Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/Biographies of living people/Phase I/Archive 3

Progress being made in backlog
As we pause the RfC, it might also be good to pause and take stock of where we are in terms of the backlog of unsourced BLPs (if someone has already done that elsewhere my apologies for repetition). Obviously the number has been going down significantly and a lot of people are working on the problem, presumably by doing one or more of the following: 1) Removing unreferenced tags from BLPs that were in fact already referenced; 2) Sourcing unreferenced BLPs, then removing the tags; 3) Putting these articles up for deletion in one form or another, and eventually having them deleted via already existing deletion processes.

This entire discussion (even preceding the RfC&mdash;I think the origins were in an ANI thread here) began almost exactly 12 days ago early on the morning on January 20th. I don't have a diff in hand, but multiple people remarked at the time that there were just under 52,000 articles in Category:All unreferenced BLPs. As of this writing we are at 46,828. So in 12 days time we've reduced the unsourced BLP backlog by roughly 5,000 articles, which is a bit over 400 per day. I'm not sure we can keep up that pace, and perhaps people are picking the low-hanging fruit (e.g. articles that are already sourced and just require tag removal), but if we did keep up a similar pace, and even assuming hundreds of newer unsourced BLPs would be added and/or tagged in the meantime, we should be able to clear the whole backlog in around 4 months or so. This in the absence of a more organized process for clearing the backlog (as we will hopefully develop out of this RfC), and via which we can probably recruit even more editors to work on this.

My point here is that we're off to a good start and these efforts should continue even as we come to a consensus about how to put an end to unsourced BLPs and make sure they do not reappear. Indeed anyone who has participated in the RfC but has not worked on helping to clear out the category of unsourced BLPs should, if at all possible, pitch in one way or another, ideally trying to work on at least a few articles a week. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 06:07, 1 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Well yes, I really have to wonder why so much time had to be wasted on discussing possible bureaucratic procedures to deal with the backlog when the obvious solution all along IMO was simply to create some sort of taskforce to deal with it. I'm glad to hear that some people have started to tackle the actual problem. I will try to pitch in when I can find the time. Gatoclass (talk) 08:55, 1 February 2010 (UTC)


 * I do think you need some sort of centralized discussion page though, so people can co-ordinate their activities. Do you have one yet? Gatoclass (talk) 09:02, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I definitely agree that the effort should be centralized and transparent to all (as far as I know it's neither right now). Ideally that's what the RfC should produce (in part), though really there's nothing stopping us from coming up with a centralized means for cleaning out the unsourced BLP category using already existing procedures (some of the suggestions in the RfC would change procedures such that we would presumably clean out the category even more quickly than we could now given current policies and guidelines).


 * Honestly I don't know what exactly has happened in the last 12 days to remove some 5,000 articles from the unreffed BLP category, but I assume these are just ad hoc (and largely unorganized) efforts by a number of people aware of the problem. Personally I'm cataloging the little I've done at User:Bigtimepeace/BLP log and I know a couple of other editors spoke of doing something similar, but there is no centralized spot to coordinate this as far as I know. Perhaps someone should just boldly create WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons (or something similar) in an effort to centralize our efforts while the RfC comes up with more permanent, codified solutions that perhaps have more "teeth" to them than a WikiProject would. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 09:50, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * User:The Wordsmith/BLP sourcing is probably the most centralised place at the moment. I'd happily join a Wikiproject, and 20-odd people in the RFC agreed with me that one should be created. Hut 8.5 16:27, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for posting this update. I've been doing my small part and I've seen others hard at work, too, so it's good to see the overall effect. I would happily join a WikiProject - we could do with some centralisation of resources, eg I can never find that useful Category intersection tool. --Dweller (talk) 10:10, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * If/when something is decided, some blatant promotion is in order. Definitely in the Signpost. Not sure where else though. --Dweller (talk) 10:12, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * There are a lot of "low-hanging fruit" here - articles that actually do have inline refs already, or external links that are usable as refs - these groups started at 16,750 on Giggs' list (see above). Then Anglosphere actors/MAWs, sportspeople & politicians are relatively easy to handle, & found in vast numbers.  Much harder are marginal foreign figures - look at the handful left from 2005 - 5 last time I looked, most Japanese. People who are still alive (maybe) but whose career finished pre-internet are also tougher.  Actually one thing that is hard to source is whether people are still alive. Many "notable" people on our current standards are actually too obscure to get any press coverage at all if they die after 20 or more years in retirement.  That will be an increasing issue in the long term.  It would be good to have a place where any real examples of tagged as unreferenced possible libels are recorded, as despite I and others having asked for these, none have yet been produced. Johnbod (talk) 12:52, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, it's often hard to find reliable sources about folk whose work was pre-internet before electronic archiving of newspaper reports. I've even seen that issue while looking for key facts about Idries Shah who sold over 15 million books worldwide and still sells. Very often there are usable sources to be found in "External Links" (and bundled variations like the "External Links, References and All sorts") section at the bottom of the page, or in an untitled, bare, inline URL, especially in older articles.  Esowteric + Talk  13:11, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I've stared at a lot of these articles recently, and I've can only remember two that were potentially libellous (one correctly said that the subject was dismissed for corruption, and the other that the subject had alcohol problems). I think the rate of copyright violations and plagiarism problems is actually higher. Hut 8.5 16:27, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Regarding possible libels in these articles, I've logged several in the couple dozen articles I've looked at in detail so far. Out of 24 articles, three had problematic material in terms of our BLP policy and potentially libelous statements. Obviously I have no idea if this is a typical percentage (I would guess not), but the point is there are examples of this, and I know others have provided specific examples in the past. In my comment on the RfC I suggested keeping a formal log of problematic BLP material we find as we work on the category of unsourced BLPs, and perhaps in the absence of a centralized location to do that (for now) it would be good if editors kept track of that on their own. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 18:41, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * What I'm never sure of is how many sources is enough to remove the unsourced tag? On some of these musicians (that to me are obscure as hell), I can only find their "official site" that looks like a vanity site, but is actually maintained by their record label, and listings in music catalogs for their music.  I can't use a mp3 download, CD catalog or a lyrics site as a source, can I?  It certainly isn't reputable press, even if it's Amazon.  If they don't tour much, don't do interviews with web available press, I have no way to source them except catalogs and their own web sites. --RavanAsteris (talk) 04:18, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
 * If there is no reliably published coverage then the article should probably be deleted as non-notable. One reliable and independent source should be enough to prevent deletion for being unsourced though. Kevin (talk) 04:40, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes see WP:BAND, the notability criteria. It doesn't sound as if these are met. Johnbod (talk) 10:48, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
 * So let me get this straight: If they don't tour and do interviews in the web published press, they aren't notable, regardless of how many albums they have? How about the ones who may have foreign language or non-web press that I can't find?  What I don't want to do is propose for deletion someone who actually is a big name elsewhere in the world, but obscure in the "reliable" web-based English language press (which is really quite small, and shrinking daily due to newspaper failure and consolidation.)  When you leave out blogs and other freelance reportage, the pool of reliable sources is not as big as one could wish.  Frustrating. At least WP:BAND lets me figure out which ones can easily be dumped.  --  RavanAsteris  (talk) 09:39, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

One thing we'll never know is how much of this improvement was happening anyway because of user:DASHBot messaging the 17,400 creators of these articles and how much is a result of the current kerfuffle. However to keep the momentum going, there has been a lot of work is going on re a beefed up WolterBot's approach of asking the projects to fix articles that are relevant to those projects. I think that we can assist both of these in several ways, firstly an adopt a retired editor campaign to persuade current users to "adopt" long inactive editors and fix the unreferenced BLPs that Dashbot has messaged them about, secondly an "add a meaningful category" project to add further categories to articles currently only tagged with living people and year of birth categories, and thirdly we may need to try and revive some inactive projects that have suddenly been asked to fix huge numbers of unreferenced BLPs. Then in a few weeks we need a refresh to the bot messages to projects so that the newly categorised stuff appears and the stuff fixed by editors or other projects goes away. I also think that once these 17,400 editors have had a couple of months to come back and fix their unreferenced BLPs a second message from DASHBot might be in order, perhaps even by email this time.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers  13:04, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * A first step might be to have a bot go through all articles tagged as unreferenced BLPs, and remove those with inline citations inside them, or transclusions of citation templates. Then at least we could have some confidence in the size count of the category. Honestly, I've probably removed the unref-blp tag (either by sourcing or by noting that it's already sourced) on more than 50 articles in the last couple of days, and I assure you this pace is absolutely not sustainable. Ray  Talk 16:49, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Quick note: in addition to User:The Wordsmith/BLP sourcing mentioned above, another place where there seems to be an attempt to centralize some of these efforts is Unreferenced articles, though the former seems to have gotten more attention. It might make sense to use one or both of these pages as a springboard into a more formal (possibly WikiProject) page. One thing I think would be useful is a step-by-step "how to" guide that folks should follow when they come to an unreferenced BLP article (just reading the first sentence and sourcing it is obviously not good enough, for example). We should also encourage people to log their activities either directly on a central page, or in their own userspace and then provide a link on the central page. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 19:09, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I think this is too diverse and big to try and centrally micro-organise. Much is being done in relevant projects and by some of the 17,400 creators of these articles. By all means have a project to discuss the various BLP initiatives, but don't expect thousands of editors to report back to some central project that they've just fixed a BLP. If you do want stats on this I suggest programmatically extracting stuff from the database dumps and comparing the 52,000 articles tagged as unreferenced BLPs a few weeks ago with the current state of play - how many have more references, how many have been deleted (and of those how many as G10), how many changed to refimproveBLP  Ϣere  Spiel  Chequers  19:21, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * In terms of extracting stuff from a database I personally would have no remote idea how to do that though I'm sure it could be useful. Logging activities would just be a useful way to provide some anecdotal evidence, particularly about the number of unsourced BLPs with problematic material in them (a lot of people have been asking for data on that, and we cannot get it from a database extraction). Obviously it's great if WikiProjects and individual people are working on these articles, but I don't think that precludes some effort at centralized coordination. For one thing it would allow us to publicize the effort much more prominently and give people a page where they can get basic info such as where to find the category (many would not know), what they should do when checking an article (make sure there are not already sources, also read the entire thing and check for problematic material), and how to go about sourcing properly (not everyone has links to the pages or scripts that allow for easy referencing). If we don't log the activities of every editor and WikiProject, and if lots of people are working on their own outside of a centralized page, that's completely fine. A lot of other folks would be glad to have a centralized place to go for info and discussion about best practices, and the fact is there's no reason not to do it. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 20:48, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I would have thought that the number of the 52,000 that wind up deleted as attack pages should give a useful stat for the amount of major problems. The problems of a partial central log are three fold: People will denigrate its statistical validity, you will struggle to keep it free of repeats of the actual vandalisms, and you risk bumping into wp:DENY. As for a place for useful resources in improving articles, the Article Rescue Squadron has a lot of useful info, or if people want to revive a more BLP focussed project why not restart Living People Patrol?  Ϣere  Spiel  Chequers  21:14, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * The Living People Patrol project seems good (if inactive), but what we're talking about here is rather more focused and need not be ongoing&mdash;it's just about getting people together to clear a backlog, and hopefully the RfC will come up with permanent solutions to prevent it from building up again. To your first point, most articles with BLP problems in them will not be deleted as attack pages&mdash;for example of the three I've come across so far I simply fixed the problems, which is what most people would do. As for the problems of a central log as you see it: 1) People will denigrate the statistical validity of anything, but a bunch of people have asked for specific examples&mdash;both in this RfC (indeed in this thread) and elsewhere&mdash;of unsourced BLPs that had problems; 2-3) It's pretty easy to avoid repeating vandalism and falling afoul of WP:DENY, see for example the three comments at the bottom of my own log which point to problems without saying anything specific, linking to anything, or bringing "recognition and infamy" to anyone. People have asked for this kind of data so why not provide it, even if only anecdotally? If you don't think a coordinated effort to deal with unsourced BLPs is a good idea then don't take part, but you're not convincing me that coordination of efforts is ill-advised, and indeed I'm only discussing it because a couple editors above brought it up. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 21:47, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

WikiProject created
I am obviously crazy, but at least I can move this from "no project exists" to "a project exists". It might be "a failed attempt to create a project exists", but at least nobody can claim that nobody tried.

WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons is now created. Hack away. --Alvestrand (talk) 17:06, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

Barnstars

 * You might be on to something there, Michig. PeterbrownDancin's comments  made me realize that some people are only motivated to do new work if there's a reward associated with it (like, for instance, deleting unreferenced BLPs because they now can delete articles).  Maybe a motivation is needed in the other direction - has anyone stopped to make a barnstar specific to this task?  That could really motivate some editors.  Or maybe a UBLP marathon, vaguely based on the WikiCup?--otherlleft 13:37, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I suggested that the cup change the points system to incentivise referencing BLPs but they didn't seem keen. I have dished out article rescue barnstars to people who have rescued prodded or deleted unreferenced BLPs by referencing them, message ~ and of course there is the BLP barnstar  message ~ which is probably more relevant if people are sourcing lots of BLPs that aren't under immediate threat of deletion.  Ϣere  Spiel  Chequers  14:19, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Unless i mistaken, i was among the dubious few to have mentioned that editors fixing unsourced BLP needed a form of recognition. For Anime/Manga project i'm holding a score board of who fixed what with diff as evidence so recognition and reward can be given out accordingly. --KrebMarkt 14:25, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Teasing with a game/point for referencing articles? That's good. Points for deleting them?
 * Any editor that experienced glee or any type of twisted pleasure for deleting, or being able to delete articles just because they can or think they "should" should really, not be deleting articles in this incident, and possibly just not ever period. It terrorizes me to think that anyone would consider this ability a "reward". If people only performed the core work that no one sees but keeps Wikipedia running if there were a reward involved, we wouldn't have Wikipedia seeing as we're all volunteers. Barnstars aren't a merit or a "+1" to anything as a credit and most editors either don't care about and/or are happy enough to edit without them. The proposed "encouragement" is proof in and of itself of everything wrong with it. What kind of rewards do people collect currently that show any proof that such a thing works? Not that it matters. ♪ daTheisen(talk) 14:30, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I suggested that some editors might see deletion power as a reward because I don't think that's a good thing to encourage - in case I wasn't clear. Everyone is motivated by some form of positive reinforcement - that is part of the reason why DYK, GA, and FA are successful.  Granted, many editors find that doing a good job is sufficient motivation, but a specific barnstar or contest could entice folks who are more moved by a trophy or competition of some sort.  It's not my cup of tea, but I thought it worth a mention!  --otherlleft 15:05, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I gave several editors who are part of User:The Wordsmith/BLP sourcing The BLP Barnstar. I'd give it to anyone who has been working on sourcing BLPs, but there isn't a centralized list of who's been working on them, so I don't know who else to give it to.--Father Goose (talk) 05:59, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

Foundations of any official proposal?
This is to the above section, but cleared out.

To me, a quick summary of things with the largest support and support margins brings me to something like these concepts in a final proposal and is me trying to add at least a flavor of all of the mass-supported statements or others with significant consensus. If this is up elsewhere, I don't know about it or it's at least not widely pointed at everywhere. This is not the deletion process proposal at WP:DUB that would specifically be detailing what is roughly the second through fourth her, but the larger community motion.


 * Set a goal to fully clear the unreferenced BLP log, starting with the oldest.
 * Have s "BLPPROD" system akin to our current PROD with the same fundamentals.
 * Permit incubation with NOINDEX, and with good faith assumptions they won't sit forever.
 * Contact article creators and/or primary contributors whenever possible with DASHBot's data mentioned by WereSpielChequers.
 * Time given left open to repair articles, TBA. Either 'X' slowly per day/week, or larger groups over larger scopes per month.
 * Make the process as transparent as possible and explain everything to the community so they understand we do not mean to belittle anyone's contributions.
 * Encourage project heads to locate articles specifically relating to them for high participation. "Master lists" also publicly posted.
 * Revising and update text and wording in various places. Likely a few new templates needed.
 * Detail the policy to page creators, NPP and RCP. They're who we'll need to keep the log at zero in the future.

Ok. The last one is me, but this problem only ever started because the core was never cut off. It's possible to stop 100% of it at that level if we're wise. I'd also like to see the few loopholes that can get articles past the patrol requirement flag closed if possible. ♪ daTheisen(talk) 15:21, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I think closing all loopholes isn't going to be easy, but that's a good suggestion - we should certainly be looking for them. Ones I can think of are:
 * Any autoreviewers or admins who are still creating unreferenced BLPs, as these largely bypass the newpage patrol process.
 * Newpage patrollers marking unreferenced BLPs as patrolled because they don't meet the speedy deletion criteria.
 * Editors turning redirects and other non-BLP articles into unreferenced BLPs.
 * Editors changing the subject of the article, - I think this is very rare, but they aren't always helpful enough to put "changing the person this is about" in the edit summary.
 * The first two of these we could partly address when and if we make the change to not allow new unreferenced BLPs to be created. It would be more than reasonable both to publicise that change widely, and after that change to trout and ultimately revoke rights for admins and autoreviewers who still create unreferenced BLPs. I'm not sure what would be the best way to deal with the other two examples, except perhaps if a program could be written to identify redirects being expanded into articles and treat them as new articles?  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers  16:57, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

Speaking of a "master list" of unreferenced BLPs for "special action," don't you think there are already deletion-happy zealots already quietly scouring Wikipedia for these articles -- covertly compiling their own "master lists" of articles to be eliminated once Arbcom gives the go-ahead for the "final solution," as it were. This whole process scares me. PeterbrownDancin (talk) 18:28, 6 February 2010 (UTC) -- Sockpuppet of banned user
 * Well there's already a master list so to speak, so I wouldn't worry too much about others being created. I think you're being altogether too alarmist (and the "final solution" language is more than a little offensive, not to mention that it proves Godwin's law pretty early in a discussion thread). Pretty much everyone who supported the outright deletions is fine with not doing that ever again so long as we develop a process to clear the backlog. Your assumption that these articles are going to be deleted en masse is simply not borne out by the facts, and indeed basically everyone is trying to avoid that which is largely the point of this entire discussion. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 18:52, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I've taken the opposite stance. I have progressively been going through the important people in my area of expertise, referencing and removing the "unreferenced BLP" marker.  I'm well past 100 articles fixed.  If other people would do the same in their areas of expertise, we'd cut down the number of unreferenced BLPs significantly.  And some people are.  I've watched the number of unreferenced BLP articles reduce by a couple thousand already.  Of course, the method I have used for finding these candidates (lists that guarantee notability) have not shown one article that should be in danger of being deleted nor one that is hard to reference since there are parallel referencing sources naming these same people and their accomplishments.  In other words, we are talking about killing the article because the editor who created the article didn't know how to include obvious references.  In a sense, removing all the BLP flags is a bad thing, because stub articles now no longer have anything to draw attention to them and the longer articles have significantly more content that really should have supplementary referencing.  However, the proposal makes merely having the flag place an article in jeopardy.  So the flag must be removed or some (expletive deleted) administrator will delete the article and leave a residual notice that it had been deleted, which will make it that much harder for a legitimate article to be resurrected.Trackinfo (talk) 21:07, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
 * You're right that a number of people are doing as you are and referencing unreferenced BLPs. It's actually brought down the total of unreferenced articles by about 6,000 in the last 2 weeks or so (along with people removing tags where the article was referenced to begin with). But it's definitely not the case that all of these articles can be saved. I've only done about a quarter of the sourcing that you have, but I've already found several articles where the subject was simply not notable and/or where sourcing was essentially impossible. I think most of the articles can be sourced and saved (though one tricky problem is articles where the only sources are not in English, and there seem to be a number of those, and we won't always be able to find someone with the language skills to do the work), but there are also a number that really do need to be deleted because they never should have been created in the first place based even on our current notability guidelines. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 22:47, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Notability standards, applied to BLPs or any other subject, are a different subject. Many people were supporting deleting an article simply because it was an unreferenced BLP, with no consideration to whether the information was valid or belonged here.  What we should have been discussing is incorrect information, libelous information posted here in a BLP.  None of the subjects I have dealt with are that prone to becoming libelous.  I have included some things that might be considered negative, but I have carefully referenced them, usually with multiple references.  And better yet, the other pieces of the puzzle fit.  Is that now libelous, or closer to the truth?Trackinfo (talk) 06:03, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

Is this dead?
What's happening here? I am really hoping some progress is being made.

We really must get agreement here or the consequences are not good. There seemed to be a momentum that was giving me some hope. But we must not let innertia set in again, or we'll be back to the very regrettable circumstances that drove us of us to start deleting the oldest of these. Those are circumstances we really must avoid as they were fairly disruptive, so an agreed way forward here is a neccessity. What's the hold up? I thought we seemed to have a growing consensus around a 7day prod mechanism for new unreferenced articles, with a fairly long, but set, timescale for dealing with the backlog before any deletions?--Scott Mac (Doc) 11:31, 6 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Can anyone reply and say that they are working on it? The community paid already a dire price in term of mutual trust and respect to have that process started not finishing with a balanced compromise would adding insult to the injury. --KrebMarkt 12:05, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
 * From the template at the top of the project page and some comments above, I believe we are awaiting an admin with enough time, determination, bravery, etc. to read the voluminous comments and produce a summary, from which a second RFC with only a few, popular, concrete options may be produced. --Cyber cobra (talk) 12:07, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure we need to be so process bound. There were some obvious points of agreement here: I know some are opposed to the above - but it seems most will support if the timeframes are right. So lets start with a very long timeframe indeed (longer than I would like) to get things moving. Maybe a year to clear the backlog?
 * 1) Prodlike process for new unreferenced BLPs. The process should not bite the creator, and should flag any available wikiprojects for assistance. 7 days later, if still unreferenced, article is deleted without prejudice to undeletion if someone willing to source.
 * 2) A very slow setting of deadlines for the backlog. (The timeframe still needs agreement.) Encouraging wikiprojects to source through lists of artilcle, and preventing a swamping of the process with thousands of articles at a time. However there will be a deadline - "after x months all remaining articles marked as unsourced for x years get deleted". (Timeframe to be agreed - but to allow plenty of time for sourcing, so that few or none require deletion.)

Whether people like this or not, does anyone think it isn't somewhere near consensus?--Scott Mac (Doc) 12:39, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I think we probably have consensus to require newly created BLPs to be sourced, though we do need to make sure this is communicated to the article creators, and to keep as many people as possible on board, if they don't meet the existing G10 or A7 criteria for speedy deletion we need a sticky prod rather than speedy deletion for newly created unsourced BLPs. However we haven't yet fully identified the backlog, and the unreferenced BLPs that we haven't yet found and tagged as such are probably even worse, if only because the tagger had a chance of spotting some attacks and vandalism. We are still finding unreferenced BLPs created in 2005, and have found 455 old unreferenced BLPs so far this month, along with 2,015 in January. I think we should finish the job of finding the remaining unidentified old BLPs before we set a schedule for deleting those that no-one can be bothered to reference, and to be realistic I think that would need to mean the number of old unreferenced BLPs being detected dropping below a hundred a week. On the bright side, I think User:DASHBot has done some useful work chiding the 17,400 authors of the known unreferenced BLPs and quite a few projects are now working on the ones of interest to those projects. I think we could do with a follow up note from DashBot in a few weeks, not least because so many thousands of unreferenced BLPs have been tagged since the first note, and we could also do with an update of the note to the projects, both because of the newly identified articles and also because of the categorisation that has been going on.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers  15:12, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Amidst the dithering and deliberate delaying, 455 unreffed blps have been added so far in February 2010. "backlog" is code for "the thing which gets larger and worse and more ethically compromising every day." The Gordian knot needs cutting, and soon.Bali ultimate (talk) 15:18, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I think it would be more accurate to say 455 unreferenced biographies have been identified so far this month, it isn't as if many of these are newly created unreferenced BLPs. I think that the fact that we are identifying these articles is positive. The fact that the number of articles tagged as unreferenced BLPs is falling despite the thousands still being found is evidence both that rather than getting "larger and worse and more ethically compromising" the problem is actually getting smaller and less serious, and also that rather than "dithering and deliberate delaying" the community has been putting a lot of effort into this problem.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers  16:12, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes perhaps, but only because some of us took decisive action. If this resulting process stalls, then the backlogs will certainly grow.--Scott Mac (Doc) 17:58, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately because the deletion spree took place at the same time as Dashbot's campaign I doubt if we will ever know which had most effect on the backlog. It should be possible to extract some stats from the 2009 data dumps to see at what rate the backlog was changing during last year, but I would be very surprised if they showed that the backlog of unreferenced BLPs had been stable or growing. The backlog of articles tagged as unreferenced BLPs may well have been stable or growing, after all about 30,000 of them were tagged in 2009. But how many of them were created in 2009? Looking at the articles in Category:Unreferenced BLPs from September 2009, the first three I checked at random were created in 2005-2007, this fits in with much that I've seen recently. I'm pretty confident that the total backlog has been declining, whether the identified part of the backlog has been growing or not is of much lesser importance to me.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers  18:55, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

To Scott's original question, User:Risker is right now working on "summarizing" the RfC to date (see this thread on WP:AN). I would guess she'll post something in the relatively near future, though it's a lot to read through. I agree with Scott that there's clearly strong support for some sort of 7 day prod mechanism (or something similar) and once we get a summary from Risker we should proceed apace to figuring out how exactly that will work, either at one of the existing proposals along those lines or somewhere else (it doesn't matter really, so long as we hone in one page to discuss it). Probably there will be other good suggestions distilled into summary form and we should pursue those too, but an expedited process for clearing the unsourced backlog is the key thing.

