User talk:FloNight/Archive Jul 2007

Thank you for your comments
Thank you for your comments in my RfC. I hope that getting the full story out in a single location will be of benefit should questions about what occurred ever come up again. I look forward to working with you in continuing to help improve the project now and in the future. Thanks again. CLA 07:02, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
 * I hope that you got more insight into my concerns from my comment. At this point putting the incident in the past is probably best for all. Take care, FloNight 16:52, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm willing and able to put the incident in the past as you suggest. One aspect of it, though, that concerns me is SV's obviously false accusation that I commented on the dispute on Wikpedia Review (WR).  I've never had an account on WR.  SV alleged that I did this in order to help in torpedoing of my RfA.  If I had done the same thing to someone else, I think I would have been "called on the carpet" to apologize.  In her/his case, however, that hasn't been the case.  No one has formally asked her to apologize for this obviously personal attack.  Don't you think that some double standards are going on here?  Admins have been desysopped for much less.  Why didn't you, as an arbitrator, call for her to be desysopped for making such a bald lie without evidence in order to win an argument or sink an RfA?  To be honest, this is what we expect arbitrators to do.  I'll be direct here, why is SV still an admin?  What's really going on here and why do different standards appear to apply to different editors? CLA 16:27, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Also, when has accusing someone of living in the same state as a banned editor been given a free pass on such an obvious poison pill? Have you ever considered making the same accusation? CLA 16:40, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

ArbCom status
Hi. Best wishes in connection with your real-life issues as noted on your page.

Based on your wikibreak notice, someone has moved you to the "inactive" list on WP:AC ... but I see you voting this morning. I am guessing that this means that you will be checking in often enough to stay on active status, but please advise what you want the clerks to do. Regards, Newyorkbrad 12:58, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

BLP Admin
As one of the arbitrators who has already voted on Requests for arbitration/Badlydrawnjeff/Proposed decision, and in particular in support of Summary deletion of BLPs, I wanted to ask if you were aware of BLP Admin (a rejected proposal), and the discussions on its talk page? Do you think that rejected proposal is relevant to the proposed principle? Carcharoth 16:46, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

revision made, I need your review and rate
The article LeToya Luckett has been revised by many editors, and it is improved now, I would be satisfied if you could take a look over ther and rate it again, if it is possible, thank you in advice. E & M ( talk ) 17:49, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

BLP for the recently dead
The problem with extending BLP to covering the recently dead is that it suddenly removes a bright-line rule, that there is a good argument for, and extends it to be undefined.

The good argument for the bright-line rule is that the living can be directly harmed, like the historian that was stopped on the Canadian border due to vandalism in his Wikipedia article; while direct harm to the dead is beyond the reach of even a top-10 website. :-) The dead don't care about crossing borders, applying for jobs, going on dates; other than in a metaphysical sense, the dead aren't harmed by having bad things said about them, or being Googled. The dead are personally beyond the evils of this world, we can't hurt them.

The arguments given for extending it due to trying to avoid harm to hypothetical living relatives have serious issues. Yours, for example: "The policy speaks to the harm that comes to the person and their living family members. Drawing a line in the sand about whether the subject of the article is breathing today, misses the intent of the policy. Not to harm living people." That wouldn't restrict it to the recently dead at all, since living direct family members can survive the dead by 100 years. How recent is recent? And does it require family members? What about people whose family members are all dead? And how closely related does someone have to be, anyway - a parent, a child, a sibling, an inlaw, a third cousin twice removed? After all, half of us are descendants of Charlemagne - is Charlemagne therefore covered by BLP? And can we really get away from harming living people by restricting articles about the recently deceased? For example, I'm darn sure our articles depicting Muhammad, who's been dead for centuries, hurt the feelings of hundreds of millions of effectively genetically unrelated Muslims much more than if we wrote something defamatory about a much closer relative.

