Shortcut: WT:DEL

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Contents 1 Proposal 2 Review of the review section 3 Deleting from the database 4 Default to delete for BLPs 4.1 random break 4.2 Random break 2 4.3 Random break 3 5 Alternative to policy change 6 Alternative to policy change no.2 : Default to keep+semiprotect 7 Alternative No 3. 8 Proposed alternative No. 4 9 a lot of talk but seemingly little action

[edit] Proposal

MilbornOne posted an opinion at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Aviation/Notability#Comment that articles should not be PRODded or nominated at AfD within 48 hours of creation. He was talking specifically about new articles on aircraft accidents. I see no reason why this should not extend to all articles. I fully agree that this would be a good idea. It gives those editors who do not follow the practice of creating articles in a sandbox the time to work on the article. An editor who finds a new article with problems can always raise the issue politely on the talk page of the creator. This proposal would not prevent an article being listed at CSD or prevent articles from being speedied where that is appropriate.

Therefore I'd like to ask what the consensus is for this proposal:-

{{PROD}} and {{AfD}} may not be placed on an article within 48 hours of the creation of the article. Mjroots (talk) 10:28, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

• Support Mjroots (talk) 10:28, 24 September 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose - The processes for saying 'hangon' or discussing at length in an AFD are pretty straightforward. If someone raises, for example, an obvious content fork then discussing this in an AFD shortly after creation seems entirely appropriate. The creator has plenty of time to discuss the matter and always has the option of using the {{construction}} in order to encourage discussion on the article talk page.—Ash (talk) 10:36, 24 September 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose. There are plenty of new pages that don't fit in the CSD categories, but where some searching shows that they don't fit in Wikipedia either. If these can't be prod'ded or AfD'ed in the first 48 hours, yo uare making the work of the new page patrollers much harder, since you need to separate CSD patrol (immediate, for attacks and so on) from prod/afD patrol (looking only at pages that are at least two days old). Now, a New Page Patroller can do both (and much more) at the same time. Some of these may be considered speedyable or otherwise solvable, but why would we not prod things like Leeds/draft, Compiling environment, Desk sockets (already prodded), Victor Antonio Torres (speedy A7?), On the Ball (TV show), ... Fram (talk) 10:54, 24 September 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose in addition to the comments above, this would probably make it harder for the creator to contest the deletion. If the creator writes the article they might not log back in for weeks or months, so if the prod tag is placed 48 hours after creation they'll never see it. On the other hand if the tag is placed not long after the article is created they are much more likely to be around and to contest the deletion. Hut 8.5 11:10, 24 September 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose As Fram said, there are plenty of articles that have no place in the encyclopedia that aren't speediable. If you eliminate prod as an option for pages that clearly have no encyclopedic potential, people will tag them with IAR speedies, either making CSD an insane asylum or wasting lots of gnome time while people remove the CSD tags, put it on a list to be prodded in two days, then prod the thing. If editors are tagging articles for deletion without following WP:BEFORE, call them out on it. They'll either start following WP:BEFORE or get so sick of the "you have new messages" bar that they won't prod at all. (This goes for CSD, prod and AfD.)--Fabrictramp | talk to me 13:58, 24 September 2009 (UTC)
• Support Great idea which if adopted will make the encylopedia more welcoming to new users, and encourage creativity. If an article doesnt qualify for CSD, it can wait two extra days before entering the non urgent deletion streams. Come on deletionists, you know they taste better if you give them a chance to grow! FeydHuxtable (talk) 16:42, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

• Somehow I'm not anxious to encourage creativity like "Foofraz is a great drinking game that's been played in my dorm for the last three years." There's no speedy category for this, and when my gsearch turns up 6 blog hits and nothing else, you want me to wait two more days before starting the prod/afd cycle, which will still take a minimum of 7 more days? How on earth is two more days going to make this into an encyclopedic article? And if it would, why not just make prod 9 days (remembering that not so long ago we added two days to prod and AfD ). --Fabrictramp | talk to me 17:10, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

• Please note that I have proposed this before, (here) with...err...resounding opposition in response. Protonk (talk) 16:48, 24 September 2009 (UTC)
• String support - if thwe article isn't covered by speedy deletion, give it a chance before requesting to have it deleted. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 17:40, 24 September 2009 (UTC)
• As I said last year when Protonk proposed it, oppose for PROD, as PROD is (ideally) for uncontroversial deletions as is, and it seems pointless to add an extra two days to it. Meh for AfD, as the likelihood that adding two more days to the process is going to result in much improvement to the article that wouldn't already happen in a week is low. So, I kinda' oppose it to avoid being WP:CREEPy, but there isn't much other reason for me to oppose. Cheers. lifebaka++ 18:18, 24 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Wow, it was almost exactly a year ago, eh? I didn't even notice that. Protonk (talk) 19:12, 24 September 2009 (UTC)
• Comment the original suggestion I made was related to aviation accidents when a high number of edits can be made related to a news event. These tend to be AfD or Prodded quickly before they have a chance to establish notability. This can end up with long discussions at AfD about not news etc while a wait of a few days could establish notability when events had settled. I understand the comments about enough time in the AfD process for the article to establish notability but these AfDs can attract a large number of opinions because of the current event interest. MilborneOne (talk) 19:45, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
• support in principle but there need to be exceptions, for there are articles that do not fit into speedy policy but are appropriate for snow deletes after a few opinions have been collected. And , like Fram and Papyrus and Lifebaka said, I don't really see a great problem with prod, for they will always be around for 7 days in any case, and anyone can remove the prod when they disagree with it. But as for AfD, the main problem is the one Hut raised, of notifying the creator. We could add a layer of notices to handle it, such as my "I advise you to fix this very quickly, before the article gets nominated for deletion by a regular deletion process, " but we don't want to complicate things too far. DGG ( talk ) 00:38, 27 September 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose, a new article that is unsuitable for the encyclopedia (but not speedyable) needs to be dealt with as soon as possible, not allowed to be swept away by the stream and forgotten about. --Stormie (talk) 02:23, 27 September 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose, 48 hours is much too long to wait. Especially considering a prod already gives it 7 days anyway. I tend to adhere to an Immediatist philosophy, where "any detracting quality (such as being ill-formatted or containing less than satisfactory material) should be remedied as soon as possible" and that a newly-created article should be as complete as possible BEFORE putting it in the mainspace.. because I care about Wikipedia's image, and when I picture a troll bragging to his buddies that his joke article is "STILL up after TWO days man! Lulz!" I can see how it would detract from the professional image of Wikipedia's administrators, about whom it may be said that they're not doing their job properly by deleting that crap ASAP, but also the professionalism of Wikipedia as a whole. -- œ^™ 05:08, 27 September 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose. Any required improvement can still happen during the AfD/PROD period, and is indeed often more likely to be triggered by an appropriate deletion request.  Sandstein  05:17, 27 September 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose. Among other reasons, an article being a WP:HOAX is not a reason for speedy deletion, unless it's also WP:NONSENSE, but there is no reason to delay the removal. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 16:16, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Blatant hoaxes can be speedily deleted. Fences&Windows 21:53, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

