by it. SlimVirgin 12:20, 21 April 2008 (UTC)