Misplaced Pages

Meta-view by Kotniski

This is just the same discussion that is already taking place in at least two other places. Can we stop this forking?

Users who endorse this summary

1. Collect (talk) 16:15, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
2. Yes, but an RfC is finally the RIGHT place to discuss this, so let's close all the others in favor of this, shall we? Jclemens (talk) 16:27, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

   Agree, and add links from those places to here, and move this Meta-view to the talk page, which is where meta things and threaded conversations belong. Jehochman 16:29, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

View by Jclemens

BLPs have certainly been abused in the past, but the simple fact remains that most BLPs, even those that are unreferenced are innocuous, provide useful material, and do no harm. The issue with the status quo hasn't been the wording, but the implementation: page protection (as it exists today, leaving alone discussion of future technology) has been applied too stingily to BLPs, even in inexcusable cases like Joseph Farah where he's both a vandalism target and an Internet journalist who's been critical of Misplaced Pages. The choice set before us is a false dichotomy. Do we really need to delete every unsourced BLP? If we do that, we're cleaning up the 80% of them that are only 20% of the problem, and we're not touching the issue of false information appearing in sourced articles.

The risk reduced--and let's be clear, there certainly will be some--is insufficient to justify the widespread deletion of accurate, useful, and innocuous information, sourced or not, and ultimately damages Misplaced Pages without helping BLP vandalism subjects.

Users who endorse this summary

1. Jclemens (talk) 16:22, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
2. Collect (talk) 16:30, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

View by Collect

Controversial or contentious material with no references should be deleted on sight. Existence of a person is not, however, controversial nor contentious. WP has policies for deleting articles lacking notability, and no Draconian policy of automatic article deletion should pre-empt the orderly functioning of processes already existing. Collect (talk) 16:13, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

Users who endorse this summary

1. Collect (talk) 16:16, 21 January 2010 (UTC) (approving own message as seen above)
2. Jclemens (talk) 16:24, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
3. Endorse, and I think it would be appropriate to extend the definition of controversial or contentious material as it pertains to living people vs as it might pertain to a video game. I see no reason whatsoever to delete, for example, a BLP that states simply "Person X is a New York Times best-selling author." and then provides a list of books. This generally falls under the "common knowledge" exception of WP:V. Karanacs (talk) 16:57, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

View by David Gerard

Deletion on sight for completely unsourced bios is IMO a good idea at this stage. That said, errors are far too easy. Articles replaced with an unsourced version, references vandalised, etc - there's a bit much that can go wrong.

I suggest a PROD-like template - call it BLP-PROD - which says "Find references for this article or it DIES." Five days seems too long, make it two days. Notices to creator and all major contributors as for an AFD. This would also serve as warning to casual readers that the article is really not up to scratch and should not be considered at all quality content as yet. Perhaps a big red STOP sign icon.

Users who endorse this summary

1. David Gerard (talk) 16:17, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
2. I'd accept a special flavor of prod as part of my proposal above. Exact number of days is not critical. Also, include a {{NOINDEX}} magic word in that template. Jehochman 16:20, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
3. --Dirk Beetstra 16:26, 21 January 2010 (UTC) - adding: 2 days is too short, 5 days, I would say that no more than 500 articles be tagged at one time, strictly by a bot. Prods be removed (for mistagging by bot or for resolved when sources added) or articles deleted (after the 5 days, by hand, not by bot, again to find mistaggings), if there are less than 100 left then (and only then) the bot should refill the cat to 500. --Dirk Beetstra 16:31, 21 January 2010 (UTC) Adding more: I would also suggest that human tagging should be discouraged, and that hand mass-tagging should be treated as a form of disruption as well, just to keep the situation handleable. {{NOINDEX}} suggestion of Jehochman is indeed a good one, though for those 5 days not really necessary (in the very first 5 days, the majority of the other thousands will be indexed, so it does not make a difference). --Dirk Beetstra 16:48, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
4. Good enough. Hipocrite (talk) 16:29, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
5. As with Jehochman's proposal, this seems like a good way to satisfy both those who want to see process and those who want to eliminate the risk of unreferenced BLPs. keɪɑtɪk flʌfi (talk) 16:33, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
6. Agreed, subject to Beetstra's suggestion that the period should be 5 days, and the bot's activity rate-throttled to something that humans can follow (perhaps a couple of hundred proposals/deletions per day?) Jehochman's idea of {{NOINDEX}} tagging is good too. -- The Anome (talk) 16:41, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
7. This works too, for the same reasons as Jehochman's proposal. The crucial factors are that any deleted article should not come back without sources and the PROD tag must not be deleted without sources being added. A separate template has merit due to the different conditions. Guy (Help!) 17:01, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
8. Setting a deadline is a good thing. Editors should no longer be able to camp on unsourced BLPs, doing nothing but preventing deletion. Sχeptomaniac 17:44, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
9. Partial endorse, but the time spent will need to be much longer than 2 days. Not everyone works full time on Misplaced Pages. The current 7 days is appropriate. I can work very fast at sourcing, but I cannot work that fast. If they have been here for years, why the hurry? It's enough of an improvement that we do get to them promptly. Shortening the period is biasing against being able to source. And we need to remember that the authors of the older problematic articles are in most cases no longer active. DGG ( talk ) 17:45, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
10. Fine by me. –Juliancolton |  17:53, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

