Wikipedia:Protecting BLP articles feeler survey/I don't like any of these options but something has to be done for BLPs

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The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

I don't like any of these options but something has to be done for BLPs[edit]

Leave your alternate idea here
  1. For all articles, show the current version but have a link at the top to the last-flagged version. This would alert users immediately that the version they are looking at has not been reviewed and give them an opportunity to go to the last reviewed version. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 20:35, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    That's exactly how flagged revisions work already (for those who use them). — Sebastian 03:33, 30 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Spread the word that Special:RecentChangesLinked&target=Category%3ALiving_people and other patrols exist. If that doesn't work to reduce the time vandalism stays on biography articles, then look at more severe actions like making BLP articles flagged-revision or semi-protect by default. "Use a light touch first, use more pressure only if necessary." davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 20:35, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    I like that! How about adding that as a preferences option for anytime RC is clicked? Is that doable? Daniel Case (talk) 06:57, 25 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    MediaWiki:Recentchangestext? --MZMcBride (talk) 07:07, 25 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    I like this idea too. -kotra (talk) 22:47, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    Smart idea. Bearian (talk) 19:54, 8 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  3. I don't like the idea of semi protecting anything until such time as is demonstrably required. I don't like the idea of not allowing anonymous editors in, automatically. As a suggestion, perhaps categorize all BLP as a BLP and then place a noticebot in a public IRC channel. That would be a suggestion, but as for protection, I don't think I like the idea. NonvocalScream (talk) 21:15, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  4. We just need to enforce a conservative interpretation of blp, its only cos loads of editors don't want to that we see this problem. Thanks, SqueakBox 23:26, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    Keep in mind that the problem of vandalism is completely distinct from the problem of what material should actually be in an article when that material is well-sourced. Let's not confuse them. JoshuaZ (talk) 02:06, 20 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    There is quite a lot of crossover. This, for example, was vandalism. -kotra (talk) 22:56, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  5. Endorse Davidwr's idea. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 01:48, 20 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  6. A while ago I did a survey of how long it took to revert some vandal edits (see User:Hut 8.5/vandals). The vast majority of edits were reverted extremely quickly. However a handful of edits were missed by RC patrol and survived for much longer, and presumably it is these which pose the biggest risk since there is a much greater chance that someone will see them. In order to catch these edits we need some way of marking an edit as "patrolled", which I understand is already done on some wikis. Alternatively we could use flagged revisions while still giving all users the most recent version to read. Hut 8.5 10:30, 20 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  7. Alternate idea - If you have the capability to edit semi protected articles, your edit goes straight though. If you do not then your edit gets flagged. Kind of a cross between "flagged revisions for BLPs" and "semiprotect BLPs." --ScWizard (talk) 17:10, 20 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • I support this idea, as it is basically what I've proposed in the above section, but SCW said it better! - BillCJ (talk) 02:02, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  8. improve patrolling A follow up on what Hut said a little above--organize RC patrol so we can catch what gets missed. If we can implement semi-protection of NLPs, we could alternatively establish a separate RC patrol for BLPs. DGG (talk) 18:59, 20 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    I agree with this and davidwr's idea above. Keeping a close eye on BLP articles, and having editors be more hard-line about reverting unsourced or inappropriate edits, seems to be a better solution than semi-protecting them. —Politizer talk/contribs 19:26, 21 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  9. I think we have all the policies here to address problems, we just have to priortise dealing with them. Cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 11:00, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  10. On the few times I have been on RC patrol recently I have generally allowed very little tolerance on blatant vandalism to BLPs. While newbie testing on BLPs, such as adding "Hello" or "LOL" at the end of the article is dealt with in the usual, kind, {{test}} manner, I have been much harsher with people who use the bio as a medium to launch attacks. If I'm in a good mood, I can go with {{test4im}}, but if the vandalism is particularly vicious, I have no compulsions against instant-blocking without warning. I don't believe that anyone would be surprised, or righteously upset, at being blocked as a response to lies and slander to someone's bio. Perhaps standards are that way already with some admins, but if not I have no trouble in implementing tougher practices on vandalism like this. If a non-admin sees an anon making libel and slander on a BLP, they should be able to take them to WP:AIV immediately, without seeing the report rejected with "user hasn't been warned". Sjakkalle (Check!) 