And to WereSpielChequers above, I don't see any reason why we would need to wait until we finish finding and tagging all of the unsourced BLPs (who knows how long that would take, really it would probably never be complete) before setting a schedule. The schedule can always be slightly adjusted as we go&mdash;I haven't seen anyone opposed to that. So if, for example, we set a four month deadline, and then two months out realize we had tagged an additional 7,000 unsourced BLPs and would need a few more weeks, we could do that. The point is to get started asap and not lose what little momentum we have, plus (more importantly) the longer we wait the longer articles sit around with potentially problematic material in them. We've already done some good work on the backlog (it's down about 6,000 articles since this entire unsourced BLP discussion began), but we need to kick it into high gear and blast notes all over the project that this is a priority and that we've developed a formal process for it. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 18:41, 6 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks, that's brilliant. Risker is an excellent choice. I suspect clearing the backlog may be more difficult to get agreement on. But if we can at least get a sticky prod thing going for new articles while we discuss the backlog that would be some result.--Scott Mac (Doc) 18:45, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Exactly, I think the "scheduling" aspect for the backlog will be the most contentious, and indeed at first we won't know what will be doable or not (so actually any firm opinion on the matter will be based on a wild guess). I think the point is to get started and discuss as we go, throttling back or forward as needed, but with an overall sense that we'll need a definite cut-off date eventually. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 18:57, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I think we need to think of three groups of articles. Already identified unreferenced BLPs where we can probably get consensus for some sort of timetable with a manageable throttle, a sticky prod with plenty of editor and project notification. New articles where we can agree a sticky prod system. But then we will still have newly identified old unsourced BLPs turning up for a long time to come. I think that this will need a rolling program to address, but provided we configure the bots to run more frequently and we put some sort of throttle on the process, I would think we can setup a monthly process whereby newly identified unreferenced BLPs get handled within a month of being identified. As for the schedule, I would like to see it fixed and gradual. Fixed so that a Bot could alter the templates on all 46,000 with a message to the effect that unless referenced this will be deleted on x date, and gradual so that there is a steady flow of them with some being deleted every day. The solution I fear most is one where on two or three dates this year thousands of articles will be deleted, I see that as a near guarantee that some editors will do low quality rushed rescues to save as much as they can at the last minute. That's why I would rather that after a certain date we start deleting the oldest five days of unreferenced BLPs per day (oldest in terms of the tag, not the article).  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers  19:16, 6 February 2010 (UTC)


 * I don't see a need to be in any sort of rush. There is still no evidence that unsourced BLPs are as bad as the BLPs that contain at least one reference, and plenty of anecdotal evidence to the contrary (as many contentious claims are referenced, most of the unsourced BLPs do not contain contentious claims). Another week or four of consensus-building before anything drastic is done (again) is probably still necessary to find a solution acceptable to most people. —Кузьма討論 00:11, 7 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I'd say three years isn't a rush. But yes, a week or even more if fine as long as the process doesn't stall. This must not be kicked into the longgrass. We need to find a solution that works and saves unpopular solutions being neccessary. I think we're probably quite close to that objective.--Scott Mac (Doc) 00:19, 7 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I am really appalled by the claims that there is a "consensus" of any sort, and at seeing that the so-called "deletionists" are discussing the implementation of some speedy-deletion process as if it was a closed issue. A 50-50 split is not a "consensus". A "150 oppose, 60 support" vote is defintely not "consensus"! Not even a "75 support, 25 oppose" vote can be considered a "consensus", when the proposal is to stomp on the fingers of 49,000 potential new editors who did not vote (but have implicitly voted against!) Not to mention that the poll was taken over a very small and very biased sample of editors; namely those who (1) understand what the RfC is about, (2) have the time and interest for adminitrative debates, and (3) understand enough of the jargon-laden "views" to vote on them. Obviously editors who would rather edit contents than discuss policies were sorely under-represented in the poll; while every deletionist who saw the call must have rushed to cast his vote. And yet, even with that bias, it seems that the votes on the proposal, and all variants thereof, generally went the "wrong" way. As for the 7-day period, that is just ridiculous, it seems chosen to ensure that no one will see the prod before the article is deleted. Why does it *have* to be one week, rather than one month or one year? (A longer period might allow some of those articles to get fixed, and therefore spoil the tagger's fun — is that the fear?) Every time the "notability requirement" comes under discussion, the result is the same: a long heated discussion that never gets anywhere near a consensus.  The "notability requirement" is by far the most un-consensual and most hotly contested "policy" in Wikipedia; and seems to be the most frequent cause of nasty fighting and editor burn-out. Yet, after all these years and all those megabytes of discussion, I still haven't seen an explanation of what, exactly, is the harm that BLPs of non-notable people (or schools, or whatever) might cause to Wikipedia.  I already got tired of asking that question. The answers I get back always boil down to a totally circular argument: "non-notable articles must be deleted, because otherwise WP will have thousands of non-notable articles, and that is bad because non-notable articles must be deleted." Bios of non-notable people are not particularly likely to generate lawsuits or embarassment. (In fact, all cases of libel and malicious pranks that I have seen in six years of editing were either in BLPs of *notable* persons or in non-BLP articles.) They do not attract as much vandalism as other articles; and since they are hardly visible to anyone but their authors, any vandalism that they may get is unlikely to be seen by anyone else. Non-notable BLPs are much easier to police than other kinds of articles, because it does not take an expert to sniff malicious or promotional edits, because the criteria for their *contents* are much stricter, and because the bio of a non-notable person necessarily be very short and basic.  So, please, what is the problem? I submit that the problem that bothers the initiators of this RfC is not "the large number of unsourced BLPs". The problem is "the huge and growing backlog of unsourced BLPs that need to be assessed for notability". But this is a totally artificial problem!  It was created when a group of editors invented the notability rule; namely when *they* decided that the classification of BLPs into "notable" and "non-notable", and deletion of the non-notable ones, was to be a priority-one project for Wikipedia. That problem bothers *only* the deletionists (and their unfortunate victims); and bothers them not because the articles are actually harming Wikipedia or anyone else, but *only* because they just *dislike* them.  The reason why the "backlog problem" is so large is that the deletionists are a minority; and the other editors, who generally view that project as a very low priority one (if not an anti-goal or a form of vandalism) naturally will not help them. Well, that "problem" can be *easily and instantaneously* solved by scrapping the notability requirement and forgetting about that ill-thought project. This simple solution would spare us all from the work of assessing, prodding, re-assessing, documenting, discussing, and appealing about the notability of those 49,000 people. (The *contents* of every new BLP would still need to be checked and trimmed, of course, just as now; but the normal editing procedures and basic principles can take care of that, at the same pace as now.) In summary, the discussions over this RfC only strengthened my conviction that the notability requirement is not doing any good to Wikipedia, only a lot of harm. Logic, statistics and anecdotes say so. I challenge the supporters of the notability rule to *prove* (not merely *claim*) otherwise. All the best, grumpily, --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 02:55, 7 February 2010 (UTC)


 * (edit conflict) I agree. I know it's not a !vote, but Requests for comment/Biographies of living people/Phase II shows 80%+ consensus for two incompatible groups of proposals: the 7-day deletionists such as Jehochman and the advocates of no change such as Jclemens. I do not see a clear preference for either, so let's wait for the closing admin's conclusions. Being process bound is less bad than jumping hastily in the wrong direction. Certes (talk) 03:03, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

Yes, we can wait a bit and get some type of agreement here. But only if people will be willing to work through this to find a solution. People burying their heads in the sand and thinking everything is fine and dandy don't help. The degree of harm is debatable, what isn't is that we want our BLPs to be referenced and that the current "system" has failed to do that - 50,000 backlog and things unreferenced since 2005 bears adequate testimony. If there are new ideas to prevent this, they should be considered. But they have to actually work with reality, the sort of "well in theory people can sort this, so let's just ...." is not good. We need to be realistic. It is agreed speedy deletion is amongst the worst ways out of this, so lets find another way. There are a number of good suggestions in the RfC, we just need to work with them and make one of them really work.--Scott Mac (Doc) 03:58, 7 February 2010 (UTC)
 * "We want our BLPs to be referenced": okay, you may include me in that "we". As for the rest, including the priority and methods for that task, we probably disagree. As for the BLPs that are unreferenced since 2005, that fact could be read the other way around: it proves that an unreferenced BLP (notable or not) will not cause problems even if it stays unreferenced for five years.  Indeed, we may assume that BLPs that have been there for five years either are notable, and therefore must have been read by many editors, and therefore are likely to be OK (even if unreferenced); or are not notable, and therefore are not read by anyone, and therefore fixing them should have lower priority than fixing regular articles.  So, we should worry about the BLPs that were created this week, rather than those of 2005; and concenrtate on the most notable ones, if only we could detect them automatically (perhaps by access frequency?)
 * As for suggestions, if the notability rule is not repealed, consider this alternative way of implementing it:
 * if an article is to be deleted solely because of non-notability or lack of references, it should be blanked instead of deleted. Some differences between that and true deletion are
 * Any editor can blank an article, without having to go through the AfD or invoking special powers;
 * Other editors can still view the history and undo the blanking if they disagree with it, at any later time;
 * The search engine will index the title, which is useful for editors, but not the blanked contents;
 * The editor who blanks cannot presume he is superior to other editors;
 * Disputes about blanking and unblanking can and should be handled like any other editorial disputes (talk pages,3rr,etc.);
 * Blanking without due reason, caution and explanation should be handled as any other kind of improper editing;
 * Total blanking is only a special case of content deletion, so it does not need special rules and procedures.
 * The AfD and sppedy deletion would then be used only for truly uncontroversial reasons (malicious article creation, superfluous redirect, libel or copyvio that cannot be erased from the history except by deleting the article, etc.).
 * Non-editing readers will hardly notice the difference between a blanked article and a missing or truly deleted one. If the author of a blanked article is a vandal or spammer, any attempts by him to unblank the article will show up in the blanker's watchlist, like any attempt to undo an undo; and will be handled the same way. If the author is a misguided novice, he should find in the talk page a gentle explanation by the blanker; if he is not convinced he can just click undo, and then both will have to find an agreement as usual. Articles  which have remained in a blanked state for a year or two could perhaps be deleted; however there is no real need to do so, since a blanked article (unlike a tagged one) is essentially harmless.
 * Even those editors who demand notability will hardly blank more than a small fraction of those 50,000 unsourced BLPs. While the proposal above allows creators to undo the blankings, only a small fraction of that small fraction will choose to do so. On the other hand, those authors will not have to beg and argue with the admins to do so. Therefore, in practice this proposal should save quite bit of work for everybody, blankers and authors — and a quite a lot of bile. All the best, --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 06:57, 7 February 2010 (UTC)


 * It seems Risker didn't find consensus for the concept of a deadline in the close, I agree there were none. Considering the progress being made (see here), I'm confident we'll be able to deal with most of the backlog within a few months. I long thought we needed to involve in the process a more important part of the community. The BLP unsourced tag was created only at the end of 2008, and the only major RFC we had on the issue happened ... just now. Cenarium (talk) 16:22, 7 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Seeing as how you consider yourself a major stakeholder in the need to clean up the BLP issue, Scott, why don't you build a proposal out of what's been discussed and what the community has endorsed and rejected via this RFC? We can push forward from there. Resolute 16:31, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

What's going down?
"This has been one of the largest and most complex requests for comment within the community for some time...", apparently started by a group who wanted a certain outcome with the time to comment reduced by about 75% from the normal time judging from the frequent references to 30 days being the customary length for a request for comment. Is this factually incorrect? (Yes, I'm new enough this is a serious question.)

