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331dot (talk) 12:55, 4 May 2022 (UTC)Reply

Editing biographies of living people

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Hi, please be especially careful when editing Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons - as mentioned on that policy article, we have to be extra careful to use high quality sources. The New York Post article you cited did not name any of the students involved; the name came only from a domain registered by the doxxing campaign itself, which doesn't count as a high quality source. We need to wait for a good newspaper or something to publish that name before we can name people on Wikipedia. This is because Wikipedia editors like me and you are not considered reliable fact-checkers (i.e. nobody knows if we're any good at research or not), so we have to point to a news article that readers can reasonably assume has been professionally fact-checked, and say only what that article says. So if that student's name has not been verifiably OK'd by a known professional fact checker, then we don't know if that student was really involved or not. Imagine if someone mistakenly put your name on a poster and said you hadn't apologised for being pro-Hamas, and it was all a mistake - they got the wrong person all along - and you didn't even know how to contact them and tell them it hadn't been anything to do with you, let alone fight with the question of should or shouldn't you go on public record with a suspiciously specific denial. And if this student is the president of a club - which I don't know because it hasn't been professionally fact-checked - but if they are, then that doesn't mean a thing because we don't know what it's like in that place: for all we know, there could be loads of pressure to "start your little club and be a president", and that student might just have gone with the flow. We need a professional fact-checker to help figure out if they are bad enough to be named and shamed; we can't figure it out ourselves. But it may still be OK to add the Post to an article about the event, without naming the people involved, if we can summarise the mainstream news coverage i.e. the part that we know has been professionally fact-checked, not the names which have not been professionally fact-checked. For example, it could go in the Accuracy in Media article. Thanks. A1415 (talk) 11:33, 30 October 2023 (UTC)Reply

Just to add, there's further discussion of the above on my talk page and I'd suggest putting any replies there... A1415 (talk) 16:53, 30 October 2023 (UTC)Reply