User:HJensen/HJensen BLP POV

NOTE

This page - by User:HJensen - discussing the rules for Biographies of Living Persons is in preparation! August 15, 2006.

Background

Recently, editors are begining to take rules adhering to Biographies of Living Persons, very, very literally. I am a person who thinks rules are there to be obeyed (otherwise the rules should not be there), but I also believe in some sound judgement in adhering to rules. Otherwise, we end up turning Wikipedia into a very dull place, where eventually bots will do most of the editing.

Personally, I encountered the tendency a while ago, where an editor with little explanation (except that sources were lacking) removed an entire paragraph of a biography. It left the article without a structure. I.e., it was a destructive edit that did not help the article in any way. I responded by reverting the edit and giving the editor a vandal warning (lowest level). I genuinly believed that this was vandalism. I moreover made an edit where I tried to improve the paragraph. The editor in question responded angrily with a statement that I should not accuse him/her of vandalism (shouting in the sense that capital letters were applied). The editor then went back to the particular paragraph and tagged several statements with {{fact}}. Then, I found the appropriate references, and inserted them to the article and removed the tags. The end result was an improvement, but it was a slightly bumpy way towards that end. I wondered why the editor had not simply added some tags from the beginning. It would have seemed as a constructive and cooperative way of improving articles.

Upon reading the rules in detail, however, I found out that the editor was actually adhering strictly to the rules. With bios of living persons, editors are actually encouraged to delete unsourced sentences rather than ask for references.

During August 2006, almost all talk pages of bios of living people has been tagged with a (transcluded) template creating an infobox emphazising that the main article is

1) a biography of a living person, and

2) part of Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography.

As of that time, it looked like this when seen for the first time on the talk page (sustituted version of August 17, 2006):

Biography of a living person This article must adhere to the policy on biographies of living persons. Controversial material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libellous. If such material is repeatedly inserted or if there are other concerns relative to this policy, report it on the living persons biographies noticeboard.
	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to people on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the Project's quality scale. Please rate the article and then leave a short summary here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article.

See here, for insertions regarding some bios with first names beginning with 'M' (there are, of course, numerous similar edits). It thus appears to me that there could be many editors starting to adhere stricly to the rules from now on. I fear this will lead to a lot of wasted time like the situation I was exposed to (although that was a minor incident; but time could have been saved, if the editor had just tagged instead of deleting the whole thing). Indeed, with this new infobox, editors are told úp front:

"Specifically, unsourced or poorly sourced negative material about living persons should not be posted to this article or its talk page(s). Such material must be removed without hesitation. The three-revert rule does not apply to such removals"

Before going into the pitfalls of editing when presented with these rules, let me go through the set of rules in a little detail.

The Rules and my personal comments

I will now go through the set of rules as stated on Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons, and provide my brief/longer comments (and questions) to most of the items.