15:16, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  11. Improve access to reporting functions, admins, and OFFICE Need I point out that the administrators' noticeboard is usually a 300kb, ad-hoc mess of a discussion page? Is it really so difficult to implement a simple forum on Wikipedia? If there were a "Problem!" tab before the "Talk" tab that took readers to a report form or admin forum, problems would get solved much more quickly. Shii (tock) 23:34, 23 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    I like this idea. Let the readers and/or editors (most of whom are not vandals) report blatant problems quickly and easily. Oren0 (talk) 00:46, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    Ironically, too, the administrators' noticeboard is ignored by most admins as most of the time it's simply a hotbed of drama with nothing of interest or use to them. We need to establish something admins will actually read. Orderinchaos 23:11, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    It seems like this proposal (an easy to access forum for reporting "problems") would just increase the number of reports without proportionally increasing the number of people responding to them. Besides, if there are blatant problems, editors are encouraged to be bold and fix it themselves. The noticeboards (plural noticeboards, as opposed to the single bloated WP:AN) should be more publicized, though. They are pretty obscure. -kotra (talk) 23:16, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  12. Improved patrolling is the way to go, not flagged revisions. Having a "Recent Changes" or #en-wikipedia-vandalism type route, that only shows changes on articles tagged with the BLP template on their talk page is a good start, requiring administrators to patrol a minimum amount somehow would be a nice additional step though not likely "possible". Sherurcij (speaker for the dead) 01:25, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    Required patrolling would be bad. We're all volunteers here. -kotra (talk) 23:21, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  13. I would like admins and arbitrators, when alerted to BLP violations to read complaints and act on them. I have recently had reason to do so, and I find the non-attention by admins and arbitrators to be lacking, and in the case of one arbcom member, they don't even understand the policy. I question Jimbo about this on his user page, and you can see his (non) answer here. The interesting thing is, I framed the question to Jimbo in such a way that it would get his attention, because admins and arbcom members have ignored it. What I wrote initially is here. The funny thing is, it is not acceptable to use an analogy on Jimbo's talk page in framing a question, because it could be seen as an accusation against Jimbo, yet when we have the exact wording on an article this is not only acceptable, but when alerted admins and arbs do nothing (well, they did something, they blocked me for 3RR for using BLP as it is written), and Jimbo's non-answer is also not acceptable. Is it acceptable for admins and arbs to do nothing? No it is not, unless of course it is totally ok with the Wikimedia Foundation for BLP information to exist in some articles but not in others? So yes, something has to be done, that thing being enforce the blooming policy across the board! --Russavia Dialogue Stalk me 05:43, 24 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  14. Some of the problems here is that there are a whole bunch of admins who are not doing much if not anything admin wise. They basically are glorified editors who want to hide their adminship and rarely use their tools. I feel to fix this, we need to make it mandatory that all admins identify themselves and also assign them various tasks that they are required, under their adminship, to accomplish. (I.E. patrol certain groups of articles, work as a vandalism patrol, deal with fires before they erupt into an edit war, etc.) If these admins are not willing to take on the responsibility of being an admin, then they should be stripped of their adminship and another appointed in their place who will do the job. Brothejr (talk) 11:01, 25 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    Requiring admins to have essentially a "work quota" is not the way to go. They are, just like the rest of us, volunteers. We need more good admins, not to burn out existing admins or discourage editors from even wanting to become admins. -kotra (talk) 23:41, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    We need more good editors period and support for those who are doing good work including vandalism clean-up. -- Banjeboi 01:55, 2 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  15. Could we have a system to turn on flagged revisions at the request of a BLP subject? I'm imagining that if a living person complains about their article, we could ask them if they want flagged revisions turned on. They'd be given a revision of the article to look over and asked hold Wikipedia and its editors not liable for any error in that version. If they agreed, flagged revisions would be turned on for that article, the revision the subject agreed to would be flagged, and a template would be placed on the talk page stating that flagged revisions have been turned on at the request of the article subject. The template would state that flagged revisions must not be turned off except at the request of the article subject, and it would state which article revision the subject had agreed to. I realize that not