Within hours of being murdered in the ongoing Indian terror attacks, Wikipedia has whipped up a biography of buisnessman Andreas Liveras (T-H-L-K-D).

Despite having wads of cash, this guy was a private figure.

I haven't seen anything this tasteless on WP since Wikipedos created and then tried to fill in the red links for victims of the Virginia Tech massacre.

Oh come on, as BLPs go that's tame.

You want intrusive information, try this.

There's a bunch more overnight terror victim bios, though I suppose one might try to argue these cops were marginal "public" figures

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemant_Karkare
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vijay_Salaskar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashok_Kamte

I was unaware the BBC was in the business of publishing biographies of private persons.

Of course, maybe they were just following his lead, since he has also published his own biography.

There is legitimate criticism of Wikipedia to be made. "Damn the tarpedos, full speed ahead" is not the attitude to take while doing it. Criticism that stands up to inspection is valuable, while that so flimsy it tatters at the slight glance just drives up the noise and conceals whatever legitimate criticism may be hiding around here.

Doc's is a better shot, though I have not looked into it.

Exposing private victims of tragedies to edit wars, tasteless talk page banter and the kind of crap that gets thrown at Wikipedia bios, only hours after their death is bad news. And it goes straight to the top of google as we all know.

In fact, it is such bad news that Wikipedia itself has tried to stop it on various occasions, notably in the case of the Virginia Tech massacre where bios had to be deleted.. Various policies were hastily designed to avoid this kind of thing again.

I'm just pointing out another case where Wikipedos have fallen over themselves to create some bogus biography of someone who clearly does not meet notability standards, while their body was still warm - if you don't think that is worthy of criticism, or a site named "Wikipedia Review" then perhaps you misunderstand the purpose of both.

The question I raise is "How do you reconcile 'private' and 'biographied by the BBC News agency'?"

Poorly thought out complaints about Wikipedia which fail to rise to the level of genuine, reasonable criticism have no hope of doing so without real analysis that does not start at the conclusion "Wikipedia is evil" and work backwards through the evidence to its premises. This does nobody any good.

The BBC are a professional news outfit serving the pubic interest - the BBC reports the news and matters of interest therein.

Wikipedia is not a news outfit. It pretends to be an encyclopedia with "notability" standards, some of which have been fought for due to Wikipedia's haphazard preponderance towards poor taste and its history of defamation. That guy clearly fails the notability standards.



I've been banging on about things like this for nearly two years, replete with extensive critical analysis. I have never simply written "Wikipedia is evil" and worked backwards, and haven't done so here. You just made that up, probably to mischaracterize my views in an attempt to discredit criticism of your site.

If you think articles like this aren't worthy of criticism or discussion, in the face of months (and years) of criticism and discussion about this topic on Wikipedia itself, then you are at the wrong place.

Why don't you go back to Wikipedia and re-write the bios individual victims of Virginia Tech, simply because some news source gave a potted history of some poor souls who were at the wrong place at the wrong time? In fact, write a "bio" on everyone who has somewhere been mentioned by the BBC?

Jimbo wants everyone in the world to have wiki- biography somewhere (he actually said that) - matters of taste and privacy concerns be damned. So chop chop and get to it Jose...

"I'd be happy to have, in theory, a good, neutral biography on every single person on the planet," he says. "I mean, why not, right?"
— Jimmy Wales in The Wall Street Journal, August 8, 2008

..or hours after some previously unknown bloke is victim of a terrorist attack.

I'm going to leap to Kato's defence. Much of what I encounter on this site is blinkered anti-wikipedian aggression, and it is ill-informed and dull. It comes from people who thought Wikipedia was wonderful until it didn't go their way, and suddenly they decided to hate. People grinding axes the size of England, who can't get off the track of "what happened to me proves wikipedia is utterly depravedl"

Kato on the other hand, despite his conviction that Wikipedia is a net evil, is almost always worth reading. That's because he dares to see it from the other side, and dares to change his mind occasionally.

Using this rhetoric on him is a case of right torpedo, but wrong target.

It is the case that I had the rhetoric on high, maybe too high.

It is frustrating to see an otherwise intelligent poster like Kato take such a dive off the deep end of biased analysis as is occuring here. I am not trying to be generally critical of Kato's arguments, but specifically critical in this case, as they are absolute crap.

If we consider this bio, the guy clearly passes any Wikipedia notability standard. Many, many good sources discuss him in light of recent events, but you can find older material on him in books, newspapers, whatnot. He is discussed not as a participant in the events, but the story of his life is being told and retold. Yet Kato's flatly asserts "That guy clearly fails the notability standards".

Kato continually asserts that he is a "private person". The idea that republishing information that has already been published in dozens or hundreds of newspapers, including national ones, and published by the guy himself is invading his privacy is one that needs justifying.

Kato complains that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and therefor it is inappropriate for it to do what is only being done by highly reputable newspapers. Would slapping a "& news service" after the the "The free encyclopedia" really transform behavior from "unacceptable" to "acceptable"? That seems awfully silly, but it's the only way to avoid Kato's fundamental argument being "It's unethical because Wikipedia does it."

Do it then.

Slap on a "& news service" to the site. Would anyone care? Would anyone debate you on that? Would anyone disagree? Would anyone take you up on that point?

Would anyone on WP go "hang on...that isn't what Wikipedia is supposed to be about" and then launch into exactly the same kind of discussion we're having now?

If you do manage to change Wikipedia's tagline to "& news service" , then be sure to tell all the people who dispute that direction that their criticism is "illegitimate".

Where's Awbrey when you need him?


Utter bollocks. And your notability standard is such a moving goalpost anyway that at one point it allowed for a whole Category of Rape Victims with accompanying biographies, which I spotted last year from this site, before decent minded Wikipedos read my posts and fought to have it removed.

He was close to famous enough for one, or at the very least his company was, before this:

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?as_ld...=od&btnG=Search

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=And...&hl=en&resnum=1

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=Liv...Search+Archives

Is it moral or ethical to publish a recently murdered person's biography on an encyclopedia anyone can edit?

Wikipedia notability aside, you need time to digest and analyze the facts. It would be better for Wikipedia to wait a year or more to report on things related to major events like the Mumbai attacks and Virginia Tech Massacre. Otherwise, you're just writing a blog and repeating what the news agencies are saying. The news agencies themselves don't have all the facts at once, even they take months to finally understand what exactly happened.

I remember during the CNN coverage of the shooting incident at NASA that the journalist at the scene basically said to Wolf Blitzer: "Look, we don't have all the facts and the incident is still happening. Isn't it unethical to be live reporting and just making speculations about what might be happening? Can't we just wait until it's over and we can get all the facts?" To which Wolf said basically: "Well, we gotta say something!"

Okay, then let me put it this way:

"How are the ethical standards of journalism different from the ethical standards of encyclopediaism? Why?"

And there is no way he would not pass the notability standards before. Unless there were allegations that his biography was spam, before this incident he probably would have been kept at AfD. "Utter bollocks" is not a convincing argument. Notability standards, if they are evolving in time, are evolving away from inclusion towards deletion, especially regarding living people. The strawman about the rape victims category is also unconvincing, since it is unrelated to notability.