Wikipedia talk:BLP Cleanup Project

BLPs are hard
Seriously. Determining notability can be incredibly difficult. Especially when the person comes from an 'obscure' part of the world where Internet access isn't as readily available.

And determining what is and is not negative in a biography can also be incredibly difficult.

Does that mean we don't need more volunteers? Of course not. But it does mean that setting the broader community loose on the biographies may not be the wisest course of action. --MZMcBride (talk) 04:37, 27 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Dealing the problem of BLP is just as incredibly difficult to begin with. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try. I suppose you are referring that the BLP topic needs specialized users. That we can try to encourage WikiProject members from that particular topic to work on it alongside with the broader community. We need more eyes on BLP because there are many of them that has been in rather poor state of quality for some time, and we can do more. - Mailer Diablo 07:03, 27 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Absolutely, we can do more and we should be doing more. The issue is that ... sometimes "you go to war with the army you have&mdash;not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time." Y'know? Though I suppose the entire project is predicated on the idea of any random person showing up, so perhaps I'm blowing the concerns out of proportion. Still, a lot of these issues are complicated and many require sensitivity. Whether or not to include a DUI charge, a rape allegation, a miscarriage, a cancer diagnosis, etc. Reviewing each and every biography is a noble goal and something that we should do at some point. But we need better software. Flagged protection and patrolled revisions is a pretty good start.... --MZMcBride (talk) 07:14, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Much of this proposal seems based on the idea that if we can spend a little time on every BLP, we can get good results, as we did with images. But, with images, you only need a little review time per image. With images, the onus of proof is on the person wanting to keep an image, and if problems aren't fixed it's deleted. An image reviewer isn't expected to fix the problems, just identify them for deletion in a specified time. With BLPs, unfortunately, we already have vast quantities of articles tagged with major problems, such as being entirely unsourced, and there's strong opposition to deletion. Rather, people prefer to let them sit forever unfixed. Truly problematic BLPs aren't fixed easily, and for BLPs of the marginally notable (sufficent to avoid deletion) there's nobody who's prepared to spend large time on a topic they don't care about. But, there's often enough "concern" for the topic for it to be de-PRODed and survive AFD, without being fixed. Problem BLPs can be created far faster than they can be fixed, and it's unrealistic to think we can have a group of BLP-fixers that's larger than the group creating the problems. Fundamental rules have to be changed, to ensure we fix problems at a faster rate than we allow them to be made. --Rob (talk) 07:40, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Let's get this going
It's kind of pathetic that this was proposed three months ago with no action. What can we do to get started? &mdash;harej (talk) (cool!) 08:52, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Read the previous discussion? --MZMcBride (talk) 22:12, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Listing BLP
A discussion on the BLP article that requires at least a major cleanup or blanking is going on with the below AfD -- Wikid as&#169; 15:20, 13 August 2009 (UTC):