BHPs (Biographies of Happy People)

http://allswool.blogspot.com/2009/03/bhps-...ppy-people.html

Not quite the perspective usually found here.

What Mr. Wool seems to be saying here is that excessive BLP content restrictions (i.e., more of the same) will "neuter" Wikipedia and make it useless as a source of information about controversial people. To some extent he's right, but what he's warning against would still be better than the current situation.

Contrary to another thing he seems to be saying, the number of people who currently have ongoing BLP problems hasn't really decreased significantly. The fact is, they were never really all that numerous to begin with - the real problem is the threat, which exists continually for tens of thousands of people. And the threat increases as Wikipedia's novelty wears off, and positive interest in maintaining Wikipedia (under its organizing "ideal") wanes.

The real solution, of course, is to allow something similar to what conservatives like to call "market forces" to take effect. Articles about people who have done bad things should contain negative information, if the information is unassailably true, but if Wikipedia allows the subject to determine whether the article should exist or not, as opposed to trying to determine the content of the article itself, then the constant threat of deletion should prevent the mob (i.e., WP users) from going too far. They'd still have to enforce their various rules on sourcing and "original research," but they'd have to do that anyway.

If they combine that with some form of edit-approval mechanism, they'll have solved their problem about as effectively as any reasonable person could ask, short of deleting all the BLP's completely or just shutting down the whole website and all of its varous offshoots.

These two possibilities are not in opposition at all, nor can they be. If the subject can determine whether the article can exist, then they can dictate the content. It's a simple fact and it'd be more productive to explain why allowing them to do so is a sacrifice that must be made rather than claiming it doesn't naturally follow from this.

I'm afraid I have to disagree completely. You're thinking in overly binary terms, like the line from Dune where Mu'ad-Dib says, "he who can destroy a thing controls a thing." The real world isn't quite so simple, particularly when you're talking about information, as opposed to material commodities.

People should have the right to decide if they want to be profiled on a website that allows anyone, including them, to edit that profile at any time. If they want to fight a bunch of anonymous "editors" over a questionable fact/non-fact, or the reliability of a source, or whatever, they should have the right to do that to the same extent as anyone else. And if they have that right, there's no reason to assume that they won't prefer to have the article exist, since they can at least influence its content directly themselves. But if they do prefer that, then they should probably have to accept the fact that they won't have complete control over it, within the context of Wikipedia at least.

The option to delete certainly isn't equivalent to complete control - complete control would mean that you write it yourself, nobody else can change it, and then you decide whether or not it continues to exist. The latter aspect is almost irrelevant - if you had complete control, you'd probably never want to delete the article... unless you just decided you didn't like it being on WP because WP carries porn, perversion, or pseudoscience-advocacy, or something like that.

"If you don't take this piece of [perfectly true/cited/etc] information out, you have to delete the whole article."

Acceptable? Maybe. But don't pretend it's not there.

Of course it's there, but think of the negative-publicity potential. If the person is newsworthy, then the transparently public attempt to whitewash the article about himself/herself should also be newsworthy, and might easily appear to be shameful, vain, and childish. Whereas, if the person isn't newsworthy, then maybe they shouldn't have been in Wikipedia to begin with?

Again, IMO you're thinking in Wikipedia-centric terms, whereby the need for CONTROL trumps all other considerations, including accuracy, ethics, human decency, and common sense. The thinking is, we must not allow anyone to control Wikipedia content (or more accurately, "we must not allow non-administrators to control Wikipedia content"). But that kind of control will always be an illusion, especially in the Wikipedia context. You might achieve it for a short time, maybe for a period of months or even a few years, but ultimately you'll lose it to someone more clever, more aggressive, and more skilled at playing the game. Ultimately, you will almost certainly lose, or at best, lose interest and give up. Meanwhile, the content will (probably) remain, in some form or other.

You also have to try to think of BLP inclusion as an honor, not a punishment, because it really is an honor for the vast majority of BLP subjects. It means they've done something worthy of other people's attention, and most people do good things, not bad things. There's probably a higher proportion of criminals and evildoers profiled in Wikipedia BLP's than exists in the general population, but I think if you were to actually count them all up, that proportion would still be way below 10 percent, and probably below 5 percent. Perhaps even more importantly, there's the inertia factor - most people just won't want to be bothered with the procedures required to opt out, much less fight an edit war with angry Wikipedians, unless they have a damn good reason and have exhausted the more convenient (i.e., anonymous) means of dealing with WP.

Also, don't forget the "dead tree" exemption. There's always a fair chance that someone so controversial as to generate edit-warring and general-purpose nastiness from WP users has already been biographically profiled (as opposed to simply reported on) in a printed publication that operates under the principles of peer review, publisher review, or both.