2009/3/3 David Gerard <[email protected]>: > 2009/3/3 Sue Gardner <[email protected]>: > >> Can I ask: does anyone reading this thread 1) think raising the notability >> threshold is a bad idea, 2) believe defaulting to deletion upon request is a >> bad idea, or 3) disagree with the notion that other Wikipedias should shift >> closer to the German Wikipedia's generally-less-permissive policies and >> practices, particularly WRT BLPs? > > Deletion upon request is a terrible idea. It will lead to only > hagiographies - violations of NPOV - being kept. (This has been > discussed at length on wikien-l, fwiw.)
That said, reacting the other way and *prohibiting* deletion on request is also counterproductive - we've skirted close to this on enwp in the past, where people have interpreted "subject has asked us to delete it" as being an automatic cast-iron reason to keep it in place. I mean, I've seen cases where someone's stood up and said "this article is atrocious, subject wants it deleted" and it's been kept (with a variety of snide comments), whereas had they just said "this article is atrocious", it'd have been killed with no objections. We can go too far; after all, when someone says "delete this please", it's at least as common that they're reflecting that the article has major fundamental problems as that they're making a frivolous request! We do need to recognise that the subject of an article is often one of the people (counting readers and editors together) who has the closest knowledge *of the article*, and is well-placed to see real problems - finding some way of using that is potentially an excellent tool in identifying the real dross that we ourselves don't want, and keeping the material we *do* want up to a high standard. The trick is taking advantage of their perspective, without turning it into a (real or imagined) conflict-of-interest issue, or letting it degenerate into the kind of thing that breeds automatic assumptions of bad faith. -- - Andrew Gray [email protected] _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