• Comment. Whatever we do has to take the work force and work flows into account. Even if it's a good idea in principle, if the effect is that the taggers don't take any action two days later, then it won't work. - Dank (push to talk) 02:41, 28 September 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose. There are overzealous deletionists at NPP and AfD, but we shouldn't snarl up the deletion process with this proposal because of them. A prod can be removed by anyone for any reason (other than serial pointy or disruptive removals), so there is no good reason to delay it. All editors should follow WP:BEFORE, but is making someone intent on deleting an article wait two days likely to make them any more diligent in this? I doubt it. A greater problem with deletion is speedily deleting works in progress without giving the editor any real notice or chance to improve the article. Fences&Windows 21:53, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
• Strong Oppose Many, many new articles clearly qualify for deletion by prod or AFD. There is absolutely no reason to need to be forced to wait two days to tag non-notable, etc. articles that aren't CSD. Both prod and AFD still allow for seven days to object or improve. A forced delay will only allow unnecessary articles to stay on WP longer or forever. Reywas92^Talk 21:55, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose Hard limits do not work well when discretion is needed. Some articles need to be dealt with right away. While this may be discouraging to new users, the encyclopedia and the quality of its content is our first priority. By the time an article is 48 hours old the amount of attention it is getting has drastically reduced, it has a chance of being forgotten and just sitting there forever. Chillum 21:59, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose, complete nonsenses. As others have already noted, if the article clearly qualifies for deletion, but not speedy deletion, then no reason at all to force a 2 day wait. There are many hoax and other inappropriate articles that can NOT be speedied (by nature of the "blatant" part), and should be tagged immediately. Both Afd and Prod allow sufficient time to show any notability of the article is tagged for that reason. -- Collectonian (talk · contribs) 01:40, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose if for nothing else but that it's unworkable. People don't operate on a two-days-later schedule. It will result in far fewer articles that should receive a prod or AfD, not getting them.--162.84.136.254 (talk) 04:20, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose—as other editors here have noted, there are many articles which should clear be deleted but aren't eligible for CSD. A good example is many band articles tagged for A7 but don't satisfy A7 because they released a studio album and have additional assertions of notability. Many administrators still cheat the process by deleting these articles, but their number would reach somewhere around 100% if this proposal was implemented. No one wants to try to help out at CSD and then realize they need to do more work just for a number of bad articles that should be deleted anyway. —Ynhockey ^(Talk) 11:02, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose - I see no reason to exempt new articles from our policies. This also includes the pseudopolicy that surmountable problems are best fixed by editing. 81.110.104.91 (talk) 16:51, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose MilborneOne's argument is valid and I understand his point. Perhaps we could make an exception for current events of this kind. Otherwise I think any editor can improve the article with {{PROD}} or {{AfD}} template. The templates aren't "biting", they inform about the rules of our project and other people's opinions in a standard way. This is an encyclopedia, not a kindergarten. No need to complicate things, in my opinion. --Vejvančický (talk) 19:24, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
• Comment Clearly the consensus is not in favour of the proposal. My thanks to all who commented on the proposal. Maybe a bit more discretion would be a better way of avoiding PRODs and AfDs on recent-event related articles. IMHO, all editors should be enouraged to make use of a personal sandbox to perfect articles before releasing them into mainspace, rather than creating unfinished articles and then working on them when they are "live".Mjroots (talk) 20:46, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
  • Not at all. That's perverse. NPPs shouldn't be deleting articles with potential. This is a wiki, people should be creating articles like this or this without having to go through some strange migration process. Protonk (talk) 20:50, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
    • No, what's perverse is linking to examples of new articles from 2001 and 2005. The more Wikipedia grows, the more obscure the topic of the average new article - and hence the more necessary that a new article reaches certain minimum standards of sourcing and content which enables others to understand and expand it. Over time that makes it more and more advantageous to do a draft "paddling pool" stage first, before being thrown into the deep end of the swimming pool. Rd232 ^talk 07:54, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
      • That's not really a feature of growth and the relative obscurity of uncreated and newly created articles doesn't play a big role. Much more powerful is the notion that wikipedia has "grown up" and will be a proper place for articles rather than a freewheeling environment for editing and collaboration. Protonk (talk) 07:59, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
        • Well that's your view, I disagree. Rd232 ^talk 10:34, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
    • Your first one makes a clear assertion of notability and wouldn't be deleted anyway. And the second probably should have been a section in Byzantine Empire (which at the time looked like this) rather than a standalone article, until it had some more content. Neither really demonstrate a problem with the current system which would be helped by this proposal. --Stormie (talk) 10:20, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
      • I didn't say that they would. My point is that we are moving toward a set of expectations for articles that they should more like DYK material than 1-2 sentence unwikified stubs before they are created. And that in doing so we are placing an implicit barrier to entry. The point was raised in response to mjroot's reasoning for withdrawing the procedure, not in support of it. I proposed an almost identical policy last year, but I'm less sure of the merits today, hence why I didn't offer a support or opposing view. Protonk (talk) 18:05, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
• Why Mjroots was wrong in his proposal and wrong in his withdrawal rationale. My experience with this article convinced me that prodding articles quickly is necessary if the New Page Patrollers are ever going to make any headway, and at the same time it pushes the article creators to improve their article quickly, rather than allow it to lay around as a two-sentence stub for months. But I also disagree with those who argue that everyone should create articles in their sandbox before displaying them. With the same article mentioned above, I had contributors expanding it more quickly than I was able; those helping editors may well have been more inspired to contribute to a nearly blank canvass than they would have to a fully-fabricated article. Just my 2¢. Unschool 05:16, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

