Hi folks. I fear this is not my first legalistic post to wikia-l; sorry about that.
The Doom Wiki (doom.wikia.com) is an encyclopedia about the video game Doom and related games. It is intended as a scholarly project, rather than a community portal. Due to the great age of the game, however, a comprehensive treatment necessarily includes a discussion of Doom's influence on the gaming populace, and the (still ongoing) activities of Doom's fandom. This eventually results in wiki articles about living persons who have contributed notably to Doom's history (e.g. by publishing add-on levels, doing programming work, or winning competitions), but who are otherwise private citizens. The subjects of these articles often know about, and contribute to, said articles, but because we have an NPOV policy similar to Wikipedia's, they occasionally object to what is written there. I myself have argued for a courtesy deletion policy, on the grounds that we really have no legal standing to write biographies of private citizens without their permission; others insist that that is overkill and we should simply tighten our bibliographic standards (no unsourced statements from forum posts or IRC logs, for example). I am posting here because I know there are other wikis where this is an issue (fanfic exchanges, alternative lifestyle communities), and despite the presence of one or two irate users looking over our shoulders, the Doom Wiki by itself seems unable to reach consensus on a new policy. The full debate, if you want it, is here: doom.wikia.com/wiki/Doom_Wiki:Central_Processing#Uh-oh_.28NPOV_biographies.29 Any advice would be enormously appreciated, even if it's just a link to another Wikia site where this has been discussed extensively (there are so many now that I don't know where to start looking). Thank you for reading this far, at any rate. --- "Ryan W" _______________________________________________ Wikia-l mailing list [email protected] http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikia-l
