Thank you, everyone, for your prompt and thoughtful replies. GreenReaper, I ran across that Wikifur discussion at some earlier point, but the "Eyes of the Night" story was new to me. BLP subjects in such cases must get very frustrated by the wiki-process of forming consensus, which differs completely from their dealings with every other organization in the real world or on the internet: normally, you just find the one right person to complain to, and the problem gets strong-armed away. Supposing the wiki editors don't start shouting at each other or at the BLP subject, but actually listen to each other's lines of reasoning? That could take days!
The present problem at the Doom Wiki would never arise on Wikipedia, because none of the information in the article meets the "reliable sources" criteria. Unfortunately, excepting a tiny number of industry celebrities, the culture of any gaming community is expressed almost entirely in non-fact-checked media (Usenet, BBSes, IRC, e-mails, forum postings); it would be impossible to document that culture using Wikipedia's bibliographic standards. If I had dictatorial authority over the site, I would institute a courtesy deletion policy like Wikifur's. There are many reasons that someone might not want an article, the article doesn't have to be anywhere close to illegal to do harm, and the subject is the most qualified person to judge that. Courtesy deletion also leaves our NPOV policy intact, nor must we consider a blanket ban on hearsay citations; I think the latter would disqualify a lot of genuinely significant historical information (at least, in the superficial sense that our community as a whole is significant). In the ongoing debate, however, most others seem to advocate a compromise "I'll know a problem when I see it" approach. The divisive incident would be removed from the biographical article, but without prejudice to writing about it in related non-biographical articles, with or without naming the main parties. I don't know if that will satisfy our irate fellow player, but it at least prevents the allegations showing up on the first page of a Google search for "Firstname Lastname" (which does happen with our biographical articles!), and tables the question of a detailed specification for NPOV exceptions, which would quickly bog down because we're a small site and don't have many gnomes yet. Sadly, the pertinent principle may be that a gaming wiki is populated largely by gamers, who are self-selected for poor social skills. Therefore, at this stage of our growth, content may have to be added or not added depending on the probability of a flame war, which consumes energy (maybe even contributors) out of all proportion to any potential improvement to the encyclopedia. In the absence of courtesy deletions, the compromise solution above might well achieve that, because it implies that editors should use their common sense instead of trying to jam in as much information as possible without violating the letter of a policy. Again, I appreciate everyone's time and effort, especially that previously devoted (probably in the face of withering criticism) to developing the BLP policies I have been reading. --- "Ryan W" _______________________________________________ Wikia-l mailing list [email protected] http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikia-l