• Oppose Allowing people to work on an article before it gets deleted is a bad idea, as they will feel very disappointed. It is much better to delete it from the start, before there is too much emotional involvement. SyG (talk) 19:56, 8 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose. What is really needed is a mandatory tutorial programme for new users so they don't create articles that should be deleted in the first place. JBsupreme (talk) 17:10, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Review of the review section

Now that WP:REFUND is up and running, I think the Deletion review section of the policy needs revising to make it clear in which cases WP:DRV should be used instead. We need to clarify what sort of deletions can be overturned under what circumstances, how deletions can be challenged and when they need to be discussed with the deleting admin and/or in a forum open to community discussion. Speaking to administrators recently it seems best practices are unclear or ill-understood.  Skomorokh, barbarian  07:07, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

I've added a description of the REFUND process in this edit, with some content taken from the Deletion review section. I wasn't sure if REFUND/undeletion should be its own subsection or part of the Deletion review subsection, so I went half-way and made it a subsection of Deletion review. Review, suggestions, comments welcome.  Skomorokh, barbarian  07:41, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

As a starting point for people, I tried to start a discussion on scope of WP:REFUND and best practices at Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_undeletion#Scope_and_best_practices, but not much discussion was generated. --Fabrictramp | talk to me 16:11, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Deleting from the database

If there are some deleted User talk pages from years back that I want deleted from the database as well, what steps can I take to ask for those deleted user talk pages (which were deleted by Administrators in 2006 & 2007 and the decision to delete those talk pages was agreed upon, even by me) to be deleted from the database as well? 76.208.168.46 (talk) 05:25, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

• Without knowing which pages you are talking about, I can't answer specifically. Try WP:REFUND or asking an admin in Category:Wikipedia administrators who will provide copies of deleted articles. REFUND is faster, given that you supply wikilinks to the pages in question. keep in mind that the answer may be "no". Protonk (talk) 05:36, 25 October 2009 (UTC)
• Umm, Protonk, he wants the deleted revisions removed. That can only be done by an WP:Oversighter and can be requested at WP:RFO, however, the requirements for it being done are very strict and it is unlikely that they would do it for a normal user talk page. MBisanz ^talk 05:52, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks to both of you. I just read some of the WP:RFO and it looks to me that my user talk pages from years back meet the requirements. It's going to be awkward to make the request, but eventually I have to. 76.208.168.46 (talk) 05:58, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

Whoops. Definitely misread that. Protonk (talk) 06:05, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Default to delete for BLPs

“	I think [David Shankbone's article], and other biographies like it, whether of Wikipedia editors or not, are clear candidates for deletion. If I were to vote, I would vote very strongly for deletion. I don't really know what your concerns about double standards and so on have to do with it, but I'm certainly willing to say that we should take the same very high moral and ethical approach to BLPs of everyone equally	”
—Jimmy Wales., (source)

Jake Wartenburg, rightly in my view, made this edit to codify what is becoming accepted practice... that a BLP that has no consensus defaults to delete, or at least that the admin has the option of so closing it. Chillum reverted it here. I've put it back, and am now here on the talk to discuss it. Policy is descriptive, for the most part, it describes what we do, and it sometimes lags practice. This is one of those cases. Also, please be informed by this edit of Jimbo Wales in which he is pretty strongly saying that marginals should go. Being kind is more important than having every marginal BLP that no dead tree encyclopedia would have. I invite support for this view. ++Lar: t/c 02:15, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

• This definitely has my strong support and, IMO, is way overdue. I strongly suspect Jimbo would concur - Alison ^❤ 02:23, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• I think this is a sensible change. It doesn't force any change on the community, rather it allows admins to use their discretion to a greater degree at the marginal edges of notability, where such discretion is most needed. Kevin (talk) 02:28, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• Kevin puts this quite well. This change is overdue in my opinion. Interestingly Cary Bass's BLP Task Force imagined an even greater scope of no consensus defaulting to delete at AfD, which is certainly something to think about. Perhaps this is how bad things have gotten for OTRS. NW (Talk) 02:32, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
  • That's set to be rewritten to be BLP-specific. Lara 05:17, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• Seems reasonable to codify this practice. --MZMcBride (talk) 02:53, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

