On 4/17/12, George Herbert <george.herb...@gmail.com> wrote: <snip>
> The key problem here - IMHO - is not-sensitive editors interacting > with sensitive BLP subjects. That is not always the case. What would *you* do if you cleaned up and expanded an article on a BLP you had never heard of before (to 'do the right thing'), and did the best job you could, but the subject of the article turned up on the talk page of the article and objected to the rewrite and said they didn't want an article on them (I'm talking in general here, not about specific cases)? To make it even harder, they are being reasonable about it, rather than abusive, and you feel bad about how things turned out. What then? You feel an obligation to keep an eye on an article that *you* rewrote, but you know the subject objects to it. You are not getting paid for this (you are 'only' a volunteer), yet you have found yourself caught in this rather horrible situation that you would never have found yourself in if you had been employed by a published scholarly encyclopedia to write an article. The conclusion I'm coming to is (as I've said, I've only seriously edited 4-5 BLPs ever): only edit BLPs where there are sufficient sources to write a proper article. Editing of borderline notable BLPs is a thankless task that rewards no-one. Not the readers (they don't get a proper article, only a stub), not the subjects (they mostly don't want such articles or want to have inappropriate control), and not the editors (they usually don't have the sources to write a proper article). That is largely why I've left my proposed rewrite on the radio presenter on the talk page. I can't in good conscience put that in as the actual article if the subject doesn't want an article at all. There are far better things to do with my time than edit borderline notable BLPs, which will all likely get deleted at some future point anyway. Having huge numbers of BLPs is not a sustainable practice on Wikipedia. One more point. There was a Facebook thread and radio comments mentioned at some point. I'm not on Facebook and I don't listen to the radio. The question is, should I make myself aware of what is being said in those media before editing such articles or their talk pages, or not? If there is a need to follow 'responses' in other media, that is not sustainable either. Carcharoth _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