There's a lengthy official looking banner with statements that don't seem accurate or impartial to me. And the final sentence seems to be a disclaimer that this banner/proclamation isn't official. "There's something happening here, what it is ain't exactly clear..." Refrigerator Heaven (talk) 12:42, 7 February 2010 (UTC)
 * The problem here was that the discussion was pretty lengthy and becoming unparseable. So the RfC was paused not halted so that the basic positions could be summarised.  The RfC will then proceed over at Requests for comment/Biographies of living people/Phase II in due course.  It is through this mechanism that consensus can be achieved - otherwise we just have lots of disparate opinions and no agreement on anything Fritzpoll (talk) 13:26, 7 February 2010 (UTC)


 * As Fritzpoll states, this isn't an early close. The fact that this question seems to keep coming up (and being answered relatively satisfactorily by all accounts) would seem to indicate that even the talk page has begun to get too large to easily parse. -- B figura  (talk) 22:14, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

The articles which were deleted which led to the creation of this RFC
WP:ARS/BLP shows the quality of some of the articles which were deleted without process which led to this RFC:

Deleted by User:Rdm2376: Deleted by User:Scott MacDonald:
 * 1) A president of Bangladesh
 * 2) Acting Prime Minister of South Korea twice
 * 3) Deputy prime minister from 1992 until 1996 the Executive Secretary of the Commonwealth of Independent States from April 1999 until June 2004
 * 1) Emmy winner
 * 2) Grammy Award-winning American record producer
 * 3) editor-in-chief of The Village Voice, credited for coining the term Brat Pack
 * 4) Polish general, Chief of the General Staff of the Polish Army
 * 5) United States Ambassador to South Africa during the Reagan administration
 * 6) College football coach at DePauw University ,Penn ,Rice, and Temple
 * 7) Film was submitted to the foreign films category in the 67th Academy Awards, the first submission from Guatemala
 * 8) Author who created Where's Wally?, known as Where's Waldo in the USA and Canada
 * 9) The Doobie Brothers member
 * 10) Heavy metal drummer who played in the original versions of heavy metal bands Guns N' Roses and L.A. Guns
 * 11) American climate scientist
 * 12) Two-time World Champion in the Supersport World Championship in 2005 and 2006
 * 13) Canadian ski jumper  won a Ski jumping World Cup  event at the age of 15 in 1980

User:Lar deleted:
 * 1) Bosnia and Herzegovina Prime minister in 1996-1997
 * 2)  Prime Minister of Kyrgyzstan (briefly)
 * 3) three-time Grammy nominee
 * 4) Chief Secretary of the Cayman Islands
 * 5) Lead creative developer for several Sega Arcade games such as: Altered Beast ,Golden Axe ,Wing War, Die Hard Arcade,Dynamite Cop, and Alien Front Online just closed keep.

Caveat I cannot fully vouch for the claims of these articles, as I was not the editor to source them. Okip (formerly Ikip) 02:19, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * yeah for actual facts about what is out there in these deleted articles! Looks notable.--Mdukas (talk) 05:57, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Hm, now imagine if it was a newbie editor who had blanked all those articles without asking... 8-/ All the best (I hope, someday), --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 10:22, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

Run real proposals separately
Since this RFC is so large, and people support the views the like rather than voting support/oppose on each view, I suggest that any actual proposal for policy change is made into a separate page, advertised here and all the normal channels, and then a vote/discussion is held. It is just not reasonable to take the support/oppose ratio for a view here to show any kind of consensus. --Apoc2400 (talk) 18:42, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
 * that sounds wonderful. Requests for comment/Biographies of living people/final decision after this RFC closes normally? Ikip 18:45, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Agreed. This is a thorny issue, and it's far better to whittle it down bit by bit rather than try and do a whole lot at once. -- Ser Amantio di Nicolao Che dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa. 22:24, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Agreed. The "community desysop" RFC made that mistake. Rd232 talk 13:18, 25 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Separate RfCs are a good idea. Indeed, why not run a user poll (or separate RfCs) on the underlying basic basic questions, separately, such as:


 * BLPs in general:
 * Who is responsible for checking the contents of new BLPs?
 * Who is responsible for watching the edits made to a BLP?
 * Who is responsible for fixing errors in existing BLPs?
 * Should the basic WP editing principles be different for BLPs?
 * Unsourced BLPs (i.e. BLPs that contain no *explicit* references):
 * Is the contents of unsourced BLPs of lower quality than that of sourced ones?
 * Are unsourced BLPs of higher risk than sourced ones?
 * Are unsourced BLPs a *top-priority* problem for Wikipedia?
 * Is it OK to delete a BLP only because it is unsourced, without attempting to source it?
 * Who is morally responsible for adding sources to an unsourced BLP?
 * The editor who created the article
 * All the editors who have worked on the article
 * The editors who have it in their watchlist
 * The editor who proposes it for deletion
 * The editors who support the deletion
 * The editors who oppose the deletion
 * The regular WP editors in general
 * The administrators in general
 * Jimbo Wales (well, Wikipedia was *his* idea, wasn't it? 8-)
 * Is blanking an unsourced BLP better or worse than deleting it?
 * What should happen if there is a dispute about the deletion of an usourced BLP?
 * The editor who says "delete" (e.g. by tagging) prevails
 * The editor who says "keep" (e.g. by deleting a tag) prevails
 * An administrator decides
 * The article goes to the AfD
 * The usual edit conflict resolution process applies (talk page, 3rr, arbitration, etc.).
 * If a BLP goes to the AfD only for being unsourced, howlong should we wait before deleting it?
 * What should Wikipedia do to the authors/editors of an unsourced BLP?
 * Nothing
 * Warn them beforehand
 * Scold them
 * Block them
 * Apologize and justify the decision in their talk page
 * Provide them with an "undo deletion" button
 * Other
 * Non-notable BLPs (i.e. BLPs *with appropriate and fully verifiable contents* on "non-notable" subjects):
 * Should Wikipedia attempt to label people as either "notable" or "non-notable"?
 * Are the current notability criteria:
 * Just right
 * Too lax
 * Too strict
 * Too complicated
 * Too rigid
 * Too subjective
 * I haven't read them
 * Are non-notable BLPs harmful or beneficial to Wikipedia?
 * Are non-notable BLPs a *top-priority* problem?
 * Is it OK to delete a BLP *only* because *its notability has not been determined*, without attempting to determine it?
 * Who is morally responsible for determining the notability of the subject of a BLP? (same alternatives as above)
 * What should happen if there is a dispute about the notability of a subject? (same alternatives as above)
 * What should Wikipedia do with any existing BLPs that are *determined* to be non-notable?
 * Nothing particular
 * Delete
 * Merge and redirect as appropriate
 * Move to user space
 * Other
 * If a BLP goes to the AfD only for being non-notable, how long should we wait before deleting it?
 * What should Wikipedia do to the authors/editors of a non-notable BLP? (same alternatives as above)


 * For some of these questions we should also get basic statistics, e.g. what percentage of unsourced BLPs are/could be sourced, etc.


 * If Wikipedia only had a convenient mechanism for placing such surveys and tabulating their results. What about this: any userwho wishes to respond creates a copy of the poll's form as a subpage of their own user page, called "User:Foo/Polls/{POLL_NAME}",and ticks the boxes and fills the blanks in that page, preserving its layout. Then the poll tabulator uses the category mechanism to find all such forms, and a simple wikisource parser to extract the votes.


 * All the best, --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 20:31, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

WOW---working on the Poker List
Wow... I'm working on the list of poker players... and if some of these people had been deleted, it would have been a travesty. First, I'm working on my third article right now. Two of the three that I've done are marked as unreferenced, but have references! One of the three is for Lyle Berman a three time WSOP winner, Poker Hall of Famer, former CEO of Rainforest Cafe, Chairman of the World Poker Tour. One of them is for ten time bracelet winner, Johnny Chan---whose WSOP Main Event victory played a major role in the movie Rounders (1998 film). TV commentator Ali Nejad. Another is for the desperately needing help Mason Malmuth---but the founder of Two Plus Two Publishing and a recognized poker authority. Poker Hall of Famer Corky McCorquodale and Cindy Violette. Spot checking another 5 indicates that at least roughly half the poker articles are incorrectly tagged. The articles may need more references, but they are not unreferenced.--- Balloonman  NO! I'm Spartacus! 07:12, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I understand we need better coverage of articles. But something like Mason Malmuth is probably A7 speedable in its current form. This doesn't mean he isn't worthy of an article, just that the content provided thus far doesn't create one. There are probably a billion topics out there deserving an article, we just have the first 3 million or so created.  MBisanz  talk 07:24, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Being the owner of 2+2 is a claim to significance as is his being a poker author---but the article needs to be expanded and referenced. But the point of mentioning this, is to point out what would be lost if the BLP-CSD'ers had their way and blindly started deleting everything with the unreferenced tag. Some definitely notable individuals a number of which have references would have been lost.--- Balloonman  NO! I'm Spartacus! 08:00, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Quite possibly, so this RfC needs to come to a consensus on a better way of handling it - the status quo is obviously unacceptable, and summary deletion seems to be going the same way. A compromise is needed, quickly Fritzpoll (talk) 08:37, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Frankly, I don't think it needs to happen "quickly". It needs to happen, and it can't be dragged on forever, there is no doubt about that.  But I would much rather get it right, even if it takes a couple months rather than force some hackneyed, half-assed policy that causes far more issues than it solves.  There is far more involved in this debate than "ZOMG! Unreferenced BLPs!!1" Resolute 16:04, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Heh, "quickly" is a relative term. On an issue that has lasted for year, a month could be considered "quick" Fritzpoll (talk) 16:25, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Sorry, but the consnsus is clearly *against* any quick solution. --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 20:59, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * It is comical, isn't it? On my list, I have two Hockey Hall of Famers and numerous Olympians.  A lot of them are in bad shape, but as with yours, I am also coming across several that have references in the EL section or as general refs.  The real scope of this problem is indeterminate.  I would say a decent percentage of that 50k are improperly tagged, but at the same time, there are thousands more that haven't been tagged at all yet. Resolute 16:04, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
 * A bot found something like 16,000 that are tagged that actually have references. All the numbers are meaningless.  We know have thousands incorrectly tagged, and I wouldn't be surprised if we have hundreds of thousands that have no tags and are sitting out there orphaned in some corner somewhere. 18:08, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Agree, which is why a bot/automated process should not be employed. It would not surprise me at all if there were some articles deleted in the initial fray that started this that were in fact referenced!  So, one thing that we need to incrporate into the solution is what to do when we come across unreferenced BLP's after the clean up period.--- Balloonman  NO! I'm Spartacus! 21:48, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Indeed it seems that a large fraction of the BLPs that were speedily deleted merely for being unsourced were actually pretty valid articles. So it is not just a problem of incorrect tagging. The "source now or delete" policy means the practically permanent destruction of the *good* work of tens of thousands of *good* editors — for *no valid reason*. If that is not vandalism, then what is? --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 20:59, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

Link PROD
Can someone please link the first instances of "PROD" and "BLP" in the summary? Or at least make it explicit what the abbreviated jargon means with parentheses or something. I know BLP muself, but despite being active for over five years and participating in plenty of deletion discussions I had never seen PROD before I read this.

Peter Isotalo 08:10, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Badly tagged unreferenced BLPs
Digging through all of these unreferenced BLPs, I have noticed about 30% of these BLPs already have references in them, using the tag. Whether these references were added after the BLP tag was added, I do not know.

I could create a study exactly how many of these BLPs actually have tags, if I thought it would change the alarmist position of those who want drastic changes, but I don't think it would. Okip (formerly Ikip) 02:19, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I checked 50 at random today, and found that 20% were incorrectly tagged. Most of those had sources added after the tag, but the tag was left in place. Kevin (talk) 02:33, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Okay, so many are sources added after the tag, is it possible to have a bot remove these tags? It would be nice to have a accurate number of unreferenced BLPs. The number will still be large, just less large :) 20% less of 45,518 is 36,415, still a huge number...sigh...Okip (formerly Ikip) 03:29, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * No, no bot can do this. While many are indeed incorrectly tagged (at the time of tagging, or now), their are a fair number of articles that use the ref tag but don't have actual references, just some footnote without any source. Many also have empty references section, but have the reflist or references template in place. Just like no bot should delete pages, no bot should remove the tag either. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fram (talk • contribs)
 * It couldn't be done automatically, but a bot could draw up a list of articles that have refs containing external links, those that have a populated References section without inline citations, and those containing external links of any sort.--Father Goose (talk) 08:25, 9 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Already done. WP:Mistagged BLP cleanup. Gigs (talk)