• Oppose. The subtle wording change is a significant one and it has not been demonstrated that it was a descriptive one, as shown by the responses to the first deletion rationale relying on this policy revision. If an arguably notable individual requests deletion of their biography, I agree that we should strongly consider complying with their wishes. Otherwise, closing administrators should rely on consensus, with our standard of "no consensus" defaulting to retention. user:J aka justen (talk) 02:58, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose [edit confict] #1 this isn't actually a common practice that I know of. #2 There is a discussion (above) that addressed this before. #3 If you are going to try to make such a change, a wider discussion is in order (RfC). I'll certainly be including a proposal to remove the current (narrow) option to delete with no consensus in any such discussion. In any case, we should be defaulting to keep on all article IMO. We should only remove those things we find consensus to remove. Hobit (talk) 03:02, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
  • Last discussion is at [1] Hobit (talk) 03:14, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
    • Let's not forget that consensus can change - Alison ^❤ 03:27, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
      • Certainly it can. But I've seen no evidence other than one highly debatable AfD result that says it has. So far we've seen the same folks who seem to be pushing this BLP change everywhere else in the last week or so pushing it here. Serious question: are you all discussing these AfDs, DrVs and/or this policy change somewhere (on or off Wikipedia?). It feels very orchestrated. S Marshall asked the same question a while back in a DrV and got no response. Hobit (talk) 03:42, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
        • Well, I've only just come out of retirement a few weeks back so am playing catch-up here. My past work as an oversighter has contributed to my belief that WP has a serious BLP issue, the question of marginal ones being only part of the problem. The simple fact is there just aren't enough eyes to ensure adequate policiing of alll BLPs and the fabled 'flagged revisions' has been dragging on for years, though it's enabled on other wikis. I'll believe it when I see it - Alison ^❤ 04:43, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
          • Part of it probably has a lot to do with User:Jennavecia/AFDBIO which I spammed to the talk page of WikiProject Living people and to several BLP editors and admins. It lists all biographical AFDs, so allows for easier focus for those who work in BLP. As far as the "default to delete", that's been pushed for quite a few months now, but really gained traction a few weeks ago. It's not that knew, it's just been mentioned more in the past week or so, mostly by Lar and myself, I think, and probably several members of the BLP project. It's also discussed on WR quite a bit, along with some AFDs and DRVs. Lara 05:17, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
            • • Let me ask again. Is there any discussion on-going, on or off wikipedia, on the topic of BLPs, by any of you that are !voting to support this proposal? If so, could you please provide a link to those disussions (on WR or elsewhere)? That a group of people, all !voting the same way, to a DrV, a WP:DEL discussion, as well as a number of AfDs (the AFDBIO page would explain the AfDs, though I'm not sure how people found it) makes me wonder what prompted them to all appear at the same time. Hobit (talk) 15:21, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
                • here and here are the ones I've noticed. So that there is no misunderstanding: I do not participate (post) on WR, ever. Nomoskedasticity (talk) 15:36, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• A very reasonable and current description of what we do. I support. NonvocalScream (talk) 03:34, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose Unless there is a current(ie not potential) BLP issue that cannot be remedied through regular editing, or the subject of the article is objecting then there is no BLP reason to default to delete. If there are real issues sure, but BLP should not be used to delete when BLP is not at issue. This distinction needs to be clear. All too often the BLP exceptions are used when BLP is not the motive. Chillum 03:42, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose You've got to be kidding me. The closing admin for the David Shankbone AfD comes over here and makes this change, then becomes the closing admin at that AfD and uses it to close (even though the poor closing statement simply calls that AfD a "delete", ignoring the fact that more raw votes were for "Keep"). This just reeks of misuse of the ability to edit the encyclopedia. Even if the change were a good idea, initiating the change by this particular editor at this particular time basically looks like twisting the entire encyclopedia to get one outcome in one case, regardless of what dozens of editors made the effort to try to decide in a good, civil discussion. Don't we need to show respect for these editors? Perhaps the change should be made later, but not now. Wikipedia should try to avoid becoming a farce. And this kind of effort at policy change at this time makes it very hard to assume good faith on the part of the proponents. Don't you see what you look like? JohnWBarber (talk) 03:47, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Wait, when did "default to delete" in any situation gain consensus? The last discussion I remember on the subject in May it was shot down. Did I miss a changing of consensus, or was it just inserted one day? Chillum 03:50, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Good question. It didn't. But the change was made on the page for this policy anyway before it was edited back out, which is why we're discussing it now. If there's some kind of typical practice of defaulting to delete in AfDs for marginal BLPs, then let's have the diffs and let's watch that position gain consensus here. JohnWBarber (talk) 04:37, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

• Support I think Wikipedia has too many marginally notable BLP articles, and any way to reduce them is beneficial. Unless there is a clear consensus to keep, these marginal articles should go. Otherwise, we reduce the overall quality of the Encyclopedia by becoming a phone book or a vanity site. Also, BLPs are extremely hard to guard against vandalism and malicious edits, and articles about marginally notable individuals strain our ability to keep junk and potential libel out. Crum375 (talk) 04:18, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• Support I strongly agree with Lar's suggestion, so long as it says that "no consensus" closes of BLP AfDs may default to delete, rather than requiring that this be so. That is, when an admin closes a BLP AfD as no consensus, they have the option to either "default to keep" or "default to delete." Making it purely the latter (or the former, as has been the case in the past) is too much of a straight jacket, and I think what's needed here is more admin discretion when it comes to marginally notable BLPs that likely could be (or already have been) highly problematic. At the least I'd like to try this for awhile and see if it works/helps, and if it creates huge problems (which is possible, though I won't spill the beans and say how) we can change the practice again. Just in terms of how to run this discussion, I would suggest that it be listed at the centralized discussions page or wherever else necessary to get broad community feedback, and I would also suggest that folks try to think about this in general terms and without respect to the recent David Shankbone AfD. This discussion stems from that, but is by no means intrinsically tied to it, and we should try to think about this proposal in terms of the broader BLP problem of which we are all aware (and about which we have done next to nothing) rather than in the context of a recent (and heated) community debate about a specific article. The discussion here is vastly more important than the discussion there was, and one could have wanted to keep the Shankbone article (and hate the way the AfD was closed...the second time!) and still support this. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 04:30, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• Support - I was going to oppose per Chillum, but given that BLP is essentially a beefed-up version of every other important content policy, I can't really think of any situations where deletion would be considered, but BLP would not in any way be an issue. Mr.Z-man 04:59, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose There are already plenty (too many?) tools to deal with BLPs. The problem isn't with BLPs that are nominated for deletion, it is with BLPs that go unchecked and unwatched. Any editor has the mandate to ignore 3RR to remove BLP violations, and admins have virutally limitless permission to "shoot first, ask questions later" in any BLP dispute. Flipping the consensus to "default to delete" allows too much suppression of political dissent. I question whether Orly Taitz's or even Murder of Robert Eric Wone would have survived an AfD had such been the default deletion outcome. Fact is, BLP is used in a partisan manner. This proposal would embolden such partisan use, without any corresponding reduction of risk. Jclemens (talk) 05:08, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

The partisan use of BLP is precisely my concern. Chillum 05:12, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

I agree, that is very much a concern, and I think part of how you deal with that is by not making delete the automatic default for no consensus BLPs but rather an option the closing admin can take, thus admins would not be forced to delete in crazy-partisan AfDs that happened to end no consensus. Still, problems could remain, even among admins themselves who could close no consensus AfDs too aggressively as delete defaults because they have an agenda to rid the 'pedia of as many BLPs as possible (not commenting on that view one way or another, just saying it's obviously out there and pursuing it would be an abuse of deletion policy). For both Chillum and Jclemens or anyone thinking along your lines I have a question: would you be more likely to support this if we made this a "trial change", e.g. change the policy for a couple of months, keep a close eye on what happens, and then re-evaluate at the end and determine whether we really have consensus for it or not? I wonder if that isn't a more workable compromise, also being in the spirit of the flagged revisions proposal that eventually won consensus as a "trial". --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 05:35, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

I'd rather, if it's to be a trial, that it be a set of administrators 1) deleting no-consensus BLPs under IAR, 2) Logging them centrally for tracking and discussion, and 3) Logging any resultant DRVs from such IAR closes. I'd favor that sort of a trial period as a way to see if consensus has indeed changed, and if abuses have been absent. Jclemens (talk) 18:25, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

