> 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"
Generally your biographies and mentions are of living people, who can be both hurt and offended, and have standing to sue in some cases. Wikipedia developed the policy Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons in response to this problem. Essentially, the policy is to exclude any controversial information that is not backed up by a good source and to attribute even that to the source. There is much more to it than that. But in my experience, the biggest problem is an editor who is angry about another person for one reason or another and engages in finding and posting negative information. If they have backing in the media, watch out, because then nasty stuff is easy to find and has a presumption of reliability. I suppose Doom has a somewhat specialized press, but there are probably some critical articles which resulted from controversies. Wikipedia would not accept comments on mailing lists or blogs as a reliable source. Those sources are quite likely to contain snippy stuff that may not be particularly objective. Fred _______________________________________________ Wikia-l mailing list [email protected] http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikia-l