I disagree with the closing opinion
The only result I feel that this RfC has achieved for me is that by expressing sincere skepticism towards the assumptions of this matter -- that "something must be done at any cost" -- I receive unhelpful comments like this and this on my User talk page. I guess that when it comes to certain issues on Wikipedia, holding a rational conversation to elicit opinions, educate each other & achieve a consensus is a waste of time, & the ends justify the means. -- llywrch (talk) 22:35, 7 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I regret to hear that you do not agree with my close, Llywrch. When I took on the task (one which nobody else seemed willing to attempt), I wasn't sure there was a consensus there. I was surprised myself at the strength of consensus for some variation of the BLP-PROD process; as I note in the close, for each of the views proposing something along this line, most of the opposes were related to the fine points specific to that view, and not to the overall concept. To paraphrase, "Oppose, no reason to shorten/lengthen PROD period, it should be 7 days" or variations thereof were much more common than "Oppose, prodding these articles is a terrible idea". This was clearly a (quite remarkable) discussion, despite the oppose/support headers, and pure head-counting doesn't work for genuine discussions. Nonetheless, I respect your opinion on this, and know that you speak in good faith. Risker (talk) 23:02, 7 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm kind of puzzled by the close, mostly because I thought the "pause" was meant to rearrange and re-present ideas so discussion could continue further, rather than to declare a consensus already. Calliopejen1 (talk) 23:13, 7 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Consensus can change, but the closure was a fair assessment of what consensus was evident during the course of the initial discussion. Consider it a primary... now we take the "winners" of the first discussion and consider which of them (independently or in concert) will best address the concerns of both sides, as well as what specific implementations will be acceptable to the greatest number of people.--Father Goose (talk) 23:56, 7 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I concur with Calliopejen1's comment. –Whitehorse1 06:56, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * First, Risker, let me state that I believe you acted in good faith in closing this RfC, & sincerely felt this discussion had run its course. Further, I believe that no one on Wikipedia doubts that something needs to be done to add references to these articles; no one wants slander or negative information on living people in Wikipedia. Where the consensus breaks down is over using PROD as a stick to get this "something" done. Many people who contribute to Wikipedia do so in an area which interests them; they are "scratching their own itch." To refer to an old Wikipedia adage, the editor who contributes great amounts of energy & content on Pokemon articles will not necessarily contribute the same energy towards fixing biographical articles on living people which lack sources. Another caveat here is that we have a group of Admins eager to immediately delete these articles on the slightest pretexts, whether or not common sense dictates we have some article, sourced or not, about the indivduals. Look at the list Okip compiled below: we have articles on leaders of countries being deleted. (On the other hand, personally I could care less about unsourced articles on random gay porn stars or net.personalities -- & all of them can be deleted today.) In the cases of clearly notable individuals, a better response should have been, at most, turning these articles into stubs. (Making them a priority for sourcing would have been the best solution; but to prioritize them requires a human to actually read the articles, not use a bot.) The question of how to handle this matter brings me to my last -- & perhaps most important point: this was not a poll on what to do, but a discussion over the problem. I will repeat my earlier objections: no one has provided a convincing argument that having biographical articles on living people is causing any harm, let alone unsourced ones; no one has provided a convincing argument that this is an urgent matter that needs to be acted on; & all of the responses were meant to be exactly that -- responses, not actions we need to take right now. Which is why, I suspect, Jehochman's proposal attracted so much support: that if something needs to be done, his proposal was as good as anyone's. -- llywrch (talk) 22:15, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't think it's fair to declare consensus at this point for a specific approach. We do have some opinions and proposals that are beginning to take shape. It is the final proposal that will need consensus.  For now it's helpful to narrow and guide the discussion and set a path to get there.  It seems likely that to gain acceptance a proposal will have to set out an orderly process to clean up the backlog of unsourced older BLP articles by tagging them and, if not brought up to some reasonable sourcing standards, deleting them at a scheduled, measured rate with some firm or target deadline for getting the entire task done in the scale of months, not years.  There seems to be a consensus against, or at least no consensus for, tagging or deleting of old articles at a large-scale ad-hoc basis, except for things like attack pages, copyvios, speedy candidates, etc, which are not affected by this process.  I think there is also some approval voiced for more aggressive policing of newer BLP articles.  - Wikidemon (talk) 00:07, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Actually, I think what I say above is consistent with the long version of the closing comments - good job! - Wikidemon (talk) 00:20, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Assuming we are going around at least once more, I thought Risker did a good job on the summary too. I hope we can find a better term than "aggressive" for managing newborn/infant BLPs though—that sounds like sentencing newbies to death for their first offense. We want to attract and develop authors who reference new articles properly, and we don't want to feather-bed "drive-by" contributors who leave others to do sourcing for them. What's the right term for that stance? - Pointillist (talk) 00:42, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Carrotstickism.--Father Goose (talk) 01:08, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Have you got a RS for that...? - Pointillist (talk) 22:33, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm sure my friend Abraham Lincoln would be willing to back me up on that.--Father Goose (talk) 08:28, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

The pause tag stated:
 * This RfC is currently paused so that the proposals enumerated here can be summarized and sorted by an uninvolved admin, so that the community may comment with greater ease on the different types/themes of proposals suggested here. (As opposed to the current grouping by author).

The last edit on this page states: "closing of RFC"... Okip (formerly Ikip) 07:29, 8 February 2010 (UTC)


 * I thought the close tracked pretty well with the table. There were a bunch of "no change"s that were supported, plus Jechochmen's idea.  We should do a runoff between Jechochmen's and I guess DGG's, since they were the ones with a lot of support, and the highest percentage of support.  The one issue with the close I guess, is that it seems to presuppose that change is required, possibly because of what arbcom said (and then clarified, and then...). - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 09:15, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

Predictions on how this RFC will close?
Predictions? I have my own predictions forming, but I would like to hear others ideas first.

Planning for the future end results will help plan, prepare for and possibly try to avoid a highly unpopular closing. Okip (formerly Ikip) 17:17, 12 February 2010 (UTC)


 * This RFC will end in rancor and acrimony. Perhaps the RFC will end when AARBCOM unilaterally shuts it down and quashes debate.  Probably over half of those who took part here will be left with feelings of disgust and utter hopelessness.  The predicted close result:  Delete all 60,000 unreferenced BLPS at once, just as Mick MacAnee did. PeterbrownDancin (talk) 22:05, 12 February 2010 (UTC) -- Sockpuppet of banned user
 * I'm hopeful of an orderly solution coming from this, that results in a cultural change toward the unacceptability of unsourced BLPs, and a clear backlog in 6 months or so. It would be a poor result to have to go back to the method that started all this. Kevin (talk) 22:35, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Requests for comment/Biographies of living people/Phase II
Can we move Requests for comment/Biographies of living people/Phase II to this page, so the 450+ editors who have this page watched can have the conversation watch listed?

The original we can move to  Requests for comment/Biographies of living people/original

Thanks. Okip (formerly Ikip) 07:09, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

Okay, we have two RFCs here, Requests for comment/Biographies of living people/Content and Requests for comment/Biographies of living people/Phase II, both which are split offs from this RFC, can we do one of the following:
 * 1) Move the newer RFC to this page, archiving this old RFC, as described above.
 * 2) In the alternative:
 * Make a notice at the very top of this page about Phase II, not buried in the text. Also mention the Content RFC?
 * Contact all of the editors who participated in phase I, but who have not participated in phase II yet.

Thank you. Okip (the new and improved Ikip) 15:17, 10 February 2010 (UTC)
 * third inquiry, can this be moved please, where can I ask for this to be moved? Okip (formerly Ikip) 17:27, 12 February 2010 (UTC)
 * fourth inquiry, I will now ask Risker to do this. Okip (formerly Ikip) 11:53, 13 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Have you not yet figured out that noone is interested in moving these pages except for you? Kevin (talk) 06:57, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail
Over the past week, I have sourced around 200 unreferenced biographies of living people (BLPs), some important observations:
 * 1) Everyone of these BLPs were legitimate
 * 2) Everyone of these BLPs were clearly done in good faith.
 * 3) All but one fact stated that I checked was correct. (the one minor exception was one person was a board member, not a director)
 * 4) Two of these were clearly un-notable BLPs, and I put these up for speedy deletion.

These 200 articles I reviewed were legitimate articles because the 45,000 unreferenced BLP articles have to get through several steps of review. First they had to survive New Page Patrol, which gets rid of most of the hoaxes, then they had to be reviewed and tagged by an editor as an unreferenced BLP.

Editors are suggesting deleting tens of thousands of articles for the infinitesimally small handful of BLP violations. It seems that many editors, Jimbo Wales included have forgotten that the vast majority of edits are from good faith editors, who come here to build an encyclopedia, and without them, Wikipedia would never had been the success that it is today. Calling other editors good faith, beneficial contributions "sewers" and deleting articles on Emmy winners, Grammy winners, and prime minsters for the one article in maybe thousands that is libelous is the wrong way of handling this.

The deletion of thousands of unreferenced BLPs no way assures that the articles with references do not have libelous information in them. This suggested purge of 45,000 articles seems to have more to do with verifiability that the person exists and is notable enough to have something written about them, then about libel. As I trudged through these 200 articles, I realized that an editor can simply add one reference that the person exists, without checking the rest of the facts in the article, and suddenly the article falls off of the unreferenced BLP radar.

Okip (the new and improved Ikip) 12:46, 10 February 2010 (UTC)
 * In normal Anglophone commercial contexts and law the "board" is the Board of Directors, and to be a "board member" is to be a director, and vice versa. So I'm dubious that was a mistake, FWIW. Johnbod (talk) 14:28, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Your broad point that this is but one part of the problem is common ground with many of the BLP hardliners. I hope there will be more RfCs in due course on how to better protect other categories of BLP.  This is "one bite of the elephant", as it were Fritzpoll (talk) 15:31, 10 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Most articles are not "reviewed" before being tagged as an unsourced BLP, they are only reviewed as being a) about a (possibly) living person and b) unsourced. No check whether these were "legitimate" articles is done in general. Looking at how many of the articles I tagged as unsourced BLP have since been deleted through regular prod or AfD, plus those that have been deleted as G10 pages, I don't think claiming that there are only an "infinitesimal small handful of BLP violations" is correct. Fram (talk) 15:43, 10 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Fram, in your searching of BLPs, name the BLP violation you personally have found? Okip (the new and improved Ikip) 08:12, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
 * An article identifying a government worker with a travestite performer? Deleted after an AfD, where there was evidence found that the stage name is in use by a performer, but not that she was notable nor (worse) that she and the govenrment worker were the same? A 2006 article claiming that someone was "sentenced in January 2004 to 14 months imprisonment for attacking a man" and that he was a "violent thug"? An article on a 10 year old obviously non notable footballer (respect for privacy of children? No way...). An unsourced 2006 article about a female Auschwitz camp guard, tagged as unrefed since April 2008? A single sourced article about "a convicted Australian child sex offender", where the source, mako.org.au, is clearly unreliable? Another unsourced article, this one from 2004, about a female Ravensbruck and Buchenwald camp guard? A 2005 article, tagged as unsourced BLP from August 2009 on, about a person, "now a fugitive from justice"? Just look in my deletion log at the G10 deletions if you want to check that I'm not making these up. You'll understand that I'll not give the names of these articles here though, I'm not going to add another BLPviolation to the long list of dreadful articles we had here for years... Fram (talk) 09:24, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Also, 200/45000 = ~0.4%. Not sure we can make any statistical assertion from such a small sample size Fritzpoll (talk) 16:03, 10 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I firmly believe, based on past experience, that there is no number of analyzed BLPs which would satisfy certain editors. I would happily do a statistical sampling if I thought it would influence these editors, but I am certain it would not. Okip (the new and improved Ikip) 08:12, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I will chime in my experience. I have taken a different approximately 150 different BLPs in different subject matter and have added references to them.  I have seen the same trend.  There might have been a couple of fluff articles of lesser significant players, but I saw zero fraudulent articles, nothing libelous that was not referenced, or reference-able and I was able to easily find references for every article.  I generally stayed in my field of expertise, so most of these people were automatically notable--Olympic Medalists, World Record Holders, World Champions.  I am offended that the articles on these significant people are being placed in jeopardy by a mindless group of people who wish to simply delete anything that has had an unreferenced BLP tag hung on it for any period of time.  As I have said before, even those tags are in error.  Many have been placed by BOTS.  Some were on articles that were already heavily referenced.  Many of those heavily referenced articles had minor formatting issues, putting references under "Notes" "Sources" "External Links" or simply in line.  And all too frequently the BOT tagged DEAD PEOPLE as BLPs.  Too many of those articles were short stubs that could each be expanded.  The short notes about a person's prime notable feature did not explain the expanse of a lifetime of significance.  I could have written three paragraphs about a lot of them.  Frankly doing that many sourcing jobs JUST TO KEEP THOSE ARTICLES OFF THE POTENTIAL DELETE LIST, I didn't have time to do justice to most of them.  An example:  Diane Dixon was a single unreferenced sentence before I started this.  Just in my domain, its going to be a massive job to bring articles up to the quality they deserve.  Removing those prods, might save the articles, but there is now nothing to call attention to them for future editors to add to them.  We on wikipedia have to depend on the randomness of which articles an editor wants to devote the time to improve.  But they won't get improved at all if they are deleted and are put on a list for future speedy deletion if they are recreated.  All that is completely counter-productive to the efforts to make wikipedia the definitive worldwide encyclopedia.Trackinfo (talk) 18:33, 10 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Nice work guys. That being said, I've come to the conclusion that the main actors in this little drama are simply trolls, and so all of us continuing to give them this much attention for their disruptive activities is simply feeding the problem rather then resolving anything. The fact that they're all "Admins", and that one of them is a "Steward", really says a lot about the failings of self-selection and the abusiveness that the lack of any form of oversight can lead to, but they have free reign because we've given it to them. I've come to the unfortunate conclusion that it's probably best to simply ignore them, and let them go hog wild at damaging the content we've collectively built up. Eventually they'll step on enough toes that we might be able to get some real reform around here, and then maybe we could prevent people from abusing their privileges in the future. — V = I * R (Talk&thinsp;&bull;&thinsp;Contribs) 18:52, 10 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Did you just call several admins (including one steward) "trolls" in a discussion about the good faith of contributors? Perhaps you'd consider rephrasing those remarks. Feel free to remove this comment if you do. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 19:02, 10 February 2010 (UTC)
 * For the record, admins and stewards are no more immune to criticism than the average editor. Nor does being an admin or steward give one's editorial judgment more weight or credibility (other than the assumption of experience) than that of an editor. I'd say that if an admin can openly hold community consensus in "utter contempt", then an editor is fine to extend the same good faith (or lack thereof) to admins. -M.Nelson (talk) 21:53, 10 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I have no qualms about criticizing admins but, in my experience, calling people names doesn't tend to sway them over to your position. It was the specific use of the "troll" that I thought should be refactored. I think some people would view that as a personal attack. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 22:16, 10 February 2010 (UTC)
 * To toss in my 2 cents: I've done several hundred of these and this is my experience as well.  The vast majority of these articles are about notable people.  I haven't yet come across any libel.  I've removed a few unsourced claims that had old fact tags, but even then the claims weren't particularly damaging if they were false.  It seems that these 54,000 articles were no more or less likely than any other article to have problems, and that the entire effort is not even a particularly good allocation of resources.  The correlation between "libelous statements" and "unsourced BLPs" seems to not exist at all. Gigs (talk) 19:55, 10 February 2010 (UTC)
 * A) The info on 200 BLP articles is useful info, it may be a small % of the 50,000, but 200 is still a large number; and this account is consistent to other similar reports. B) The deletionists have not offered statistics or evidence, beyond a count of the 50,000 as a number of tags but they do not claim to have actually looked at 50,000 articles.  C) Trackinfo said: "We on wikipedia have to depend on the randomness of which articles an editor wants to devote the time to improve."  What if we create a class of article below stub, ("pre-PROD) that would show up on the project assessment stats and then ask the Projects to systematically work through them.  And we could certainly work on assigning the 50k to projects, if they are not already. --Mdukas (talk) 20:05, 10 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I will point out that what once was well over 50K in the "Category:All unreferenced BLPs" is now under 45K due to (I assume) other editors rapidly trying to save articles from deletion.Trackinfo (talk) 20:27, 10 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I wouldn't call it "trying to save articles" really. I've been working through the backlog and have tagged several for PROD or AfD if they were clearly non-notable.  Working to clear the backlog makes any talk about involuntary mass prodding moot. Gigs (talk) 22:47, 10 February 2010 (UTC)