View by Henrik

A significant minority of editors are unwilling to let unsourced, but likely uncontentious biographies remain in the encyclopedia. Deleting content makes the text available to only a select few, and makes fixing the articles a significantly harder process. I suggest an alternative to tackle the backlog of the roughly 50k articles in question:

• We institute a process to hide the contents of unsourced biographies, using a template developed for the purpose.
• We provide clear instruction that sourcing must be instituted before the template is removed (easily checkable by automated means)
• Those articles which have remained in this hidden state for a reasonable, but fairly long, amount of time, but which have not been fixed are deleted.

This allows us to work towards preserving the content of these articles, while maintaining respect for the potential harm unsourced biographies may cause.

Users who endorse this summary

1. (There was an old copyvio template that worked like this, wasn't there?) henrik•talk 16:24, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
2. Maybe it doesn't even need to "hide" the contents, just warn the reader? Much like, you know, {{unreferencedblp}}. Jclemens (talk) 16:26, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
3. Good enough. Jclemens suggestion is not good enough. Hipocrite (talk) 16:29, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
4. That might work too. Is it possible to include something for noindexing in that template (which would be presumably a new version of {{unreferencedblp}})? And make it BRIGHT RED FOR DANGER? - David Gerard (talk) 16:31, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
5. (Partial endorse) Per my suggestion elsewhere - give a header saying "This article has not been reviewed for accuracy." Or thereabouts. Collect (talk) 16:33, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
6. Yes, hide the contents. This prevents potentially damaging information from being live on Misplaced Pages, while preserving existing text for future use. Ucucha 17:00, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
7. Endorse, but consideration must be given to what is a reasonable time for the large number of older articles, which could be many months. DGG ( talk ) 17:39, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

Oppose

1. See the draft statement by ArbCom for the reason I oppose any solution that does not enforce referencing of all biographies by a defined deadline. No ambiguity. What looks uncontentious may in fact be problematic, we cannot know without reliable sources. I ave handled OTRS tickets, I can think of several examples of text that looked quite innocuous but actually wasn't. Temporary history undeletion for referencing on request may well be a good idea, but I think we should be entirely unambiguous that the default outcome for any unreferenced biography - and ideally any unreferenced article, it's not like WP:V and WP:RS are new - is removal. Guy (Help!) 17:52, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

View By WereSpielChequers

Apart from thinking of a timeline of a few months rather than weeks I'm not all that far from MZMcBride. I broadly agree with the destination, but disagree with the route to get there. But I would rather start with all new articles, whilst giving the authors and various wiki projects a set time to source all existing BLP articles. I would rather that this was done over a period of months than that we rush this as I think rushing it would risk mass sloppy partial referencing to rescue articles.

I'm not convinced that old low traffic BLPs that are tagged as unsourced are really our biggest BLP problem, or that starting with our oldest supposedly unsourced BLPs is the best approach. A lot of the "unreferenced BLPs" are really under referenced ones, and I suspect the sneakier vandals have the sense to at least partially source their cyberbullying. Also, in my experience when you search userspace for badwords you find more personal attacks, cyberbullying and {{G10}}s per hour than looking at Category:All unreferenced BLPs, and the worst bits of mainspace vandalism I've ever encountered have not been in BLPs. So despite the current fashion for deleting old unsourced BLPs, I'm not convinced that this is the best or fastest way to improve the pedia or address our BLP problems.

