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User:Okip/Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Biographies of living people/Phase III

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Below are all proposals which received 48 or more supports. Grouped together in two categories. No technological proposals, which came later in the RFC, got more than 30+ supports. Jimbo's proposal was garnered 36. More proposals can be added.

Questions on how this may work on the talk page...

Existing policy is not adequate to address the problem

[edit]
  1. Any article that satisfies the attack page criteria should be deleted on sight.
  2. Biographies of living persons (BLP) articles that are unreferenced should be proposed for deletion (prod).
  3. Prodding should proceed at a reasonable rate to allow interested editors the chance to add sources. The volume of proposed deletions should not be unreasonably large. Discussion can establish what is a reasonable pace.
  4. After five seven days, any article so tagged may be deleted, or moved to the Wikipedia:Article incubator if it shows promise.
  5. Prod notices should not be removed, nor should articles be undeleted, unless proper references are added. Anybody who engages in mass de-prodding or undeletion without adding references risks a block for disruption.
  6. All editors are invited to participate in this BLP cleanup campaign.

Alternative 2: BLP-PROD template - which says "Find references for this article or it DIES." Five days seems too long, make it two days.

Alternative 3: Any biography that is poorly referenced or completely unreferenced should be deleted on-sight. If a user wishes to re-create the biography, they may request undeletion (or simply re-create the page) as long as they provide adequate sourcing.

Existing policy is adequate to address the problem

[edit]

The risk reduced--and let's be clear, there certainly will be some--is insufficient to justify the widespread deletion of accurate, useful, and innocuous information, sourced or not, and ultimately damages Wikipedia without helping BLP vandalism subjects.

Existence of a person is not, however, controversial nor contentious. WP has policies for deleting articles lacking notability, and no Draconian policy of automatic article deletion should pre-empt the orderly functioning of processes already existing.

The real problem is unsourced contentious info, not unreferenced articles. The proposal will do nothing or little to the real problem, and at the same time incur tremendous costs. For old articles, a procedure of summary deletion is particularly reckless.


Table summary

[edit]
submission submission time subject Support
(S) 		Oppose
(O) 		Neutral
(N) 		%Support
(%S) 		Stance
MZMcBride 15:58, 21/01/2010 "Any biography that is poorly referenced or completely unreferenced should be deleted on-sight. If a user wishes to re-create the biography, they may request undeletion (or simply re-create the page) as long as they provide adequate sourcing." 55 157 1 25.94% Stricter
0 days
Delete immediately
Jehochman 16:14, 21/01/2010
  1. Any article that satisfies the attack page criteria should be deleted on sight.
  2. Biographies of living persons (BLP) articles that are unreferenced should be proposed for deletion (prod).
  3. Prodding should proceed at a reasonable rate to allow interested editors the chance to add sources. The volume of proposed deletions should not be unreasonably large. Discussion can establish what is a reasonable pace.
  4. After five seven days, any article so tagged may be deleted, or moved to the Wikipedia:Article incubator if it shows promise.
  5. Prod notices should not be removed, nor should articles be undeleted, unless proper references are added. Anybody who engages in mass de-prodding or undeletion without adding references risks a block for disruption.
  6. All editors are invited to participate in this BLP cleanup campaign.
 163 35 8 82.32% Stricter
7 days
Jclemens 16:22, 21/01/2010 "The risk reduced--and let's be clear, there certainly will be some--is insufficient to justify the widespread deletion of accurate, useful, and innocuous information, sourced or not, and ultimately damages Wikipedia without helping BLP vandalism subjects." 83 14 1 85.57% No change
Collect 16:16, 21/01/2010 "Existence of a person is not, however, controversial nor contentious. WP has policies for deleting articles lacking notability, and no Draconian policy of automatic article deletion should pre-empt the orderly functioning of processes already existing." 83 20 4 80.58% No change
David Gerard 16:17, 21/01/2010 "I suggest a PROD-like template - call it BLP-PROD - which says "Find references for this article or it DIES." Five days seems too long, make it two days." 64 48 1 57.14% Stricter
2 days
DGG 17:10, 21/01/2010 "For old articles, a procedure of summary deletion is particularly reckless." 66 6 5 91.67% No change
Power.corrupts 18:12, 21/01/2010 "The real problem is unsourced contentious info, not unreferenced articles. The proposal will do nothing or little to the real problem, and at the same time incur tremendous costs." 48 15 0 76.19% No change
Sandstein 19:25, 21/01/2010 "The arbcom motion is not to be understood as changing or superseding general deletion policy and process as applied to the biographies of living persons, and it should be considered void if and insofar as it might have been intended to have that effect. Instead, any policy change should be decided by community consensus, starting with this RfC." 75 6 3 92.59% N/A
Jimbo Wales 15:14, 25/01/2010 "Starting with everything which has been unreferenced for more than 3 years, a three-month notice time starting February 1st, before they are deleted on May 1st. 2. Starting with everything which has been unreferenced for more than 2 years, a three-month notice time starting May 1st, before they are deleted on August 1st. 3. Starting with everything which has been unferenced for more than 1 year, a three-month notice time starting August first, before they are deleted on November 1st.