 * They are no longer unsourced, because Ikip sourced them. Deletion of an existing article simply because it's unsourced isn't supported by consensus, anyway.  There's probably a rough consensus to have some deletion process for new unsourced articles though.  You might want to get a little more experience under your belt before jumping straight into subtle policy debates. Gigs (talk) 22:47, 10 February 2010 (UTC)
 * How do you know they're unsourced? Quite obviously someone else, not you, not Ikip, will delete it, so your or Ikip's opinion doesn't matter. "They" will tell the world "It's unsourced" through pressing the button. NVO (talk) 03:45, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Since we're all "chiming in" with our "experiences", I'll join the party. I currently have a list of 242 formerly-unsourced BLPs that I'm working on in some way. Of these, I tagged 171 with PROD tags, meaning that I found that 71 of the articles were already sourced in some manner. Of these 171, I've analyzed he results of 89 of them. Of these 89, 59 are now properly-sourced. The other 30 have been either deleted (whether speedily, through PROD, or at AFD) or redirected to a notable parent article. That hardly supports the odd claims that an "infinitesimal" number of the unsourced BLPs are problematic. Scott aka UnitAnode  04:12, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
 * UnitAnode of those 171 which you prodded (ignoring WP:BEFORE I assume?), and of the 30 you helped delete, How many had libelous claims in them? I would be willing to bet zero. Unsourced is not a synonym for problematic. Unverifiable and unnotable is not synonymous with libelous. Thank you for sharing your experiences, because you experience, on so many levels, strongly verifies everything that I say above. If we want to frame this discussion as purging wikipedia of unreferenced articles, I will accept that rational, but lets please drop all pretext that this is the best solution to stopping libel. Okip  (the new and improved Ikip) 08:18, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
 * First, you should change your sig: there's nothing "new and improved" about this version of you. Meet the new Ikip, same as the old Ikip. Second, who knows what was in those articles that was potentially libelous? They were unsourced! Meaning, it's impossible to tell what could have been "potentially libelous." And apart from that, the "potentially libelous" canard is nothing more than a ploy (as is citing BEFORE, which is neither policy nor guideline) of folks like you who are intent on claiming that this isn't really a big problem. A BLP without sources is contentious by definition. Adding trivial sources to such BLPs (i.e. sources that only mention the subject in passing, or that are no more than a confirmation that the person exists) makes the problem worse, not better. It's my experience that a significant minority of those who are "sourcing" these BLPs are doing only that. And they're not even bothering to stub them down to what is actually sourced afterwards. Let me reiterate, this makes the problem worse, not better. Scott  aka UnitAnode  13:16, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
 * So, you found no libel in the 171 articles you attempted to delete. The "problem" you describe is a small infinitesimal exception. It is very important to keep that in mind. Your attempted deletion of 171 only strengthened that point. Can we both agree at least that the overwhelming majority of editors are good faith contributors? Okip (formerly Ikip) 17:08, 12 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Okay, I'll type this one more time for you: THERE IS NO WAY TO EVEN KNOW WHAT MIGHT BE POTENTIAL LIBEL IN AN ARTICLE THAT IS UNSOURCED!!! Good god, Ikip/Okip, why is that so damn hard to understand? Unless they're sourced, we have no idea what material might end up being problematic. And the fact that 36 of the 89 I've examined thus far were deleted, and another 4 redirected lets us all see without doubt that the problem is not "infinitesimal." Please stop assaulting the corpse of that non-living equine. Scott  aka UnitAnode  05:00, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Did you come up with stats or reasons that unrefed BLPs have more libel? I haven't heard much so far, but I may missed it. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 07:00, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Yes, there is an increase in collaborative editing; many wikiprojects have kicked into gear over this to vet the pages which fly under their banner. That's a good thing. Also, some unreferenced articles have been referenced. That's a good thing. Some unreferenced articles have been deleted. That's a good thing. What exactly is the downside? pablo hablo. 00:03, 12 February 2010 (UTC)
 * It proves nothing other than that the deletions were successful. A hit rate of 39 / 171 is extremely poor - you would do just as well nominating articles completely at random, which is not far from what this was.  Having read many of these articles I see no indication that any of them were problematic from a BLP or libel perspective.  Speculating that they are a problem because we don't know where problems may lie is beside the point, and no excess of repetition and markup excess can change that.  It's very easy to evaluate an unsourced article and assess which claims are verifiable or not, and which are contentious or not.  The likelihood that a statement like "so-and-so was born in Chicago" is libelous is about the same chance that it will trigger a mudslide.  That's not to say that anything should remain unsourced, of course.  I think everyone around here can agree that we will go on a program of either sourcing or deleting this group of articles, and if we do it carefully the encyclopedia will be the better for it.  - Wikidemon (talk) 13:06, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
 * "Problematic" can refer to two things: non-notable bios, and inaccurate and/or libelous bios. The fact that they've been prodded doesn't necessarily mean they were either libelous or even non-notable -- even going to AfD doesn't necessarily mean that, since I believe some admins are now closing AfDs as 'delete' solely on the basis of the article being an unreferenced BLP.  Turning an article into a redirect also doesn't signify that the content was libelous or non-notable -- it just signifies that you thought it was non-notable.  So the evidence you present doesn't really tell me anything either.--Father Goose (talk) 05:15, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Exactly, this is precisely the crucial point. Unitanode is so concerned about contentious info, but cannot provide any evidence that it is a problem, and confuses the whole issue with notability. Notability has never been, and never should be, a legit reason for speedy deletion of the type that Unitanode favors.  I have just been involved with Delicious carbuncle because he located a BLP problem in a sourced statement - there are problems with BLPs, but no evidence has been presented to suggest that unreferenced BLPs should be particularly vulnerable.  To Ohm's law: If you define a troll as somebody who deliberately disrupts Wikipedia in a manner that causes large-scale animosity, abyss-deep rifts in the community, spurs bitterness, trench-digging and us-and-them mentality, just about everything that contradicts the Wiki-love thing I once heard - well, IMO, it passes the duck test.  Predictably, it will lead to an exodus, editors voting with their feet, it has certainly crossed my mind lately. Power.corrupts (talk) 10:32, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I think the whole shenanigans has led to an increase in collaborative editing overall, despite the outbreaks of chest-beating, torch-and-pitchork brandishing, and various calls of "woe unto the world" and "we're all doomed". Progress is being made; that's a Good Thing™  pablo hablo.
 * A BLP without sources is contentious by definition So why are we wasting our time with this debate? Welcome to Vogonpedia...
 * how long would it take for one person to delete all 60,000 articles: It would take just as long as deleting 60,000 random articles. And it would have practically the same effect.
 * All the best (however slight the hope), --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 17:05, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
 * PS: an increase in collaborative editing overall: because a few editors have stopped contributing contents in a desperate attempt to save thousands of good articles from destruction? By that reasoning, the Haiti quake must be called a blessing... --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 17:13, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
 * There's that hyperbole and breast-beating again, Jorge. Easy with the Haiti comparisons unless you want an updated version of Godwin's Law named after you; those people are suffering in Real Life™ and probably do not think about Wikipedia too much from one day to the next.
 * The downside is that people are doing less of other things, and they are distracted by all this drama. Do you really think this is all new editor time being devoted to this? Maybe this is your priority, but it isn't everyone's. To the extent that people are pressured to do things they don't like, they burn out. Calliopejen1 (talk) 00:08, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Earlier I put forth an article that I discovered and fixed: Diane Dixon. Excuse me if I get sarcastic. It was one of 50,000 unreferenced articles, so they all deserve to be deleted, right? How about opening the article and looking at it: a one line article that has been on WP since 2007, repeatedly vandalized by IP addresses mentioning what an abusive teacher she now is, tagged by a BOT as unreferenced. Obvious delete, before WP might be guilty of libel. The one line claims she won an Olympic Medal. Delete it, of course. We all know every Olympic medalist already has a perfect article on WP, so this must be a fraud. But I persist and actually google the name, or the event this claims she won. Sure I get a bunch of hits, but its a common sounding name. Must be an error, so lets go ahead and delete the article. No need to even nominate it for deletion. But I went ahead and looked at the sources, common sports reference books, sites hosted by the governing bodies. Obviously inside information and not usable as a reference. Lets delete it. Gee, this stuff says she won two Olympic medals, four more at the World Championships, and eleven individual U.S. National Championships--ten of them consecutively. Nothing substantial here. She is obviously not notable, forget the AFD, this has to be deleted. Do any of the people pushing for mass deletion understand what we are talking about?

