On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 6:00 PM, David Gerard <dger...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 27 March 2012 17:20, Charles Matthews > <charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com> wrote: > > > So you have been arguing that without the BLP policy, and without the > > noticeboard set up to help compliance with the policy, just the same > close > > investigations of the actual reliability of sources that nominally fall > > within "RS" would be going on? I don't agree, and I wonder if anyone > else > > does. I'm not the biggest fan of noticeboards, qua unchartered processes; > > but in this case it seems to be working, and having WP:BLP there fairly > > clearly has something to do with it. > > > The key point to remember about BLPs is: no eventualism. If an article > about someone dead 200 years says something nasty and wrong, that's > not great, but it's not urgent. If an article about a living person > says something nasty and wrong, that is urgent, and we can't just > assume the wiki process will on balance fix it in the fullness of > time. It's the simplest possible way of doing it and it's a vast > improvement over the previous situation. It's not perfection, but > calling it a "failure" is hyperbolic. "No eventualism" is one principle that I would like to see spelled out in BLP policy, in the Writing style section. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons#Writing_style People do tend to treat biographies like a research pad for all the things that an author might justifiably want to include in a five-volume, 2,000-page biography. The problem is, the other 1,999 pages never turn up, leaving something – often something trivial, titillating, or unflattering – that might be worthy of mention on page 1,547 as the biography's main point. Andreas _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l