Chicken Little is a fairly good comparison. I see in this group of BLPs only the possibility of potential problems. I am waiting for evidence that any of those deleted without checking so far has done harm by being there. Let us suppose for the sake of argument that out of the 500, 1 or 2 of them was a potential problem;. Based on my running work with this, for about half of them there was both the ability to source enough to lose the unsourcedBLP status very easily, and the potential to become a acceptable articles after reasonable work. The project thus has been wrong several hundred times more than it has been right. A yield rate of less than 1% and a damage rate of 50% is unacceptable quality.
I would feel quite differently if either 90% of the articles were truly unsourceable or unsuitable, or if even 5% of them had been actual problems. BLP violations are serious, and I agree that we ought to risk making a few errors to remove them--a 5% error rate is as low as any Wikipedia process can reasonably attain-- but this was a process 99% of which was either wrong or unnecessarily hasty. If this does not meet the standard for "disrupting Wikipedia to make a point", I do not know what would. True, they made the point. There were so many ways to have done it better. They would have made the point just as well with 50, not 500 deletions. They would have made the point just as well and contributed something to the process if they actually checked for even the most obvious and easily sourceable notability. They would have been less foolish if they had not deleted the 5 or 10% of articles that did have sources, though not in the usual places. In the month or so that this plan probably took shape, each of the 50 people involved or strongly defending them could have checked properly 10 articles a day while still doing their usual work. That would have cleared 10,000 articles. In the years that people have been complaining about the situation, if they had worked instead of talked, the whole problem of the old articles could have been dealt with--even by themselves alone. And then we would be able to concentrate on the much bigger problem of all the sourced articles in Wikipedia that nonetheless contain major errors. David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 2:19 PM, Ryan Delaney <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 10:02 AM, Gwern Branwen <[email protected]> wrote: >> You older Wikipedians run along now; you've had your day. The adults >> are talking now - I are serious editors, this are serious website. >> >> Funny how BLPs have been the most serious threat facing the project, >> so serious that mass mutiny is justified and the jettisoning of our >> old ways and practices - and have been since at least 2006. I guess >> when I look cynically upon the Chicken Little BLP warriors, it just >> reflects my own ignorance of how Wikipedia teeters on the brink every >> day, how countless suicides and ruined lives have been averted by >> their heroic daily efforts. >> >> -- >> gwern > > This is really not the attitude that we want to project toward anyone. > I'm very disappointed by the tone of this email. > > - causa sui > > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l > _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