The point I am making is each of these 50,000 (or now, less) articles needs to be addressed as an individual. Maybe in that pile of articles, you will find a few that are not notable, libelous, erroneous or contentious. Send them through the AFD process instead of wasting time trying to delete Articles for deletion/List of The Simpsons couch gags (2nd nomination). MOST of these BLPs are legitimate articles that are simply incomplete. When you let the world edit this stuff, the quality of your editors may vary. They may not know how to reference things, or maybe they were in a hurry trying to post lists of information in the form of quick, incomplete templates. This article has been around for the better part of 3 years with no attack. It certainly could have been made better, which I did, but it still can be improved, as can most articles on WP. Who is going to take the time? Leave the stuff up there to give it a chance. Multiply by 50,000.Trackinfo (talk) 18:01, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
 * That be this Diane Dixon? Delicious carbuncle (talk) 18:38, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Hey, look at that. 15 years after her running career, she is still notable and there is more to write about her.  And to think, this could have been deleted as an unreferenced BLP.  Edit away.Trackinfo (talk) 19:22, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

My experience is very similar to Okip's. I haven't keep strict totals, but I suspect I've added references to three thousand-plus articles since I recognized the amount of unreferenced football player biographies back in November or December 2008. I've found plenty that were non-notables that I've PRODed (easily 100-200) or sent to AfD (maybe 25). A few that I thought were non-notable, actually were and another editor came in to provide sourcing (oops!). Out of this population of biographies, only a few had controversial statements (usually blatant vandalism like "John Doe is a ___er"). I think there were no more than 5-10 which had a plausible but unsourced negative statement (like claiming someone committed a crime or intentionally hurt another player). There were more hoaxes (more than 20 but less than 50) which were easy to invalidate. Overall, these unreferenced biographies about footballers were low quality, but not harmful to anyone. Jogurney (talk) 20:03, 12 February 2010 (UTC)
 * So this is the solution which the majority of the arbitration committee, veteran editors, and Jimmy Wales will push through: The deletion of 2990 articles, representing the edits of thousands of editors, for those 10 negative statements. For every 1 negative statement, 300 articles must be deleted.
 * There are viable collaborative cooperative solutions which editors have unfortunately failed to consider. Viable, peaceful, alternatives were never fostered.  Okip  (formerly Ikip) 23:59, 12 February 2010 (UTC) (refactored) Okip  (formerly Ikip) 09:59, 13 February 2010 (UTC)
 * When such piss-poor articles sit around for several years, I do not begrudge anyone who expresses contempt for for the consensus and process that let them languish in the first place. This is precisely what WP:IAR was intended for; if bureaucracy impedes your improvement of the project, fuck it. Tarc (talk) 00:14, 13 February 2010 (UTC)
 * WP:IAR was not intended to allow a small group of users to take ownership of the project and impose their own personal policy upon everyone else. The fact that so many people view these actions as harmful to the project should make it obvious that IAR was badly misapplied. Resolute 00:40, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

I've done about 10 unrefed BLP articles. I think 2 were non-notable. I redirected one of them to her band's article, and the other I'm still thinking about. The other 8 were easily confirmed as notable with a google news archive search. About five of them were people that everyone would agree is someone who should have an aricle, no controversy. I can give you names, but one was Jerome Kersey (long time NBA player), who probably has 10,000+ articles that mention him. Another was a co-inventor of the artificial heart. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 03:31, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

About libel
I'm copying this paragraph from the "Hammer" section above:


 * Okay, I'll type this one more time for you: THERE IS NO WAY TO EVEN KNOW WHAT MIGHT BE POTENTIAL LIBEL IN AN ARTICLE THAT IS UNSOURCED!!! Good god, Ikip/Okip, why is that so damn hard to understand? Unless they're sourced, we have no idea what material might end up being problematic. And the fact that 36 of the 89 I've examined thus far were deleted, and another 4 redirected lets us all see without doubt that the problem is not "infinitesimal." Please stop assaulting the corpse of that non-living equine.
 * Scott aka UnitAnode  05:00, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

That is quite incorrect, whether you consult with the best lawyer or just a handy dictionary.

Here's a definition of libel:
 * "1 a : a written statement in which a plaintiff in certain courts sets forth the cause of action or the relief sought b archaic : a handbill especially attacking or defaming someone
 * "2 a : a written or oral defamatory statement or representation that conveys an unjustly unfavorable impression b (1) : a statement or representation published without just cause and tending to expose another to public contempt (2) : defamation of a person by written or representational means (3) : the publication of blasphemous, treasonable, seditious, or obscene writings or pictures (4) : the act, tort, or crime of publishing such a libel"

Notice these words: defamatory, unfavorable, contempt, defamation, blasphemous, treasonable, seditious, or obscene.

Here is the text of an article you indicated "had some sourcing issues:
 * Erika "Riki" Mahringer (later Spieß, born 16 November 1924) is an Austrian former alpine skier who competed in the 1948 Winter Olympics and in the 1952 Winter Olympics.
 * She is the mother of Nicola Spieß and Uli Spieß.
 * In 1948 she won the bronze medal in the slalom event as well as in the Alpine combined competition. In the downhill contest she finished 19th.
 * Four years later she finished fourth in the 1952 Olympic downhill event. In the same year she finished 17th in the giant slalom competition and 22nd in the slalom contest.

How do you imagine that can be construed as defamatory, unfavorable, contempt, defamation, blasphemous, treasonable, seditious, or obscene? Maurreen (talk) 07:48, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
 * So is your point that we should be allowed to write anything so long as it is not defamatory, unfavorable etc? The standard here is "do no harm", a very different proposition to yours. What if she had actually won the gold medal in 1948? No-one here is in a position to fully understand what may or may not be harmful to the subject of the article. When we have a sourced article we can honestly say that every effort has been made to ensure that the content is true, whereas with an unsourced article we announce in effect that no effort has been made. Kevin (talk) 09:28, 14 February 2010 (UTC)


 * The first thing is, my specific point here was about libel. User:Unitanode's statements that I quoted are factually incorrect.
 * The second thing is, this is a wiki. What we can and do say is, " WIKIPEDIA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OF VALIDITY."
 * In fact, the disclaimer page states (but I disagree with this part): "None of the contributors, sponsors, administrators, or anyone else connected with Wikipedia in any way whatsoever can be responsible for the appearance of any inaccurate or libelous information or for your use of the information contained in or linked from these web pages."
 * The current emphasis on listing a source just whitewashes more-substantive problems. Today's perfect article, perfectly sourced, could be libelous, etc., tomorrow and still contain all the same sources. Then could you "honestly say that every effort has been made to ensure that the content is true"? I could not and would not. Maurreen (talk) 10:19, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I can't speak for Maurreen, but my point has been that the justification for these new rules is a hoax and the radical punitive punishment far outweighs the benefit. You are talking about quality again Kevin, not libel. Several editors have stated that an infinitesimal amount of articles are libelous or have contentious material. One stated above that for 3,000 articles on 5 to 10 had any contentious or libelous material. So your solution, most probably dreamed up in secret mailing lists, will delete 300 articles for every 1 contentious article.
 * Everyone wants well sourced articles Kevin. The key word in your sentence is "effort", how much effort did you personally put into referencing these articles:
 * A president of Bangladesh
 * Acting Prime Minister of South Korea twice
 * Deputy prime minister from 1992 until 1996 the Executive Secretary of the Commonwealth of Independent States from April 1999 until June 2004
 * ...when, in "utter contempt" for "community consensus", you, Lar, and Scott MacDonald deleted several hundred articles including these three, and several other very notable articles.
 * How much effort Kevin? Did you even read the first sentence of these three articles?
 * The difference between myself and your group of editors who have a "BLP offwiki forum dedicated to tightening up BLP practices" Is I sincerely believe that most editors contributions are in good faith. Whereas your group of extremely disruptive editors sees 52,000 articles as "sewers". It seems this "BLP offwiki forum" will go to any length to push through their bullying, draconian vision of wikipedia, including recruiting a banned editor to do a biography of living persons breaching experiment.
 * Okip BLP Contest 11:46, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
 * If you have any evidence of Kevin being in this "BLP offwiki forum", Okip, go ahead and state it right here or post a request for arbitration. Otherwise, associating Kevin's comments with the actions of MZMcBride and any supposed actions of this offwiki forum only serves to poison the well. NW ( Talk ) 20:08, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Notable and Non-Notable
Jorge Stolfi's comments above frighten me. One of the reasons for the "notable" versus "non-notable" characterization of individuals or groups should be that it allows a measure of privacy to those whose lives are not lived out in the public eye. Not everyone will consider having a page on Wikipedia to be a positive matter even if the text is completely benign and is never vandalized. (And how do we know what is benign? Everything from a date of birth to academic credentials or a parent's ethnicity may be a matter of contention to someone. Every statement needs to be backed by a WP:RS, or it should be deleted.) Wikipedia does not have some inate right to describe living people so that anyone can read about them, their lives and their families. If one of my former students were to decide to write a page about me, for example, I'd be horrified. With the notability guidelines, however loosely appplied, I would happily fail every test and my page would, quite properly, vanish into the ether. Without them, what could I, or anyone else, do? People's lives are not encyclopedia fodder. If anything, our "notability" rules need to be strengthened so that even those who are notable but whose "fame" is inadvertent and unwelcome (as the victims of crimes, for example) should not be memorialized. Bielle (talk) 05:07, 7 February 2010 (UTC)
 * "People's lives are not encyclopedia fodder" - an encyclopedia without humans is an interesting development. No people - no problem, said the wise man. Hey, if Spanish wikipedia can do without fair use images, perhaps English wikipedia can do without biographies? NVO (talk) 08:00, 7 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Dear Bielle, your concerns are quite valid, but the notability rule (NR) does not address *that* problem, and my radical "solution" would not make it any worse.


 * The *contents* of a BLP has to be factual, verifiable, true, neutral, relevant, etc.. I am not contesting those rules; they are pretty logical, truly consensual, and must be enforced even more aggresively for BLPs than for ordinary articles.


 * Because of those rules, a BLP can only contain non-objectionable information that is already publicly available in reliable and unbiased sources. An article about a non-notable professor, for instance, will probably have only the information that is listed in his school's website or yearbooks --- which therefore cannot be considered an invasion of privacy. Observe that the sources do not need to prove notability of the subject but only the accuracy of the informaton. Thanks to those rules, any editor can delete any statement in a BLP that he suspects is not public, true and proper iformation; this is a much more effective protection against objectionable contents than NR + deletion.  (I bet that my standards on this matter are even stricter than yours; I generally delete things like religion, relatives, birth days, and anything that would not be appropriate for a professor's bio on a university's website — independently of whether the information is sourced or not, and whether the subject is notable or not.)


 * I have seen uncontable cases of obvious infantile vandalism, many of them in BLPs. The NR is obviously of no help against that.


 * I have also seen many BLPs that were obviously written by the subject himself, or an admirer/employer/agent — full of promotional matetrial and/or unverifiable personal information. Some of those subjects would qualify as notable, so the NR again would not help. Others may not qualify; but in all those cases it was much easier to delete all inappropriate *contents* leaving a stub-like article, than to determine the notability and seek deletion. Anyway, it is not those articles that worry you.


 * In five years of editing, I can rememeber only three articles that I found which contained libel or libel-like pranks (false information about a person that was carefully planted in order to embarass wikipedia). Two of them were about fairly notable people. The first was a bio of the Brazilian representative at ICANN; the original stub had been replaced by two pages of pure libel, written (I came to learn afterwards) by a guy who had been harassing the subject for years. That bio had no explicit refs, because it had been writen before 2006; but its author would certainly have added them if they were required. In the second case the victim was a NY Times columnist.  The article had two references (a book written by the subject and a NY times column about him); and was not a biography, but a short article about some bogus philosphical principle that the journalist had allegedly invented and used in his book.  Another one that that I remember (just two day ago) was a nasty statement about the CEO of some company, that had been inserted in a preexisting valid article about the company. Obviously none of those incidents would have been prevented by the NR rule.


 * So, again, I share you concerns; but I do not see how they could be used to justify NR-deletion. All the best, --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 08:52, 7 February 2010 (UTC)


 * First, to User:NVO: You will not be surprised to learn that I approve of the Spanish Wikipedia's stance on "fair use" for images. Once again, WP has no right to "fair use" for anything for which it has not received explicit permission within the context of its own licencing, because it cannot, by virtue of that same licensing, commit to protecting the "fair use" aspect. Your claim that I advocate an "English wikipedia without biographies" is but a straw man distortion, fit enough, I suppose for a philosophy that would use living people's lives as fodder, defined in Webster's Ninth as "an often inferior person or thing that is used to supply a heavy demand (routine entertainment)". All this drama is about numbers: 50,000 this, 10,000 that. These are people's lives, and the focus should be on the people whose lives Wikipedia permits, even encourages, to be made as public as is currently possible, short of an ad on the Super Bowl telecast.


 * All of which takes me to Jorge Stolfi's careful and thoughtful response. There are two points on which I continue to disagree: first, the text that you find on a university's web site or even in a course calendar is not a reliable public document. The individuals vet what is presented there and do so specifically in the context of their professional positions. It is thus, "best foot forward" and may not always be exactly true. What is more important, though, is that there is no extended permission inherent in permitting one's "biography" to appear in a work-related publication that also permits its appearance in something as publicly accessible and essentially unprotected as Wikipedia.


 * And the second is that, while Wikipedia does try its best to repair or control the kind of vandalism that could be libellous, or is merely silly, these idiocies are noticed when they appear on the articles about public people (actors, reigning monarchs and the like) whose factual histories are both well-known and verifiable across a multitude of reliable sources. It is thus relatively easy to spot the trouble and to correct it. But what about that same university professor, the one who finds himself on Wikiedia for no reason other than that he has a job where he is required to present an potted history to impress potential students and investors? As long as he is on this site, he is fair game, just like the celebrities whose pages are watchlisted by hundreds. He may not even know Wikipedia is using his life to feed its obsession, until somebody notices on a mirror site that he has an ex-wife who was his agent and yet another wife of which he had no knowledge, none of which is apparently true and all of which is beginning to have ramiifications in his real life. (If you think this is far-fetched I refer you to this Help desk/Archives/2010 February 1. And this from a person who didn't mind the fact of his bio, just the details. All things considered, and presuming the facts he presented were true -something which WP still has not verified, as far as I can tell- he behaved very well.)


