Wikipedia talk:Biographical optout

Note: User:Colton Cosmic is a blocked user. His edits to the project page have been reverted, and the IP account blocked. If someone is interested in the proposal, they could take it up and continue the discussion.  SilkTork  ✔Tea time  22:10, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

Rationale
An incomplete rationale because there's a lot of good reasons for this but I'm not not able to do more than a few right now. I would say as well that most experienced editors, and certainly any who have ever stepped back to consider the BLP question, don't need a nutshell explanation, and can really intuit why this is proposed, and what their positions on the outcome are.

The universal biographies-of-living-persons opt-out (WP:OPTOUT) is needed as a gesture of respect and empathy to the people who are bothered or hurt or even just don't want their lives defined by what some wiki-editors write about them in a bio. If you consider the very first result on a person's name in nearly any major search engine and certainly the dominant one, you can see immediately that the power of the wiki model has made the Wikipedia BLP usually the primary and almost always the place of first impression when the average Internet user seeks to find out about a person. Like any Wikipedia article the BLP is usually constructed by anonymous or pretty-much anonymous editors going by pseudonyms. There is therefore a great potential and even temptation for those who dislike the person to warp it with negative content. But even without that aspect of it, WP:OPTOUT represents a question of simple decency to those who say "delete that and stop talking about me, I will be responsible for my own definition of my life." Colton Cosmic.

Expressions of Support/Opposition

 * Support. Per above. Colton Cosmic (proposer, but the draft including the initial draft, is collaborative). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.87.57.116 (talk) 14:51, 24 June 2013‎
 * This isn't how it works. You'll need to bring this up at the policy discussion board first at the very least, and then institute an RFC. Given the massive effect that your proposal would have on the site, it would need to receive a huge measure of support. —  Scott  •  talk  14:11, 24 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Be that as it may, editors may comment "support/oppose" here. Colton Cosmic. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.87.57.116 (talk) 14:33, 24 June 2013 (UTC)


 * Oppose. We do something similar at WikiFur, but we allow articles on everyone in furry fandom, and even then it's dependent on the consensus of editors (historically, criminals and those believed to be guilty of art commission fraud have been refused exclusion). Here, many (most?) are public figures, and in any case you should only have information from reliable sources. Giving people a soapbox to say what they want in the quote is also a bad idea. See my earlier talk posting for more extensive explanation of how this kind of policy works out; it occupies a significant portion of administrative time. GreenReaper (talk) 15:33, 24 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Briefly and constructively. We talked up the public figure question and decided even they should get the respect, on request, of not having some wiki-editors define their lives. A simple statement of opt-out is not a "soapbox." The draft has been carefully written not to take up a lot of editor or administrator time. Colton Cosmic. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.87.57.116 (talk) 19:34, 24 June 2013‎


 * Oppose for the reasons given in 2008 and at Village_pump_(policy)/Archive_67, primarily that notable persons should not have a right to unilaterally censor Wikipedia. 24.151.116.25 (talk) 19:07, 25 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Oppose both in principle, and because it's utterly impractical. Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:11, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

Comment
This is not policy, so I commented out a statement saying that it was, and that it was going live on 1 July. Such a statement might have confused people.  SilkTork  ✔Tea time  21:56, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

Some practical problems
Here's some potentially fatal issues:


 * The quote. "...blank the article's entire contents and replace them with the BLP subject's particular opt-out quote and corresponding hyperlink". This is giving a surprising level of prominence to their words, which may themselves be problematic - what about when someone demands it be removed from Wikipedia because we're all criminals, or does so embedded in the middle of a rant about the Zionist conspiracies etc etc?
 * Public versus private declarations. The statement here implies someone has to say something on (eg) twitter or their blog; what about if they email us privately? What if they don't wish to engage with Wikipedia to the extent of making a public statement about it? (which is a legitimate position to take if they don't want to be on here)
 * Verifying identity. This is harder than you might think, especially for someone who - say - was an actor in the 1980s and is now completely off the radar of public attention - and these are very often our most problematic articles. How can we effectively confirm their identity? At some point, we'll have to take it on faith... and that's a recipe for trouble if we're going to make public statements in that person's name.
 * Language. We know that different projects are run by their own rules, but it's going to be really confusing for third parties to find out that they can take down the English article but not the Dutch one.
 * Permanence. If we have this, I am confident that we'll start getting people who request deletion, request the article back, and request deletion again. This could get quite complex and messy unless there's a clear approach laid out.

Any one of these could make this very hard to implement as written, even if there is broad support for it (which I doubt there will be). Andrew Gray (talk) 22:01, 25 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Also - if we start allowing people to remove their biographies while they're alive, I'm fairly sure that people's estates will start trying to do it posthumously, and that's a whole other can of worms. —  Scott  •  talk  14:57, 26 June 2013 (UTC)
 * In brief: Quotes are a bad idea, and violate NPOV. You do have to have trusted users identify people and this requires domain knowledge to avoid impersonation (not been an issue for WikiFur, but surely would be for Wikipedia). People expect English rules to apply everywhere. And some people do request a removal of deletion/protection, though not that many. (Follow-on: Do you require that the page history be restored?) Most of these are not insurmountable but require more admin time. GreenReaper (talk) 20:07, 26 June 2013 (UTC)