everyone would agree to this, but it may be worth a try. It doesn't stop vandalism or POV edits, but it might make people more comfortable with the existence of an article about them. Ozob (talk) 20:52, 26 December 2008 (UTC) Withdrawn per Ngorongoro's comments below. Ozob (talk) 09:56, 2 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    Technically, it's already working this way in the German Wikipedia. When an article has never been reviewed it just works as normal. So, if you want an article to be part of the system, just review it once. — Sebastian 04:11, 30 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    Do you know if that makes living persons happier about the existence of articles about them? (Has anyone even tried to collect that sort of data?) Ozob (talk) 04:53, 31 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    That could work. One downside I can see is that it would be confusing for readers and anonymous editors to have one article with flagged revisions and another, similar article, without. It would make Wikipedia more complicated for readers and editors. But the benefits might be worth it. I think a small-scale test would be essential first, though, since what you describe would not be reversible ("flagged revisions must not be turned off except at the request of the article subject"). -kotra (talk) 23:49, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  16. I supported weakly the semi-protection option but still I have some doubts. Many BLP articles are created by anonymous IP accounts. I think they should be able to improve the article as well. I think we distinguish between stubs and non-stubs. Non-stubs must be semi-protected and we can leave the rest without protection. Patrolling helps with newly created articles and stubs, maybe we have to find ways to improve patrolling. -- Magioladitis (talk) 15:09, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  17. If all the people who argue all the time about deleting articles that are at worst harmless put their efforts into reviewing BLPs the problems would be much smaller. If we stopped deleting articles for a month and worked on BLPs the encyclopedia would be much better. Except for speedy deletions. Hullaballoo Wolfowitz (talk) 20:56, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  18. I do agree that quality improvements to BLP articles help mitigate the impact of vandalism and what we really should be concerned about, sneaky attempts to smear someone. In the Seigenthaler incident, and some of the other cases where libelous information remained in articles for long periods of time like that Norwegian politician we were falsely id'ing as a child molester, I forget his name, the offending sentences made up at least 25 percent of a very stubby article's total body text. No one reading the article could have missed them. Similarly, I have seen efforts to make the short Sergio Zyman article either very negative or very peacock-y in the past by anons (looks like it needs some work to address the former shortcoming).

    Maybe ... the solution here is to put every newly-identified (and we need work on doing that in recent changes as well) BLP article on semi-protect or flagging until it reaches a certain quality level (C-class sounds about right to me ... and I prefer that to byte count because not only can that measure be padded with garbage or trivia, a quality assessment requires an actual human eye on the page). Daniel Case (talk) 21:26, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

    Something to think about. Bearian (talk) 19:54, 8 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  19. I have wondered about protection of sections of pages, rather (or as well as) protecting the whole page. e.g. the first section with the key facts, stats. (DOB etc), and poss. tags (BLP tag) could have strong protection than the rest of the article. Of course this would need a lot of work. Martin451 (talk) 23:16, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  20. As an alternative to imposing technical solutions such as semi-protection or revision-flagging on all articles subject to BLP. I would like to propose establishing a network of registered users dedicated to keeping an eye on those articles, either through existing channels, such as the Counter-Vandalism Unit, WikiProject Biography, Recent Changes Patrolling, encouraging widespread Watchlisting of articles subject to the BLP policy, or establishing a brand-new network of registered users for that purpose. --TommyBoy (talk) 02:29, 30 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  21. How about at least one test article for flagged revisions? Pick a highly-trafficked blp like Sarah Palin was during the U.S. elections. We can see how it works out there and maybe more people can come to a consensus as to what to do. MrMurph101 (talk) 19:11, 31 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  22. Just some thoughts. The more I read through all of the arguments on this page, the more that I encounter (to an extent) that somehow annoying sensation that I'm seeing the justifiability of all of the options originally proposed by the survey; however, I'm also starting to see a pattern. Generally, the main arguments against any of the choices boil down to workload/complexity and/or first principle (/having the 'nads to go up against the man). Beyond my opinions expressed in the above survey categories, I find myself willing to support the solutions proposed by davidwr (1) et al., ScWizard (7), and very much Shii (11) (though very much not Ozob (15); while libel is one thing, such a system would become rather too complex, and I feel it would and should technically fall under NOR). Their solutions and many more are, in turn, roundly summarized by Casliber (9) et al.