• Support. This isn't a new thing. I'll diff some of the AFDs in the next day or so. It's a bit late now, but this has been a change in tradition effective for some time now. There are a few commonsense things that would serve to significantly improve the BLP problem. This is one of them. To say "there are already plenty (too many?) tools to deal with BLPs" is beyond ridiculous. I don't even have a further reply to that. Lara 05:17, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• Strong Oppose This policy change will cause many headaches in the future if it is adopted. Anything that can be borderline considered borderline, after a hard fought discussion will simply go to delete because the closing administrator will, on his/her whim, decide so. There are too many problems with allowing this clause/loophole. We should come to a consensus that you can absolutely NOT default to delete on a no consensus of a borderline notable subject (who decides notability anyways? the community cannot have decided on this if a no consensus is the result, so therefore you cannot determine from a no consensus vote that there was consensus that he is marginally notable). You see how FUBARed this is? A lengthy discussion on whether or not a subject is notable, and the outcome of that can be reduced to whether or not the closing administrator thinks the subject is notable. How does that work? I'm also concerned that this discussion is only reaching the most ardent voters at the last AFD and may not be a proper, impartial consideration of this issue. Varks Spira (talk) 06:03, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

If the community at an AfD debate cannot decide if a subject is notable or not, i.e. "no consensus", then defaulting to keep is just as arbitrary a solution as defaulting to delete. As biographies of the living need to have particular care to be neutral, accurate, well sourced etc. this gives us a good reason to make this arbitrary decision on the side of deletion. Now this proposal is not saying that we must delete no consensus BLPs, even if many of us feel that should be the case, just that the closer will be allowed an extra degree of discretion. Kevin (talk) 06:11, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

I've no significant objection to tightening up our inclusion guidelines for BLPs. I do object to defaulting to deletion for NC discussions. If the goal is to have fewer BLPs of "debatable" notability, we should change WP:N, not WP:DEL. This change will result in three problems: #1 it will be easier for partisons to delete articles on people they don't like. #2 It will greatly increase the "random by admin" issues at AfD. #3 It solves no real problem: there will be fewer BLPs, but we'll get to the point that people just renom until they get a closer that deletes. Then it gets recreated and gets renomed until kept. Just too much room for the admin to enforce their own opinion. Hobit (talk) 15:11, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Kevin, you clearly do not understand the concept of "No Consensus". That means, do nothing. It doesn't mean delete the article. It means there is no need to go in a new direction and the article remains in place. Varks Spira (talk) 23:42, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Choosing to keep is just as much an action as choosing to delete. The actions we choose to take after a debate are not part of the process that builds consensus, or fails to do so. Kevin (talk) 00:10, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

((ec))Actually, that's not quite correct. The concept of no consensus means that it is not clear one way or another what the will of the community is i.e. there is not a consensus to keep or delete. It does not mean that nothing should be done, as a state of consensus or lack thereof can only lead to an action through a governing process that pairs said state with the resulting outcome. In the example where three possible states (keep, delete, unknown/unclear) can be the outcome of a given request for consensus, it is important to have agreement on how all three states are handled. The "do nothing" approach is a result of the "default to keep" rule, not that no consensus has been reached in the first place. From a purely logical point of view, the opposite outcome is just as valid. Many thanks, Gazimoff 00:14, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

• Way too early to discuss – let's wait until everyone cools down so we can discuss this whole thing civilly and rationally as opposed to arguing emotively. I'd recommend 1 month at the least. MuZemike 06:22, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
  • what if in a month there's some other controversial AfD? How long do we wait? Also, see here where SlimVirgin eloquently argued for this very change. She was right then and it's been how long since then? How much more harm is going to be done while we wait for "the right time"? No time like the present. ++Lar: t/c 17:39, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
    • What I mean is, the timing behind such a proposal is horribly bad, especially in the wake of one of our more contentious AFDs we've had in a while. Looking at the below commentary (as well as above, which sparked my recommendation), users here are overreacting as a result of the recent AFD; this has turned into a wiki-flamewar with all users involved here ready to tear each others' heads off in a virtual fashion (of course, I think some people here would rather do that). There's going to be an imminent review of the AFD in question, so we shouldn't be pushing this right now. Wait a while so that everyone has a chance to cool down, collect their thoughts, and are able to discuss this rationally and civilly. MuZemike 19:00, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
  • way too early? This debate and discussion has being going on for years. I can understand the desire to have cool rational discussion, but how long until the next BLP tempest? Perhaps that is indicative that something needs done (badly overdue, in my opinion) Achromatic (talk) 19:50, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
    • I meant too early with regards to the recent developments in the Shankbone case, which has everyone worked up as a result. MuZemike 21:15, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• Weak oppose I understand the rationale and I understand the scope of the BLP problem, but like automatically deleting unreferenced BLPs, this is another strongarm solution which doesn't even begin to focus on the crux of the matter. I'm not generally opposed to the notion of shifting our stance on 'consensus' in AfDs like this but I don't feel that a flick of a switch in the deletion policy is likely to do it. I can haz extremism? Protonk (talk) 06:37, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose Hard cases make bad law. Policy changes should not be made to contrive a result in a particular controversial case in which many of the participants seem to have a conflict of interest. Colonel Warden (talk) 06:58, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose in the strongest possible terms, the BLP I signed up for is to prevent unsourced or poorly sourced information about living people from being introduced here, not to prevent well sourced information from being introduced. I never even conceived that this type of misuse would be tolerated. That monster is well out of control already, and clearly caused a horribly mistaken decision in the Shankbone case. Let's rein it in here before it goes any further. We should delete when there is strong consensus to do so (either explicitly through an XfD discussion showing clear consensus or implicitly through standing policies such as CSD). We should not delete at any other time or for any other reason. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 07:04, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose -- there are sufficient methods for dealing with problems in BLPs and this is serious overkill. And: when this proposal fails, it would be appropriate for people to stop claiming, falsely, that it is already policy. Since it has already failed once this year (here), persisting in making this false claim strikes me as disruptive. Nomoskedasticity (talk) 07:19, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose No reason to treat BLPs any differently from any other article, except that we recognize that they are more likely than other articles to generate defamation/privacy breaches, and we should therefore take steps to prevent such (semi-protection being the obvious answer) without otherwise harming the encyclopedia.--Kotniski (talk) 08:33, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose Hands too much power and responsibility to administrators, and is an attempt to change practice, rather than describe it. Illustrated in the Shankbone case, where a snowball no consensus was closed as a keep and then a delete. The usual and sensible thing is to make major changes by consensus, unless there are pressing and unusual reasons otherwise. In that case, there very clearly were not.John Z (talk) 10:24, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• Support despite the fact that Jimbo long ago lost the moral credibility to give any kind of lead to the community I agree that this is way overdue. This is a correct description of what has been happening in deletion discussions recently and is only a small extension to the existing rule that marginally notable blps may be deleted at admin discretion when closing an AFD. Spartaz ^Humbug! 10:50, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• Support wording per Jimbo, Lar, Alison, etc. AfDs on marginally notable BLPs should default to delete unless there is clear consensus to keep. Cla68 (talk) 12:39, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose Subject requests deletion of questionably notable bio = speedy. Wikipedian mmorpg-max-leveler requests deletion of questionably notable bio of someone he dislikes = defaults to keep. Hipocrite (talk) 12:41, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• Strong support as illustrative of practice and the right thing to do. Articles can easily be recreated if they deleted incorrectly, or if the person somehow becomes notable. The same cannot be said for something that is kept. It is always better to err on the side of caution with BLPs, and remove it so there is one less thing to worry about. Majorly talk 13:15, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