 * I continue to contest vigourously your contention that the notability rules do not protect individuals from vandalism. Of course they do; if the text is not on Wikipedia, it cannot be vandalized. And for many lives caught up in those "scare numbers" being tossed about, Wikipedia has no right to decide what is or isn't contentious in someone's life and, even more strongly, has no right to decide what otherwise private lives should be made public. I have no doubt at all that you will hear from those who want to be in WP; it's those who don't want to be in, and who do not otherwise live public lives, for whom I speak. Bielle (talk) 20:40, 7 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Question is, who are public and who are not (keep or kill). Your point, as I can interprete it, is that "actors are public" and "professors are not" (sure, there are clear cases of the contrary, i.e. totally non-notable actors and absolutely notable Nobel prize winners, but they are a manageable minority). This is only one opinion. I would not even think of actors as public people in the sense of "public = having key biographic data verifiable through reliable sources". How come an actor's bio on his/her theatre or agent's site be any more public and notable than a professor's bio on a college website? Are bio strips in Entertainment Weekly more reliable than author data from Nature? No. I'd seriously discourage drawing the public/nobpublic line based on occupation or any other formality. If wikipedia believes the informal approach ("I know it when I see it") failed, then perhaps killing all is the only solution. NVO (talk) 03:41, 10 February 2010 (UTC)
 * True, not all actors are "public" and not all professors are "private". I agree that the personal or professional actors' websites and agent's promo are not reliable. I had no idea that we were using them as WP:RS when, by their very nature, they clearly are not. The test of "public" vs "private" would be the ability to locate WP:RS for each and every detail of the lives that we put into an article. If we cannot locate enough such sources then, by definition, the individuals are not sufficiently notable to be written up - are "private", if you like, and not "public". Writing up someone's life without such rigorous specific sourcing is unacceptable. We do not know, cannot know, what might be contentious, from a date of birth to a given name to the year of an achievemnt. If a statement doesn't have a specific source, it isn't included. And we shouldn't be writing up the article and then waiting to find the sources. These are real people's real lives. No BLP should be allowed to go "live" unless every single statement in it is properly sourced. Many of the articles would be short in the beginning, but quality matters more than quantity. Vandalism would be much harder to do and much easier to spot. An individual's right to privacy supersedes Wikipedia's greed for more and more. I suggest that the possibility of losing the interest of editors who, having spent hours producing material that does not meet such a standard, sulk when sources are required of them, is a small price to pay for respecting people's lives. Deleting even many thousands of articles about "notable" people is, in the long run (and WP is in it for the long run, is it not?) a good thing because the articles will come back, only this time, with sources. Bielle  (talk) 06:03, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Way more then 60,000
Using the random article feature I'm finding about 10 a day that have not been tagged. I really think we need to stop throwing around a meaningless number. We already know there are plenty miss tagged and it clear there are countless that have not been tagged, quoting a number that we know is wrong is pointless. Ridernyc (talk) 19:34, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
 * In the opposite direction, I've been using the random button on the "Category:All unreferenced BLPs" page and find a lot of already referenced articles tagged with the the "unsourced BLP" potential kiss of death. I still haven't seen anything libelous out of thousands of articles I've opened recently.  Its been a hell of a lot of work.  As I've been cleaning up some of the text and removing those tags, I am confronted with the immense amount of work, cumulated over years of wikipedia editing by probably thousands of people that some other people want to destroy, wipe out.  First, if you do that, how many people will ever be inspired to do anything for wikipedia in the future, much less fight the battle replace all that deleted USEFUL INFORMATION (with Speedy Deletion chasing away previously deleted articles).  Shallow as many these stub articles might be, THEY ALL SERVE A PURPOSE.  They are all parts of this puzzle.  Someone brought up the idea of WP:DEADHORSE.  True.  It is the people who are pushing for deletion of this information who MUST get off the idea of mass deletion.  Its possible to open a couple thousand articles a day, I know, I've done it--though after this holiday I won't have that kind of time.  If you are so fired up to delete stuff, one dedicated person can open every one of those supposed 60,000 articles in a month (or the work load can obviously be divided up).  Show us the problem articles.  Even show us the maybe articles, so people who understand the subject in question can analyze and fix them.  Identify REAL problems, not mystery problems that MIGHT be hidden in that pile.  Then we can go about fixing or deleting just those seriously questionable articles.  If you don't want to dedicate the time to doing that.  SHUT UP.  STOP THIS MADNESS!!Trackinfo (talk) 05:00, 15 February 2010 (UTC)


 * I've noticed both. A lot the tagged articles have references of some form; usually in the external links.  Hitting random turns up articles that don't have refs and aren't tagged. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 05:08, 15 February 2010 (UTC)
 * So far I found 2 that were referenced and removed the tag. I defiantly find way more untagged and unreferenced. Ridernyc (talk) 06:06, 15 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Certainly there are a lot of unreferenced articles. In particular, some wiki editors have spent a lot of time posting a huge number of international footballers.  There are a lot of stub articles mentioning the one notable accomplishment of many individuals, unreferenced.  If one were to take the time to search out that claim, from my experience, most check out.  But I don't work on subjects I don't understand and I do pass them by.  But just because I don't know where to reference the legitimacy of a Latvian politician, or an Albanian academic doesn't mean those articles deserve to die or are in any way libelous or dangerous.  Our REAL problems are microscopic.  But with the forces pushing so vehemently for mass deletions, our serious problem is internal.Trackinfo (talk) 06:45, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Stephin Merritt comments on his Wikipedia article
hopefully I'll be able to post this since it's a youtube video watch beginning at :55 when Stephin Merritt comments on his Wikipedia article and about how many errors there are in it even his date of birth is wrong. I found this kind of interesting given the current debate, even highly visible frequently visited articles are totally 100% wrong. Ridernyc (talk) 10:59, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
 * By the way I have now tried to fix his birthdate, every source lists the same date we list. Here is the really interesting part, how many of them are using Wikipedia as the source, we are basically polluting the pool we use to draw information from. I'm going to do some digging try to find how long the wrong date has been listed. I doubt we will ever be able to figure out if there ever was a source for this, or did someone add the wrong date and it has now been published everywhere. Ridernyc (talk) 13:11, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
 * WP:RS can only get us so far if the sources are wrong. Sources written a year before his Wikipedia article existed also give his birthdate in 1966 so it's not a matter of Wikipedia errors influencing the sources.  If all the sources say 1966 and he now claims he was not born in 1966, something is fishy. Merritt's claims come as part of a rather uninformed view of Wikipedia amidst a rant about publicity in general.  I note that other sources describe him as refusing to give his age, so I think there may be a bit of a funny thing going on vis-a-vis the reliability of his claims about his age.  Going beyond this example, it's not unusual for errors that could have easily been fixed with some rudimentary fact-checking to propagate among the sources.  See, for example, False Moshe Ya'alon quotation.  - Wikidemon (talk) 14:46, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
 * The possibility of wikipedia being a source for inaccurate information that is then repeated in other reliable sources if of course always there and something that comes up on occasion at WP:BLP/N, I strongly suspect it has happened before. Even though this is a bad example, birthdates are obviously a good target for this. Wikipedia could also not be the primary source but help to perpetuate inaccurate information from non reliable sources e.g. from IMDB to reliable sources. As wikidemon mentions poor fact checking or lazy reliable source writers are unfortunately all too common a problem and it only takes one or two to make that mistake before the risk becomes it perpetuates from there. However I can't recall of any specific example where it's been shown we were the source for inaccurate information that has then been widely reported. There is an allegation that it happened here Talk:Peaches Geldof (see also ) but the evidence isn't strong (she appears to have denied it was her name once and so far no source has arisen which predated us). Nil Einne (talk) 14:37, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

The dangerous precedents set in this Request for Comment
Terminology:

"Flagged Revisions" is setting an article that when a user viewed the article, they would see not the most recent edits to the article, but instead an older version of the article that had been tagged as a clean or "sighted" version. Established Wikipedia editors might be granted rights (possibly automatically) that would let them review page revisions and determine whether the flag on an article should be reset to a more recent version.

The reason there has been such blowback and opposition to these proposals is:
 * 1) There simply is not wide-community support for these proposals.
 * 2) The veteran editors who are the strongest advocates of these proposals have "utter contempt" for "community consensus" The most vocal editor is a desysoped administrators who enlisted banned users to conduct breaching experiments and use secret mailing lists to manipulate policy.
 * 3) The new rules advocated go against the very core philosophies of what most Wikipedians see Wikipedia as.

Is it any wonder why flagged revisions and this proposal is receiving such strong opposition? The very editors who will enforce these policies have absolutely no respect for our existing policies. In a word: the community does not trust these editors to be impartial and fair, why? Simply because they have a track record of being impartial and manipulative, with a complete "utter contempt" for "community consensus".

The precedent set here goes way beyond this Request for comment. Are we, as a community, going to reward secret mailing lists, "utter contempt" for "community consensus", and give amnesty to editors whose position we support? Are we as a community going to push through unpopular proposals by deceptive means (phased request for comment, petitions)?

The behavior of those who are supposed to be our most trusted editors, truly shocks the conscience. Okip (formerly Ikip) 04:22, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Your "conscience" is easily "shocked." Scott   aka UnitAnode  04:40, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Many of your comments in this section are bordering on personal attacks (comment on content, not contributors). If you are unable to separate people from ideas, I suggest you not continue commenting here, as your attitude is not much better than what you attribute to the people you decry. Mr. Z-man 05:39, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
 * An administrator in arbitration, running a known "secret mailing list" to manipulate a certain policy starts a request for comment. How is that a precedent of anything? Should being at arbitration mean that you're forbidden from starting an RFC?
 * 90 plus sections can decide community consensus. - So... what? If a discussion becomes very long, it becomes worthless or something? It used to be that people favored extended discussions over plain votes.
 * Collapsed comment sections are introduced - Oh no! People tried to make a gigantic page easier to read. This is not new, or at the very least, not dangerous.
 * only one position is advocated - Yes, because simply starting all the discussions over again would have been so productive. I fail to see how that isn't significantly different from any other targeted RFC, except that we're calling it "Phase 2" instead of starting a new RFC. Nothing is stopping people from starting their own RFC if they disagree with this one.
 * Mr. Z-man weren't you the editor who removed other Strongly supported removing editors opposing comments in the petition which called 17,500 editors contributions "sewers" along with Scott MacDonald?
 * RE: MZMcBride has a secret mailing list dedicated to "dedicated to tightening up BLP practices", the very subject of this RFC. The off-wiki canvassing is the unprecedented effect.
 * Collapsed comment sections are introduced there is nothing inherently bad with this, I thought I would just throw that in, as it is unique. Note my hidden original comment: "I have no comment whether this is a positive step"
 * I am glad that we both agree that only "one position was advocated" in phase 2. Okip  11:41, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, begin your reply with an attempt to discredit me via guilt by association before you even begin to discuss the actual substance of my comments. Thank you very much for proving my point. And no, I did not remove any comments, so your statement is also a lie. At most, all I did was rename a section header or 2 from "Oppose" to "Discussion" because as evil as you think Scott is, petitions don't have oppose sections. I was not doing it for some nefarious purpose but simply to keep the page consistent with what a petition actually is. I'm not aware of any comments being removed entirely. I think any comments that did get removed from the petition were put on the talk page. If you seriously think that this is the first time off-wiki canvassing has been used to influence an on-wiki discussion or that anything MZM may have done (given that the Arb case findings make no mention of a "mailing list", this seems to be more allegation than fact) would have had a noticeable impact on a discussion that included nearly 500 users, you are seriously deluding yourself. I note you also make no mention of the "invitation only" project that you created to attempt to influence the RFC. If you want people to agree with you, I would strongly suggest that you drop the attacks and character assassination of everyone you disagree with. Try making reasoned arguments instead. Its almost impossible to carry on a conversation with you, let alone give any serious consideration to your points. Mr.Z-man 19:15, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
 * RE: your comment on my talk page.
 * Lets kill this "I am telling "lies" and refuse to answer them" argument. (The later a debate tactic).
 * Indeed, you never removed comments, it was, after all, a question. I did not look at the record I compiled before which shows:
 * you changed the "opposition" to "discussion" stating: "petitions don't have an oppose section. This isn't another vote on [Flagged revisions], its a statement to the foundation"
 * On the talk page, when Scott MacDonald deleted an oppose section, you stated, "I agree with the removal. This was also the reason I removed the "Oppose" section header (besides the fact that petitions don't work that way), this shouldn't be hijacked into a referendum on FlaggedRevs.", you were the first to support this.
 * So while you did not actually delete any opposes, you changed the name and supported their removal, which was exactly my underlying point.
 * I wrote all of the ways you may still get mileage out of this statement, despite my correction, but I felt like that was too much WP:BEANS, so I deleted it. Okip BLP Contest 02:21, 17 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Okay then, how about the evidence that I and NuclearWarfare have "defended" breaching experiments. And no, before you even consider it, asking for evidence for your allegations and stating that the vandalism was not as bad as you are alleging are not "defending." Defending implies support. Mr.Z-man 03:28, 17 February 2010 (UTC)