We also need to remember that Misplaced Pages is a very complex system, and one should always be cautious about making multiple simultaneous changes to complex systems as the interactions between different changes can be unpredictable. Earlier this month User:DASHBot started gently chiding the authors of unsourced BLPs. I think we should wait a couple of weeks to see what effect that has on Category:All unreferenced BLPs, or if people want to give DASHBot a hand, look for retired/inactive/blocked users who DASHBot has spoken to and help them fix or delete their unsourced contributions. Alternatively or as a next step, can someone write a Bot to inform wikiprojects of unsourced BLPs in their remit in the same way that DASHBot has been informing authors? Flagged Revisions is also supposedly on the way, so I think we have quite rapid change taking place on the old BLP front even without admins deleting articles without attempting to fix them or inform the authors.

To my mind treating our oldest BLPs more harshly than our newest is like rounding up escaped rabbits and putting them back in the run without first moving the run away from their escape tunnel. Rather I would suggest that for new BLPs we introduce "delete new unsourced BLP" as a speedy criteria; provided that we very clearly inform article creators that from a particular date this is the new rule, and that articles created after that date with information about living people must be reliably sourced. I think this would stop the problem growing and then there is just a mammoth maintenance task to improve or delete the crud .

After starting with the new stuff, and seeing how much DashBot can improve the crud, and seeing if flagged revisions can protect the rest, and then proding the unreferenced residue in batches over a couple of months, then I agree with delete unsourced BLPs on sight as the policy we should be able to enact in say 6 months. But with the following provisos:

1. An unsourced biography should at the very least have its history checked to see if reverting a bit of vandalism won't restore it to a referenced article.
2. Good faith contributions should never be deleted without the author being informed and given an easy route to getting their article restored for their next editing session.
3. We also need an exception for articles being restored and referenced - some sort of template such as prod that can be added to a restored article so that the person requesting its restoration has at least a few hours to do so.
4. Any user should be able to request, and any admin permitted to restore an existing article deleted under this process, provided the requester is promising to reference the article ASAP.

Users who endorse this summary

1. ϢereSpielChequers 16:57, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
2. This process seems much more fair. Standards were quite different 2 or 3 years ago. DashBot notified me recently that 2 of the very first articles I ever created (in 2006) were unreferenced BLPs, and I promptly fixed them. Let's at least give these types of methods a chance to work for older articles while tightening the noose for newer ones. Karanacs (talk) 17:01, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
3. Endorse except for the flaggedrevs bit, which I disagree on. All unsourced BLPs have equal weight and we should be progressing towards a speedy criterion to take care of incoming ones. ThemFromSpace 17:13, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
4. Endorse in principle, but we must take account of the fact that authors of the older articles are mostly no longer available, and it will be necessary to recruit sufficient people to work on them to process them properly. DGG ( talk ) 17:41, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
5. Endorse. The backlog has been declining steadily for some time now thanks in part to DASHBot and these efforts should be given time. There are probably a pile of unreferenced BLPs that no one will ever (be able to) source so deletion may be needed in the future. Jogurney (talk) 17:48, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
6. Mostly endorse. Apart from Flagged Revisions (which I'm undecided on), WereSpielChequers' summary is spot on. Unsourced BLP as a speedy criterion makes so much sense that it's almost amazing why it hasn't been suggested before. Hmm, after a bit of looking, the similar proposals Misplaced Pages:Speedy deletion criterion for unsourced articles (User:Dominic in October 2006) and Misplaced Pages:Proposed deletion process for unsourced articles (

View by NJA

Essentially what Jehochman suggested, but with some modifications (tying in what I think is the best of the other views noted above). Everyone seems to agree we need a new BLP PROD template.

Thus, all things listed here, but:

• reduce the time from five days
• devise a special PROD template specific to BLP's so that it can have a specialised category for monitoring and tracking (using NOINDEX)
• set out to add an edit filter to track BLP PROD template removals, as is currently done for CSD template removals for easier admin tracking