• I am a bit confused, are you saying that if an article is kept it cannot be deleted later? The same can be said of something that is kept see: An article can easily be deleted if it is kept incorrectly. Chillum 14:38, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

• If something is possibly causing harm and it's deleted, while it's deleted it isn't causing harm. It can be brought back later. On the other hand, if something is possibly causing harm and it remains around... it's still causing harm. Better safe than sorry. ++Lar: t/c 17:32, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

• There is also damage to the encyclopedia to be concerned about. I would say that deleting an article that should have been kept is damaging our content. I think BLP should be about preventing actual harm, not taking drastic measures to prevent theoretical harm. BLP already allows for 3RR exempt reversions of edits in violation. Chillum 14:22, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

• Strong oppose new policy, strongly support Jim Wales stepping down permanently. Many of the problems wikipedia has can be attributed to the company culture he has deliberatly cultivated. Ikip (talk) 14:33, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

• Are you seriously asking a Wikipedian to "step down" because he has a contrary point of view with you on this issue? This "company culture" you speak of is the foundation that runs this whole thing and set its initial goals to begin with. The very existence of Wikipedia can be attributed to the company culture so don't hold your breath waiting for anyone to step down. Chillum 14:36, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

• I think it's a shame this has moved straight to polling when I feel some discussion is in order. Firstly, there is a big difference between a BLP that is up for deletion where the result is "no consensus" and an uncited BLP or one where the debate centers around factual accuracy and the like. A well-cited article about a minor public figure where the debate centers around his notability should not be treated any differently than any other article at AfD. We have no moral obligation to prevent well-cited material from being in here if the only question is to the notability of the subject and this question has ended in no consensus. On the other hand, if the debate is closed as no consensus and after the debate there are still no reliable sources in the article, it may need to be closed as a delete. This would also hold true for BLPs where the no consensus is over "BLP-related issues" so to speak, such as whether a subject can be described from a neutral point of view or whether it an article about the subject would inherently be biased against the subject. I'd support this proposal being worked on some more and codified a bit stricter as not all BLP articles at AfD require special treatment. ThemFromSpace 14:51, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• Just to try to make things clearer for everybody (concerning how this discussion began and how it relates to the Shankbone AfD), I put together this timeline: Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion/David Shankbone#Shankbone AfD closing timeline -- JohnWBarber (talk) 15:23, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• (edit conflict) Strong oppose per the following points:

1. We are not a dead tree encyclopedia, fortunately, so invoking dead-tree criteria is nonsense.

2. "Marginal notability" has no policy/guideline definition I am aware of. It is a can of POV-worms. If it is notable, it is notable. If not, it is not. We already have tons of restrictive BLP guidelines that help prune non-notable people.

3. It gives too much power to the closing admin discretion, making it easier to disregard the community feeling

4. I see no hint it is "accepted practice". I know many editors and admins subscribe to such a point of view, but it's all but clear that they are a majority and even them do not always abide to such a conduct.

5. I see no compelling reason to "default to delete" for no consensus BLPs, unless the discussion has proven serious BLP concerns which cannot be solved by less drastic means like editing, semiprotection and protection, as per the deletion policy: If the page can be improved, this should be solved through regular editing, rather than deletion..

6. WP:JIMBOSAID.

--Cyclopia^talk 15:26, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

1) Who invoked dead-tree criteria? marginal notability != dead-tree criteria. 2) Marginal notability exists when the community is unable to come to a consensus that a subject is notable. If it needs a definition, it can be defined, but its not like its an undefinable abstract concept. 3) Admins have always had the discretion to do this and several have been doing so. 5) That's basically the "someone will fix it" approach that's gotten us into this mess. If there's a threat of deletion, someone might actually fix it during the AFD, otherwise, no one will be bothered to do so, they'll just argue that it could be fixed and therefore should be kept, regardless of how bad the current state is. Mr.Z-man 18:08, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

1)The proposer invoked dead-tree criteria: Being kind is more important than having every marginal BLP that no dead tree encyclopedia would have. 2)We have notability guidelines. Even too many of them. If there is no consensus, it means that there is no consensus, not that it is consensually "marginally notable". 3)Admins as far as I understand do not have the discretion to delete articles disregarding the AfD outcome and the current "default to keep" policy 5)"Someone will fix it" is how this encyclopedia works. We have no deadline, we're not in a hurry and the deletion policy says that if it can be fixed by editing, so be it. Note it says "can", not "will", see above. --Cyclopia^talk 19:23, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Again, a definition of "marginally notable" is not an unresolvable issue, its a minor one at most. I fail to see what the number of guidelines has to do with anything at all. Or we could just go with the definition of marginal - "at the lower extent of a standard" - given that WP:N is a standard, that shouldn't be too hard to figure out. Admins have always had discretion, contrary to what some people might say, WP:IAR does in fact apply to everything on Wikipedia, not just things that aren't related to deletion. Its a good thing we're not in a hurry, because at our current rate, our BLP issues will be solved approximately 10 years after never. "Someone will fix it" is not how the encyclopedia works, or at least not how its supposed to, its supposed to be "'you' can fix it", not "point out the problem so someone can maybe consider fixing it a couple years from now." Wikipedia works by editors fixing problems that they encounter, Wikipedia stagnates by people just tagging the problems (or in this case just acknowledging that they exist) and hoping someone else will deal with them. Mr.Z-man 01:20, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