Surely that's all silly. Don't get us in a mess of metaphysics and judging just how close a living person needs to be, and how long a dead person needs to be dead. Keep the bright-line rule, please. --AnonEMouse (squeak) 18:41, 22 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Straw man arguments are silly, too. There is a big difference between the descendants of Charlemagne and the parents of a murdered girl or of a baby born with some deformity that briefly captures the headlines, and I think most admins are smart enough to know the difference. Thatcher131 18:51, 22 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Note that if parents or relatives are mentioned in the article, they can be harmed directly. But if they are not personally mentioned, arguing that when the parents are trying to cross a border or apply for a job, someone would search for their child's name is a stretch. And if the argument is that writing about their child would hurt their feelings, then the recently deceased have no monopoly on having other people care about them. Keep the bright-line rule of direct harm to specific named individuals, that's a reasonable line, and needed. Otherwise we are opening up the "someone not mentioned can be hurt by it" floodgates, and someone not mentioned can be hurt by anything. --AnonEMouse (squeak) 19:05, 22 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Well, the old way wasn't working. If the pedulum swings back too far in the other direction for a short time until the community corrects itself again, that would be a more tolerable outcome than such a bluntly worded bright line principle that could end up fueling more disputes.  And I'm a bit mystified about Raul's justification being a spree of deletions by Tony since Tony is not an admin.  In any case, I feel many of these articles can be dealt with using Undue weight and Wikipedia is not a newspaper, at least as effectively as BLP. See for example Jeffrey Baldwin.  The current article names the parents and alleges they were abusive, with no proof.  It names the grandparents and reports their conviction.  And it says in the intro, "led to significant changes in policy by children's aid societies in the granting of custody of children to relatives" but no such information is presented in the article at all.  Other than an assertion of wider impact that is neither supported nor explored, this is a murder article, and I would argue for deletion on not a newspaper, not a police blotter, and undue weight with respect to the lives of the parents and grandparents.  (In other words, undue weight has more importance in this article because of BLP, but BLP is not the sole reason for aguing for deletion.)  Contrast this with Clery Act, a law passed in response to the murder of Jeanne Clery.  The Act is significant, and a good subject for an encyclopedia article that explores its origins and consequences, but Jeanne Clery is just a redirect, because she is not an encyclopedic subject but for the Act. Thatcher131 19:25, 22 June 2007 (UTC)

Query about your redirect
Hi FloNight. Yesterday, you redirected the Lisa Potts article to George Medal, without merging the content. I.e. you removed the entire contents of the Lisa Potts article, without copying it to another article or to a talk page, and there is no other article on Wikipedia (including George Medal) which contained the information you removed. You did this, as far as I can tell, without discussion or seeking consensus first. Knowing that you are an excellent editor who values consensus, I presume that you felt it would be best to make this edit without discussion because it was harmful to a living person.

The full version of the article has since been restored and expanded, so this is in part a moot question, but as you are an arbitrator and a thought-leader on BLP issues, I would like to understand where you were coming from in turning this article into a redirect. The information you deleted mostly consisted, as far as I can tell, of a description of Pott's actions which led to Queen Elizabeth II awarding Potts the second-highest civilian honour that could be given in her country. She subsequently wrote an autobiography which, according to the amazon.com description, centers on the event. Do you feel that the material you deleted is unfit for Wikipedia, and if so can you explain why? Take care, Kla'quot (talk | contribs) 05:07, 22 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Great to see the article being improved. I made the redirect as a temporary measure. I was unsure if the best way to approach her was a separate biography or a mention in the George Medal article. I'm always disturbed to see sub par articles about living people. This was not close to being a biography but instead a discussion of a single event in her life. Recently this article had vandalism on it for over 24 hours before it was removed. This made me feel that it was under watched and ripe for trouble. Until I could sort it out, I made the redirect out of caution. If editors are improving the article than likely there should be no problem. If later we find there is not enough material for a full biography, then we can still redirect/merge. Thanks for the query. Take care, FloNight 21:07, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your reply. To be honest, I was hoping you would say that blanking this article without discussion and not moving even a single sentence of its contents elsewhere was a misstep on your part. I appreciate that many articles which we currently have under individuals' names should be retitled or merged, however you did neither in this case. If you think a BLP is of poor quality and underwatched, you can watch it, list on the BLP noticeboard, improve it, be bold and merge or move it, protect it, or prod it. I fail to see why this version of the article warranted the measure you took. Kla'quot (talk | contribs) 22:29, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