Users who endorse this summary

1. NJA (t/c) 16:53, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

View by the Anome

David Gerard's proposal looks good to me. I'd just like to emphasize that any bot activity on this will need to be intensively supervised by humans for some time to avoid serious loss of useful articles. For example: numerous articles are currently tagged as unsourced BLPs when they have references: see Hermann Zapf (from which I've just removed a {{BLP unsourced}} tag) -- any bot would need at the very least to detect this sort of error, and I can think of many other scenarios that might cause errors. -- The Anome (talk) 17:11, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

view by DGG

For old articles, a procedure of summary deletion is particularly reckless. Of course we should we should work on them, at the pace at which we can manage it, with the special problem that the author is generally no longer be around to help. What I think is extremely dangerous is people nominating them or any article for deletion without first looking for sources, because it takes no more work to try for basic sourcing. We might even have a priority category for "I tried, but further help is needed." -- that's the sort of think I'd like to work on. What is even more dangerous is deletion without looking. As a related example, let me give the 40 prods of this nature I worked on in the last two days, about 10 were easily sourceable. About 5 were a real challenge--for some I too needed some help to do it right--and trying and not succeeding with them is not something anyone should be blamed for. The other half I decided could not be sourced in any reasonable way, or were so unlikely I at least wasn't going to bother, and I let them stand. But since they were prods, anyone else could look at them and try. Frequently I see ones I've given up on done easily by someone else. Some of the ones I found easily were ones where I can understand another person in perfect good faith might not think were likely enough to be worth the bother. That is the reason summary deletion is inappropriate--there are only a few special classes of things where one or two people can securely decide. Among the articles listed for deletion, and which could be deleted under the proposed ruling was one which was easily verifiable that the person was an ambassador, and one a member of a state legislature--things said on the face of the article. . In both cases, it took about a minute to source them. With respect to the arbitrary deletions we are concerned with, I note what Rebecca said abocee--deleting an article that is on its face probably notable without checking is about as destructive to the encyclopedia as one can get.

The offer to undelete on request in ludicrous as a solution--for most editors cannot see the articles to tell. For those of us who can, we would of course be able to check and see if we could source, and undelete if we could. I certainly would not undelete in this circumstance unless I could source, But relying on a few of us to check is only practical if the people deleting are more responsible than some of them so far have been.

An RfC as far-reaching as this requires more than one day;s consideration. Very few people have been heard from, except those with one particular view on BLPs. I shall a little later today propose a substitute suggested policy. DGG ( talk ) 17:10, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

• More reckless than unsourced biographies? I don't think so. Look at this week's breaching experiment for an idea of why reckless is not really the term to apply to deletion of unsourced biographies. Guy (Help!) 17:39, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

Collaborative views

How to edit here: if you can tweak an existing proposal for clarity, or add an additional argument that strengthens it, do so. If you agree with the basic idea but would prefer different parameters, say so in your endorsement.

BLP incubation

A big part of the problem is that the stream of new unreferenced BLPs is never-ending. Unsourced BLPs should be incubated after a time (or in some cases userfied). Articles in the incubator are automatically {{noindex}}ed and in general are deleted after a month of incubation.

Proposal:

• New unreferenced BLPs (new = created in 2010 or later), if they are more than 1 month old, get tagged with {{prod|newunrefBLP}}. The tag may not be removed without the article being sourced to the minimum standard. If at the end of 1 week of being tagged they're referenced to the minimum standard, the tag is removed. Otherwise, the article gets either incubated, userfied, at admin discretion (in consultation with the creator).
  • minimum standard is demonstration of notability with reference to reliable sources which are independent of the subject.
  • in the incubator, articles have around a month to come up to minimum standard (as standard for the incubator), or risk deletion. This period could be extended for BLP incubation, particularly if the volume of articles suggests it's necessary. (It's at admin discretion anyway.)

• Old unreferenced BLPs (pre-2010) go through basically the same process. The difference is that because of the backlog, the rate of nomination has to be kept low enough to be manageable. Starting point for discussion: max 1000 old articles tagged for BLPincubation at any one time (i.e. max 1000 in Category:Old unreferenced BLPs proposed for incubation).

Endorse

1. Rd232 17:07, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
2. DGG ( talk ) 17:35, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

Oppose

1. This is a new process that invites gaming. It's better I think to work with smaller numbers but a more definite process. The idea that people will patrol an "incubator" but won't be prepared to patrol the deletion category is puzzling to me. I've always wondered why more inclusionists don't patrol WP:PROD, I rarely see a prod tag removed by any editor who is not already active on that article (and it's usually the article creator). Guy (Help!) 17:43, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

See also

• Misplaced Pages:Biographies of living people — official Misplaced Pages policy in this area
• Misplaced Pages:BLP problem — a description of the "BLP problem"
• m:Biographies of living people — a proposed global policy in this area
• Misplaced Pages:BLP examples for discussion — examples of biographical situations requiring discussion