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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Ikip (talk | contribs) at 05:36, 1 February 2010. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Revision as of 05:36, 1 February 2010 by Ikip (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
submission submission time subject Support
(S) 		Oppose
(O) 		Neutral
(N) 		Stance
MZMcBride 15:58, 21/01/2010 "poorly referenced or completely unreferenced should be deleted on-sight" 54 156 1 Stricter - Delete all
Jehochman 16:14, 21/01/2010
  1. Any article that satisfies the attack page criteria should be deleted on sight.
  2. Biographies of living persons (BLP) articles that are unreferenced should be proposed for deletion (prod).
  3. Prodding should proceed at a reasonable rate to allow interested editors the chance to add sources. The volume of proposed deletions should not be unreasonably large. Discussion can establish what is a reasonable pace.
  4. After five seven days, any article so tagged may be deleted, or moved to the Misplaced Pages:Article incubator if it shows promise.
  5. Prod notices should not be removed, nor should articles be undeleted, unless proper references are added. Anybody who engages in mass de-prodding or undeletion without adding references risks a block for disruption.
  6. All editors are invited to participate in this BLP cleanup campaign.
 163 34 1 Stricter
Jclemens 16:22, 21/01/2010 "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." 81 19 0 No change
Collect 16:16, 21/01/2010 "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." 81 19 3 No change
David Gerard 16:17, 21/01/2010 "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." 64 46 1 Stricter
DGG 17:10, 21/01/2010 "For old articles, a procedure of summary deletion is particularly reckless." 63 5 4 No change
Power.corrupts 18:12, 21/01/2010 "The real problem is unsourced contentious info, not unreferenced articles. The proposal will do nothing or little to the real problem, and at the same time incur tremendous costs." 48 14 0 No change
Sandstein 19:25, 21/01/2010 "The arbcom motion is not to be understood as changing or superseding general deletion policy and process as applied to the biographies of living persons, and it should be considered void if and insofar as it might have been intended to have that effect. Instead, any policy change should be decided by community consensus, starting with this RfC." 73 5 3 N/A
Jimbo Wales 15:14, 25/01/2010 "Starting with everything which has been unreferenced for more than 3 years, a three-month notice time starting February 1st, before they are deleted on May 1st. 2. Starting with everything which has been unreferenced for more than 2 years, a three-month notice time starting May 1st, before they are deleted on August 1st. 3. Starting with everything which has been unferenced for more than 1 year, a three-month notice time starting August first, before they are deleted on November 1st.

In all cases, biographies deleted for being old and unreferenced should be put onto a list for those who wish to come behind and work on them further.

After that, we can consider how long is a reasonable life span (I would say one week, but one month could be fine as well) for new biographies to exist in a sad state before they are deleted.

36 24 4 Stricter
Aymatth2 13:39, 24 January 2010 This proposal is to create a mechanically ranked list of all unsourced BLPs, so editors who want to remove inappropriate articles can work up from the bottom of the list, and editors who want to retain valuable content can work down from the top. Obvious ranking criteria would be:
  • Positive: Number of inbound links, number of unique editors, size
  • Negative: Number of days since creation, number of days since last edit

The values would be given weightings in a ranking formula such as:

(inboundlinks x 100) + (uniqueeditors x 150) + (sizekb x 50) - (agedays x 1) - (lasteditdays x 0.5)

Technical solution
Henrik 16:24, 21 January 2010 "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."

Technical solution
WereSpielChequers 16:57, 21 January 2010 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.

...can someone write a Bot to inform wikiprojects of unsourced BLPs in their remit in the same way that DASHBot has been informing authors?"

...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.
 Stricker

Technical