User talk:District 49

Biographies of living persons
Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. I hope that the box above, with its many links, will be useful to you. I'm dropping by to talk to you about your recent additions to Darrell Issa and some of the particular considerations for contributing to such articles.

Wikipedia's policy is to tread very carefully with regards to biographies about living people, both to protect the people and to protect Wikipedia. As one of the most viewed websites in the world, we have the potential to do a lot of damage to individuals if our content is biased, and we also stand at risk of libel claims. In view of both, we've developed a pretty tight policy on the kinds of content and sources that can be entered into articles on living people: Biographies of living persons.

You are very welcome to contribute to the article on Darrell Issa, which could use some work, but we do ask that you make sure that your language remains neutral and that your facts are both scrupulously documented and unquestionably correct. For example, the following sentence was problematic: "Issa left the Army nearly two years early and was stripped of his duties as a bomb disposal technician after being accused of stealing a Dodge sedan from a fellow officer at the 145th Ordnance Detail, an Army bomb squad stationed near Pittsburgh in 1971." The use of the word "after" suggests causation. The source does not support a conclusion that the accusation caused his early departure; all it says was, "Issa was not prosecuted and 'he left the unit very shortly after that,' the former soldier said." Likewise, that he "was stripped of his duties" seems to be based on conjecture in the source: "Former GIs said that means". We can't base our articles on conjecture, especially when it comes to living people.

It can be a delicate balancing act, achieving a factual article that fits within that policy, but it is one of the core mandates passed down by the Wikimedia Foundation to the community of volunteer contributors that we do. Please review the WP:BLP policy; it contains a lot of useful information and links about how to contribute to articles of this sort. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 13:11, 6 January 2011 (UTC)