In all cases, biographies deleted for being old and unreferenced should be put onto a list for those who wish to come behind and work on them further.

After that, we can consider how long is a reasonable life span (I would say one week, but one month could be fine as well) for new biographies to exist in a sad state before they are deleted.

36 25 5 59.02% Stricter
7 days to 30 days
Aymatth2 13:39, 24 January 2010 This proposal is to create a mechanically ranked list of all unsourced BLPs, so editors who want to remove inappropriate articles can work up from the bottom of the list, and editors who want to retain valuable content can work down from the top. Obvious ranking criteria would be:
  • Positive: Number of inbound links, number of unique editors, size
  • Negative: Number of days since creation, number of days since last edit

The values would be given weightings in a ranking formula such as:

(inboundlinks x 100) + (uniqueeditors x 150) + (sizekb x 50) - (agedays x 1) - (lasteditdays x 0.5)

Technical
Henrik 16:24, 21 January 2010 "A significant minority of editors are unwilling to let unsourced, but likely uncontentious biographies remain in the encyclopedia. Deleting content makes the text available to only a select few, and makes fixing the articles a significantly harder process. I suggest an alternative to tackle the backlog of the roughly 50k articles in question:
  • We institute a process to hide the contents of unsourced biographies, using a template developed for the purpose.
  • We provide clear instruction that sourcing must be instituted before the template is removed (easily checkable by automated means)
  • Those articles which have remained in this hidden state for a reasonable, but fairly long, amount of time, but which have not been fixed are deleted.

This allows us to work towards preserving the content of these articles, while maintaining respect for the potential harm unsourced biographies may cause."

Technical
WereSpielChequers 16:57, 21 January 2010 Earlier this month User:DASHBot started gently chiding the authors of unsourced BLPs. I think we should wait a couple of weeks to see what effect that has on Category:All unreferenced BLPs, or if people want to give DASHBot a hand, look for retired/inactive/blocked users who DASHBot has spoken to and help them fix or delete their unsourced contributions.

...can someone write a Bot to inform wikiprojects of unsourced BLPs in their remit in the same way that DASHBot has been informing authors?"

...introduce "delete new unsourced BLP" as a speedy criteria; provided that we very clearly inform article creators that from a particular date this is the new rule, and that articles created after that date with information about living people must be reliably sourced.

...proding the unreferenced residue in batches over a couple of months

...I agree with delete unsourced BLPs on sight as the policy we should be able to enact in say 6 months. But with the following provisos:

  1. An unsourced biography should at the very least have its history checked to see if reverting a bit of vandalism won't restore it to a referenced article.
  2. Good faith contributions should never be deleted without the author being informed and given an easy route to getting their article restored for their next editing session.
  3. We also need an exception for articles being restored and referenced - some sort of template such as prod that can be added to a restored article so that the person requesting its restoration has at least a few hours to do so.
  4. Any user should be able to request, and any admin permitted to restore an existing article deleted under this process, provided the requester is promising to reference the article ASAP.
 31 9 77.50% Stricter
Technical
NJA 16:53, 21 January 2010
  • reduce the time from five days
  • devise a special PROD template specific to BLP's so that it can have a specialized category for monitoring and tracking (using NOINDEX)
  • set out to add an edit filter to track BLP PROD template removals, as is currently done for CSD template removals for easier admin tracking
 10 19 34.48% Stricter
5 days
The Anome 17:11, 21 January 2010 Any bot activity...will need to be intensively supervised by humans for some time to avoid serious loss of useful articles...numerous articles are currently tagged as unsourced BLPs when they have references 10 2 83.33% Technical
Resolute 17:59, 21 January 2010 ...Wikiprojects can help. User:WolterBot has a function that generates a cleanup listing by project. Using tools such as this allows the community to break the overwhelming scope of this issue down into manageable sizes. If we repurpose this function as a mandatory listing for all projects - either as a one time run or a quarterly listing - we can at least begin to tackle this problem. 35 7 83.33% Technical
Themfromspace 19:03, 21 January 2010 "holding tank" for all uncited BLP articles. This could be a separate project space altogether, or the subpages of a WikiProject. Each uncited BLP would then be automatically moved out of the mainspace to this holding space where it would not be indexed by Google. Each of these articles would then be considered a work in progress (and could be tagged as such) until they were moved back into the mainspace. 6 10 37.50% Technical
Arthur Rubin 19:16, 21 January 2010 Any deletion by an accelerated process...should, after deletion, restore a (locked, if needed) stub...The stub should not be deleted for 6 months, unless a non-accelerated deletion procedure is followed. 22 7 75.86% technical
NuclearWarfare 19:53, 21 January 2010 I would submit that the community cannot fully trust administrators who violate the BLP policy. 18 27 1 40.00% N/A
OrangeDog 20:00, 21 January 201 Unreferenced articles on notable living people that contain no contentious material (including, but not limited to a large number of stubs) should be treated the same as any other article, noting that they provide useful information and provide a mechanism for the encylopedia to grow...I do not see any reason to create new deletion processes to circumvent or abuse those that we already have. Especially not ones that involve automatic and unsupervised mass deletion. 26 7 78.79% No change
Hut 8.5 21:46, 23 January 2010 "I propose that we set up a wikiproject to source unreferenced BLPs." 21 0 100.00% Technical
Unanimous support
User:MickMacNee and User:Ikip Anger at history of RFC N/A
User:HJ Mitchell Generally similar to Jehochman, except:
  1. Mass drive-by prodding would be discouraged and attempts should be made to limit the number of "BLP prods" at any one time to ~1000
  2. A log should be created where editors must record the removal of "BLP prods" after proper sourcing or report others who improperly remove the tag (similar to special enforcement)
 12 1 Stricker
User:LeadSongDog "immediately...wp:userfied to the creating editors space by a bot, much in the way of user:CorenSearchBot's handling of gross copyvios" 7 3 Technology
Userfication
User:Looie496 "No articles should be deleted using automated tools." 37 1 Technology
User:Balloonman "...create a tool that can notify these projects and key editors what unsourced BLP's exist under their purvue. " 28 0
User:Balloonman "modify the template for unsource blp's so that they are not indexed" 6 8
User:Jake Wartenberg unwatched BLPs should be indefinitely semi-protected. 13 1
User:Rd232 Unsourced BLPs should be incubated after a time (or in some cases userfied). 11 8
User:FT2 creation of a "Draft:" namespace 11 5
User:The-Pope echoed by User:Cenarium Make it known that this is the site's current main priority...get Wolterbot to change the order of the cleanup list to highlight what are the real problem areas, and which ones are "nice-to-haves" (ie MOS type ones).

Get ALL of the projects on board. Get a bot/code/something quicker and smarter than me to auto-generate the lists based on the intersection of Category:Unreferenced BLPs and Category:WikiProject XYZ articles It needs some smarts, cause the project cats are on the talk pages, but the unreferenced BLPs are on the main pages, but I can do it for a project at a time using WP:AWB, so it must be able to be done. Then create a Wikipedia:WikiProject Australia/Unreferenced BLPs page for EVERY project. Update the list daily. Hold a competition to see who can zero their list the quickest - winner gets money/fame/links on the main page for a month/etc. Create a hall of fame for most removed each week.

14 1 Technical
User:SirFozzie Find something you can live with, and find it soon. Show that you can be part of a solution, and not just a part of a discussion of a problem. Sitting down and not accepting anything will mean that the situation will just go on without you. 14 17 N/A
User:Johnbod Why Unreferenced BLPs are NOT problematic
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