I've just nominated a BLP for deletion. The reason I did so is because Wikipedia's current system cannot protect BLPs such as this one on marginally notable individuals. Someone disparaged this guy's daughter on the page. The remark was there for several hours before someone removed it. Unacceptable. And yes, I am canvassing off-wiki for support for the deletion.

You've got my vote, but it won't mean anything.
Posting on WR means the inclusionist crazies will be attracted to this,
plus some deletionists. This is one of those marginal cases that will be
likely debated till frigging doomsday. Wasn't a good article to begin with.

If you can find an email on Mr. Waddle......

Maybe you're right about the crazies...

At the very least, someone should remove all reference to the daughter from the article and then semi-protect it. As for deleting it, I don't suppose CPT Waddle (ret.) has any knowledge of any of this? Maybe someone should ask him for his opinion. If he's as conscientious as his background would indicate, I suspect he wouldn't care much about the article as long as the material related to his daughter were removed.

The IP address of the AnonIP who left the nasty remark does geolocate to the US Naval Academy, and it should be noted that the first edit actually read "half our her class," as opposed to "half of" - suggesting that the person may have initially written "half our class," further suggesting that the AnonIP editor knows the daughter personally. So, one would have to assume that this is yet another anonymous use of WP for the pettiest revenge-grabbing purposes imaginable - the AnonIP editor probably had his own sexual advances towards the daughter totally rejected, most likely.

The title says "BLP AfD, Because the current system doesn't work" — which seemed like a major e-piphany for a Wikipediot — but then I read the text, and all it does is ask people to participate in this system that doesn't work.

Scratch 1 e-piphany —
Same ole u-shittinme …

Ja Ja

You think the article should be deleted because someone came and said something mean about someone else?

No, drive by shootings are okay if they only hit yer kids, Moron.

If the "someone else's" reputation is likely to be more important to the article subject than his own, then sure, why not? I mean, it's his daughter, man. If I didn't know any better, and I don't, I'd say you're just trying to confuse the issue.

My point remains the same as always: BLPs are not special. If you think "Do no harm" should be THE guiding principle of Wikipedia, autistically obsessing over what happens on pages that happen to be in Category:Living People as so many of our regulars do is retarded. It doesn't matter if you implement opt-out, semiprotect all BLPs, or even delete all BLPs. If someone wants to libel a subject, they will not care if it's in the article about the subject. They will just write about the subject in another article that, depending on how you've adjusted permissions in the Brave New World, may or may not be in Category: Living People. If they couldn't edit Scott's article, they'd just have libeled her in the articles on USS Greeneville or the US Naval Academy.

You're not wrong, but wouldn't you admit that most of these kinds of hit-and-run slurs would be repelled by simple semi-protection? I suspect that most people doing this aren't so determined that they will make more than the least-effort attempt. Wikipedia allows them to succeed, so we're left to speculate on just how determined most people are to libel someone.

Have they published one about you yet? And is it the Number One Google hit for your name? And do people then e-mail you about it, and do potential employers, lovers, investors, or even medical-insurance companies use it as a means of giving you the bum's rush without your even knowing about it?

Don't tell me they're not "special" - once again, you're using wrong terminology to misdirect people on the real issue. No, they're not "special," what they are is "stress-inducing," and in some cases, "an embarrassment to the entire internet culture."


It's a good thing I don't think that then, isn't it?

What if I were to think THE guiding principle of Wikipedia should be "harm only those truly deserving of harm"? Would I be "retarded" if that were the case?


Google... Google... Google... Google... Google... Google... Google...


Sure they would have, and Wikipedia would be just as culpable for those, too. Nobody (I hope) is saying that existing BLP strictures (and what few preventative measures are currently in place) should be jettisoned in favor of those proposals... We're just saying BLP isn't enough, at least not enough for something calling itself the "World's Greatest Encyclopedia Ever."

The word "greatest" doesn't just mean "largest" or "most visited," or at least it doesn't in my universe.

• Vandals will happily vandalize any nearby page if their primary target is semi-protected. Barack Obama is semi-protected, so the vandals click on linked articles and vandalize those. This is why Seniority in the United States Senate is periodically hit with anti-Obama vandalism: Because it's the first non-disambiguation link that isn't semi-protected. Semi-protection does reduce vandalism to a particular article but it also shunts that vandalism to other articles.
  
• This doesn't mean it's worth semi-protecting all pages in Category: Living People. Vandalism to articles in Category: Living People is not inherently more harmful than to articles in Category: Chemistry because -
  • Wikipedia's pagerank is strong enough that merely mentioning someone in an unrelated article can push it to the top of search results for their name. Example: The second hit for Fred Tepperman is a Wikipedia article about someone else. I'm pretty sure if you just added my name to a list on Wikipedia that had a strong page rank, it'd be the top of result for my name.
  • People can be just as negatively impacted by edits to articles outside of Category: Living People as edits to articles in Category: Living People. Our own Don Murphy provided an example of this. He regards adding negative reviews to movies he's worked on as an attack on him.

If you want to really reduce vandalism and libel, applying different standards to different articles based solely on their category tags is not the answer. You have to give the vandals nowhere to run by implementing changes that address all articles, such as flagged revisions.

---


If I could choose where to be libeled, I'd rather it be on Wikipedia than anywhere else. I (or a meat puppet) can directly fix it. If it really bothers me, I can get it oversighted or even get the foundation to cough up an IP. Beats the hell out of trying to get the Times or Post to fix something they got wrong. My only hope would be to get another publication to write a story rebutting theirs.

So it is your contention that approximately 100% of defamatory vandalism would just be shunted elsewhere of all BLPs were semi-protected? If that is indeed your contention,
i. you're completely full of shit, and
ii. you're ignoring the fact that, in the case of the most vulnerable BLPs, any such shunting would be to much higher profile articles, where the defamation would survive for less time.

What your argument comes down to, essentially, is a variant on the old "this wouldn't be 100% effective". I'm extremely fucking tired of that non-argument.



Please look up the distinction between "can" and "will". Besides that, a Google search for a given person who has a Wikipedia article is virtually always going to turn up that article ahead of any other Wikipedia articles in which that person might happen to be mentioned. And even if it doesn't, search results are followed by human beings, and if those human beings are looking for information on a person they're going to clickthrough to an article about that person much more often than they're going to click through to an article on a different (albeit related) subject.



I agree. But the issue isn't that Wikipedia libel is more harmful than other libel, it's that it's far more prevalent, and far harder to take recourse in response to.

And it's free!

Exactly. If the info actually causes you a lot of harm (say, causes you to lose your job, or something similar), even if you later reverted it, the recourse is much tougher. It's easy to sue the Times or the Post for libel. I believe (the Section 230ers can correct me if I'm wrong) it's much tougher/nearly impossible to sue Wikipmedia since they have some "non-publishers" exemption. That they are just a webhost, and not a real publisher supposedly gives them immunity from what random users insert. That you would have to sue the user, not Wikipmedia in general.

Yes, you have to sue whoever posted the information.