    Keeping complexity down is self-explanatory, but I feel that the "democracy" end of the objections more or less hinges on helping the uninitiated feel like members of the community before they are members of the community. I, too, feel that this is noble, and a key aspect of Wikipedia culture and policy.
    I believe that Casliber is fundamentally correct, but I also believe there should be something in the system itself to help "automatically" quell a really fairly minor if incredibly pervasive nuisance (as per Nsk92 (#32 under "Implement Semi-protection...")). Such a "something" should, for minimum hassle and maximum applicability and immediacy, be easily integrable into the tools of everyday use already present.
    Alternate proposal: BLPs are semi-protected as individually needed, but with a special template. This template would explain the special nature of such BLPs especially to anonymous users, encouraging them to constructively edit their other favorite articles and to sign up, and not treating them like villains, or, even worse, as faceless blips in the system. True vandals would be handled like they always are, and Wikipedia becomes a little bit friendlier. I do not feel another template is too much to ask or confusing, as it would be very specific in application. Ngorongoro (talk) 00:17, 2 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    A question: I don't see how my proposal above (at #15) would violate WP:NOR. Could you explain? The way I intended it, the article subject would not be given any direct input other than "This is OK" or "This is not OK". They would not be allowed to rewrite the article to fit their taste. I do agree that it's bureaucratic. I'm not convinced that it's the right thing to do (you can see elsewhere on this page that I oppose FRs on principle), I just think it might mollify some BLP subjects. Ozob (talk) 01:44, 2 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    An answer, hopefully: While I might admit that NOR might not be the perfect classification for the scenario, I do feel that you've already explained my point for me. The fundamental problem is allowing an individual veto power of any kind in a project founded on the principles of consensus. Libel is rather strictly defined, legally; we know how to deal with it, and, generally, the law would be on our side if we're controlling any true vandals. I'm certain a rich mine of information on this subject can be found on the talk pages of any article or section dealing with criticisms of Scientology. To allow an individual, even the subject of an article, to approve and veto subject matter based on personal preferences or agenda is, I feel, asking for trouble; it is also a fundamental subversion of neutrality (whence I drew my original NOR conclusion).
    It would not be the same as administration, as it has nothing to do with policy and editor interactions. Besides, it would be a policy nightmare trying to draw a universally applicable line for all possible objections by BLP subjects that could still maintain relevance and effectiveness. Our purpose is not to mollify an individual; it is to inform the masses. Ngorongoro (talk) 02:36, 2 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    This is a good point. I didn't realize when I made my original proposal that it puts Wikipedia in a tough position if the article subject says, "No, this is unacceptable." As it is, I believe we remove only libel. If we implemented my proposal above, we'd end up negotiating an article with every BLP subject. As you point out, that prevents us from writing an encyclopedia.
    So my proposal seems to be a bad idea. I withdraw it. Ozob (talk) 09:54, 2 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  23. What Shii said. We have the right tools already. I think we lack the right interface is all. And improving what we've already got helps every article and editor. Fix NPP and improve RC. Xavexgoem (talk) 12:41, 12 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  24. Give rollbackers limited semi-protect privileges. Expanding the number of people who can deal with problems should improve patrolling, and empowers more users rather than cutting more people out. Rklear (talk) 17:13, 24 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  25. Only a tiny minority of BLP articles get vandalised. The rest are generally seen as too unimportant to vandalise. I think we should focus on where vandalism has actually occurred and tailor a solution to that. Otherwise we're using a hammer to crack a nut and creating a lot of work for a shrinking pool of volunteers (by volunteers I do not mean editors here, but whoever has to sort through all the edits to see which ones go in). Orderinchaos 00:49, 6 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    What gets vandalized? People in the news. Barack Obama, John McCain, Britney Spears, Hannah Montana, Dubya, and other people who have become very famous or controversial. So, maybe we should put those up for FR or higher consideration, and leave the rest alone. — Rickyrab | Talk 18:32, 6 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    I'd entirely agree with that approach - Barack Obama and Britney Spears seem exactly the sort of articles this measure was designed for, and if it was so limited, I'd probably support it. Orderinchaos 09:52, 7 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, but those articles get MORE fellow editors overseeing it, and we already HAVE watchlists and Probation. ηoian ‡orever ηew ‡rontiers 06:15, 18 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
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