Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-01-25/BLP madness ← Back to ContentsView Latest Issue25 January 2010BLP madnessBLP deletions cause uproarContribute — Share this E-mail Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Reddit Digg By seresin
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RFC again: Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Biographies of living people
A graph of current opinion can be found here: User:Peter cohen/BLP RFC stats. The two opposing views which have the most support is:
Ikip 04:05, 26 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
2 opposes = solid opposition?
Misleading account of events
This account of events is inaccurate. The deletion spree was started by Gregory Kohs, a banned editor, who coordinated off-line with at least one administrator to do a "test" introducing vandalism to unwatched and unreferenced biographies. I believe there was also something about the purchase of an admin account (user:Cool3?). The conspiracy was exposed and blocks issued, but deletions followed with support from the Wikipedia Review crowd where Kohs is active, until a consensus of Wikipedia editors objected (see voting results on proposal that unreferenced biographies can be speedy deleted). How do we get this misleading depiction fixed? ChildofMidnight (talk) 17:28, 26 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Does this have anything to do with Casliber's claims.[1]
Are you talking about this: The BLP offwiki forum dedicated to tightening up BLP practices any bets how quick this will be deleted?[2] Ikip 05:54, 27 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I would argue the lack of references on BLPs (and all articles, in general) is partially a result of Mediawiki's unfriendly editing interface. We need to make it easier for new users to add references when there's a "Citation needed" at the end of a sentence or a big unreferenced tag on the article. How about a series a screenshots or even a short video clip? We need to teach these same users to add references instead of having a very limited number of experienced editors fixing it for them. MahangaTalk 19:52, 27 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- Without getting into the larger issue, I applaud ArbCom for making a simple, classy decision to declare an amnesty. That's the kind of low-drama forward looking approach we need more of around here. Beeblebrox (talk) 20:38, 27 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Way back when...the 'External links' section was used for references for the entire article. Obviously that wasn't the best idea in the world, and it became the common practice to provide separate citations for each statement. I can understand putting these older articles into some sort of 'purgatory' where they can be fixed up, but I certainly can't agree to deleting non-controversial articles about various elected congresspeople, including those no longer in office (which means the Project Vote Smart et al material is no longer available, which means it would be difficult to re-create the article from scratch). I'm sure there are similar stories in other areas. If there are specific problems with specific articles, fine. I just don't believe that one size fits all. (And yes, those who can't figure out how to copy and paste a ref from another article to use as a template of sorts are at a disadvantage with new articles. However, I think many are just too lazy to bother doing anything at all with refs.) Flatterworld (talk) 22:48, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]