"Lower extent"...how low? And how do you decide it is at the "lower extent". Come on, it becomes easy for everyone to argue that almost everyone not being the current POTUS or an Oscar winner is of "marginal notability", if arguing smart enough. The point is: We have notability guidelines for people. Even too many of them. These guidelines tell us who is notable and who is not, and they are already fairly arbitrary thresholds (see WP:PORNBIO for example: why Playboy centerfolds are OK and Penthouse's POTM not?). If you are decided to be above the guideline (which is already often hotly debated), you are. If not, you're (probably) not. Or do we have to add arbitrary thresholds on arbitrary thresholds? Moreover, the point is that "no consensus" means that there is no consensus on the notability, not that it is consensually thought to be "marginally notable" -whatever it means. --Cyclopia^talk 12:50, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

If the community is truly incapable of creating a policy definition of 2 English words (one of which already has a policy dentition), then we have far bigger problems than this. I'm sorry, but I just don't see the definition of "marginal notability" (which technically isn't even necessary to define if we just say "default to delete on no consensus") as anything more than a distraction to real issues. Mr.Z-man 16:04, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

• Strong oppose (and agree that this is a bad time for such a change and this discussion). Yes, if someone requests deletion, we should weight this request. But globally defaulting to delete for just one class of articles is further WP:CREEP and not a good idea. One reason for default to keep is to avoid fighting the same battle over and over again when contentious articles are recreated. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 15:32, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
  • Sorry, why exactly is this a bad time? This has nothing to do with Shankbone. There's always some AfD or another that some person or another is going to claim is controversial. We have been deleting things under admin discretion this way for some time now, the wording change just allows written policy to catch up to practice. (++Lar: t/c 16:41, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
    • I think you are wrong in claiming that "this has nothing to do with Shankbone". The change was made during the closing phase of the AfD, by an involved admin who had previously argued for deletion (on DRV), and who then used that change to justify his very controversial close as "delete". This is not "some person or other" claiming controversy, these are many experienced users, many of them admins. Adn "we" have not been deleting things this way. I think this change should be discussed independent from the current AfD, and I don't think this can be achieved now. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 17:02, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• Comment: Default to delete is just the right thing to do and those of you that are oppposing are a bunch of meanies. That's a semi facetious comment, but if you're opposing this, go look in a mirror, and repeat to yourself that we are supposed to be excellent to each other, to be nice, to be respectful of those that our widely publicised pages might harm, and then look deep within yourself and see if having a bunch of marginal BLPs around that often end up wildly slanted, or vandalism targets, or worse, is really the sort of project you want to be associated with. If after that little exercise you want to default to keep, well then, yes you are a big meanie. For shame. ++Lar: t/c 16:41, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Lar, you are not a kind of ethical authority that can tell us from heavens what is "right" or "wrong". It is the right thing for you and for people who agree with you, nothing else. Much less you can tell people that disagree with you that are meanies or that should shame: should I remind an administrator of WP:NPA? Please accept that there are different viewpoints on what is considered right or wrong, and accept that ethics is not an absolute. That said, I stand even more strongly after your comment by default to keep. Because you made it clear that there is no reason to default to delete apart from a very idiosyncratic POV on the existence of "marginal BLP" (without even a definition of "marginal"). The project I want to be associated with is a project which doesn't self-censor for a vague "might harm" handwaving. It is a project which encompasses as much as possible notable informaton in a reliable way. It is a project which exists to be an encyclopedia, not a charity. And I have no shame for that, I am proud of that. What I would be ashamed of, is a project which is so insecure about itself to decide to self-censor itself. --Cyclopia^talk 16:55, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Quite well-stated. "Avoid harm" is an admirable goal, taken on its own. But the primary goal of Wikipedia is to be a free repository of all human knowledge. Our gamble is on "more information is better". The current (?as of yesterday?) policy allows for special consideration of the subject - that goes far enough to avoid harm. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 17:07, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

"It is a project which encompasses as much as possible notable informaton in a reliable way. " Actually, it's not. That might be the GOAL, but it's not the outcome. Take a look at how many articles needed to be protected and how many more need it but haven't been. That's all the moral authority I need. ++Lar: t/c 17:32, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

That should be "all the moral authority [you] need" to protect the articles, not to delete them without consensus (or a request from the subject of the biography). user:J aka justen (talk) 18:01, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Call me a meanie if you will, but it seems to me that the issues behind our normal default to "keep" stance don't go away just because the subject is a living person. A blanket "default to delete" is just too broad of a change to address BLP problems. I would support an advisory that admins should take BLP issues into consideration when adjudicating AfDs, but deleting articles when there is no consensus to delete them is just too sweeping a change. A person can be against "having a bunch of marginal BLPs around that often end up wildly slanted, or vandalism targets, or worse" and still oppose this proposal. Powers ^T 18:05, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Shame on you, Lar, for using those kind of tactics, which are definitely not in keeping with "we are supposed to be excellent to each other, to be nice, to be respectful". I oppose defaulting to delete, because it's not the right solution for the problem of negative, unsourced BLPs. POV and sourcing issues are, and have always been, editing issues. Whack it out with a chainsaw if needed, but there's no call to delete. Sure, it will be in the history (although that can be fixed without deleting the whole article), but it would also be in the history if a vandal came along and replaced the article with "This person is a (insert derogatory term of your choosing here)" We don't delete the article when that happens (which is certainly unsourced negative information), so what's the need to delete for other unsourced negative info? If we need to fix issues with edits that shouldn't stay in history, or bad editors, let's focus on that issue. Don't use deletion as a means of throwing the baby out with the bath water.--Fabrictramp | talk to me 18:10, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

• Comment - this isn't about Shankbone at all - it's about using that AfD to create a policy that was rejected. User:Jake Wartenberg, the "close no consensus default to delete" admin, took a two sentence biography with spurious sources of Yll Hoxha and in an AfD with six deletes and six keeps, did a "close no consensus default to keep" just on October 9th. Here we had five mainstream sources (Columbia Journalism Review, Brooklyn Rail, Haaretz, Jerusalem Post, Jewish Week) and better arguments to keep. No, not about Shankbone at all. Go Yll Hoxha! --LooptyLoos (talk) 18:07, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