RfA thanks, and something I want to say
Hi, FloNight. First of all, many thanks for your support at my RfA, and for your congratulations. I very much appreciate your trust, and I hope not to let you down in any way. Secondly, I'd like to say that I've lurked a bit in some of the ArbCom cases, and I'm always extremely impressed at your efforts to treat people fairly, and at how, even when you're voting to sanction someone, you try to explain it, and often go to the person's talk page to clarify what the problem is. I hope if I'm ever in trouble with the ArbCom, you'll be one of the people judging me! Cheers. ElinorD (talk) 13:22, 23 June 2007 (UTC)
 * You're welcome. :-) FloNight 21:32, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

St Christopher Iba Mar Diop College of Medicine
Good evening Flo, we've got a request for the above article to be unprotected at WP:RFPP, it looks like a complex case so is there any chance you could look into it as I see you were the protecting admin? Cheers :-)  Ry an P os tl et hw ai te  19:15, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
 * It was complex, yes. With three separate but related issues; legal threats, banned users editing; and COI editing. I discussed it with Brad Patrick at the time and he told me to protect. I feel that we can reduce for now to semi-protect. I left a message for Guy as he was aware and I see continues to edit the requested updates. If he wants to return to full protection instead of reducing I will defer to him. Otherwise, I reduced and we need to watch closely. FloNight 20:57, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Well I'll watchlist the page then and keep an eye on it, if there's any more problems, I'll move it back upto full myself if guy doesn't get there first. Thanks for looking into it for me.  Ry an P os tl et hw ai te  20:59, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

BLP concerns in Johnson Beharry
Hi FloNight, could you take a look at my comments on this talk page? Thanks, Deathphoenix ʕ 16:12, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

Science Collaboration of the Month
NCurse work 05:27, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

WP:HARM
I noticed you commented on the talk page at WT:HARM. How do you feel about the essay? Would you regard it as an acceptable interpretation of how BLP should correctly be applied to cases? In writing it, I was trying to achieve a compromise that would be acceptable to most people in this dispute, but I'm not sure yet whether I've succeeded. Waltontalk 14:40, 1 July 2007 (UTC)
 * In actual fact, what I was trying to get across is that admins should discuss with another uninvolved admin after the deletion, and that the material should stay deleted while the discussion is taking place. I've rewritten parts to clarify this: . It's clear that it's now accepted practice to delete potentially harmful BLP content first, and then discuss - the two-admin rule was intended to work as a compromise, so that BLP deletions can be checked and discussed without having to undelete the material. I wasn't trying to imply that admins should necessarily ask for a second opinion before the deletion; in fact, one of the key themes in the essay is that non-BLP-compliant content should be removed first and discussed later. Feel free to edit the essay to make this point clearer, if you prefer. Waltontalk 09:29, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

Please Review My Talk Page
Since you are familiar with the Benoit story, please take a look at my discussion page. In a nutshell, a week ago tonight, I pointed out the now-famous edit to Benoit's page, but Moe deleted my message, saying it didnt belong. Nine people agreed with me, so I put it back and he deleted again. I protested and got blocked for it. At least two other people pointed out that Moe was rude in his disagreement with the nine as well. Since Jimbo posted his thoughts on my page about the event, I shared them with Moe on his page. Maybe it was a bit of nanny-nanny-boo-boo on my part, but I also think it is important that Moe see what he did last week was wrong. He then came to my board and picked a fight. He's been rude, used foul language and keeps trying to bully me. On the night in question, I got a 24 hour block, while Moe received a 1 hour block, which to me was a disgrace. Rather than realizing he got off easy a week ago, he has pushed this issue, refusing to accept the will of the people, the MSM or Jimbo himself. And the whole time, he has gleefully admitted to being less than friendly on several occasions, saying he "doesnt have to be nice here". Wesleymullins 07:20, 3 July 2007 (UTC)
 * According to you they are "just deserved shots" at me, see WP:HA, you're not supposed to go around taking shots at people. I'm not trying to bully you, I'm trying to get you to leave me alone. What more do you want of me? I've already been harrassed in real life, is that not enough to satisfy you? Your the only one pressing the issue anymore, and there is nothing anybody can do anymore. I'm tired of taking shots from you for trying to uphold a talk page guideline. — M o e   ε  16:29, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

Rfa?
is it going take forever?--D-Boy 23:21, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

USRD Newsletter - Issue 10

 * Want to help on next month's newsletter? Don't want to receive these in future? Don't want it subst'd next time? – It's all here. — Vsh Bot (t • c) 04:09, 7 July 2007 (UTC)