• Not sure what point you are trying to make here, and some people seem to be missing what the language of the proposed change said, namely that no consensus AfDs on marginally notable bio articles may default to delete, basically at administrator discretion, not that they must. So if Jake Wartenberg was a believer in this principle (and I'm not defending his edit of the policy while the Shankbone AfD was running—that was clearly wrong, as was his choice to close the AfD), it would not at all be inconsistent for him to close Yll Hoxha as default to keep and David Shankbone default to delete. Presumably the argument one would make (certainly the one I would make) is that there were already BLP related problems with the Shankbone article and a strong argument was made in the AfD that these problems would continue, whereas that did not seem to be an issue for the Yll Hoxha article. Speaking as an admin who does close AfDs from time to time, I would only use the "no consensus, default to delete" option when there was a strong argument in the AfD that this was necessary because of BLP issues in the article. Perhaps we could reword the proposed change somewhat to make that more clear. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 18:30, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

• The "may" word does not make the problem go away. The point is: If no consensus is reached to change the status of an article, the default to stay with the status quo until consensus comes out. If we give free choice to delete whenever there is no consensus, we basically make debated AfD outcomes almost completely dependent on the arbitrary admin will, meaning that admins will be given green light to disregard community processes, if they wish, whenever they are not bound by a huge majority of one side. Admins are human beings and have biases and preferences like anyone else, and as much as I appreciate their work, I wouldn't like them being able to delete articles only based on their own personal opinion. Otherwise we could shut down AfD and let individual admins decide. I hope no one sincerely wants that. --Cyclopia^talk 18:51, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

• If this proposal gained consensus, which already looks like it won't happen unfortunately, then it would not mean that "admins will be given green light to disregard community processes," it would mean that a community process had been changed in such a manner to give admins a green light to use their discretion on a certain class of AfDs (we already require them to use their discretion on AfDs in general when they determine "rough consensus", which is undoubtedly a judgment call, so it's not an enormous leap). The change could be worded in such a manner that is set real limits on what admins could do (e.g. marginally notable BLPs could be deleted if and only if there was a strong (and specific, as opposed to general) BLP-related argument in the AfD, which for 98% of BLP AfDs is simply not the case), and if any one admin got out of control they would certainly hear about it from the community. Ultimately what we are talking about is giving admins one other choice in how they close a certain set of BLPs. They already have three choices, and are already biased humans with their own opinions, so I don't think what is being proposed is remotely as radical as folks seem to be suggesting here. I think there are ways to word the policy such that it would be difficult to abuse it, and maybe we should have started by talking about that rather than supporting/opposing right off the bat. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 19:11, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

• Oppose Policy should not be changed to reflect practice. That's what discussion and consensus building is for. Rather, practice should itself be changed to reflect policy until that policy is changed through due process. Marginal notability defaults to notability and to keep. Lack of notability, marginal or not, is what defaults to delete. MichaelQSchmidt (talk) 18:20, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
  • Comment. This is completely wrong. The only reason ever to change a policy is retrospectively to recognize to observe that the actual practice is no longer matching what the policy had stated. The real discussion here should focus on whether in the recent past, if people involved in the article editing and deletions have been behaving as if the proposed change was already in effect. patsw (talk) 15:57, 27 October 2009 (UTC)
    • Comment Actually, MichaelQSchmidt is correct. If a few editors or even admins are acting contrary to policy, it is their actions that should change, not the policy. The policy should be changed based on discussion and consensus. Rlendog (talk) 02:23, 6 November 2009 (UTC)
• Strong Support - Firstly, Wikipedia affects real lives and reputations. If you're unlucky enough to have a Wikipedia biography about you, it can damage your reputation and even impact your ability to find work. We have a responsibility to promote and encourage good quality and reliable BLPs, but we also have a duty to ensure that those that fall short of the standards required are deleted. But why do we need to go the extra bit and ensure that those articles that we as a community just can't make our mind up on get deleted as well? Quite simply because it is in exactly this grey area that most of our problems occur. If you're a veteran politician or a popular musician, you probably don't have much to fear from issues with your biography. If you're a celebrity restaraunt critic or similar you might have more concerns about content, especially when it gets referenced in interviews with you. If you're even more obscure and only borderline notable, anything your article says has an even larger impact. It's for these people whose biographies inhabit the grey middle ground who need our protection moreso than the rest, and who should be afforded our protection. Secondly, this isn't about purging well sourced material. An article that clearly passes our policies for inclusion is likely to result in a strong keep vote at AfD. It's only those articles on the borderline - that already suffer from sourcing issues - that would be deleted in these cases. Also, deletion isn't forever - if better sourcing comes to light the article can always be sandboxed and improved upon. Thirdly, BLPs are a large workload for the OTRS volunteers. They are tricky subjects and difficult to resolve, and take a large amount of our volunteers limited time. We are reaching a point in time where volunteer effort in this project as a whole is fading (see list of acive admins etc), and it's right to make some sensible choices about how that effort is best used. We can no longer rely on unclear or inefficient policy, just shrug our shoulders and think that OTRS, or Admins, or BLP patrol will clear it up afterwards. We have to grasp the nettle and say that for some issues like these we have to implement fixes that may not be the most desirable in a perfect editing environment, but that are the fairest, most transparent and most straightforward we can manage. Many thanks, Gazimoff 18:47, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

  In addition, I would encourage anyone who opposes this motion to try out volunteering for OTRS and working the quality queue for a while. Gazimoff 18:48, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

  Is that an invitation, or just the standard blowoff? Hipocrite (talk) 18:53, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

• I would be happy to help with OTRS but I understood it was only for trusted admins (and rightly so). I will have a look. --Cyclopia^talk 18:54, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

• It's a genuine suggestion. OTRS isn't an admin-only thing, and I'd encourage anyone to apply to join. What I'm trying to say is that it's not right that we only look at the end result that's displayed to our readers, but that we also look at the feedback those readers provide us and how hard or time consuming it can be to resolve some of that feedback. I'm not asking you to take my word for it, or even the word of Cary Bass (who runs OTRS). I'm suggesting that you apply and see it for yourself. Read some of the emails, listen to the voicemails, respond to the issues these people bring to us. Then come back here and revisit this issue, and see if you still feel the same way. Many thanks, Gazimoff 19:02, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

I have no doubt that the ticket queue provides insight into the many wp:blp issues we face here, and the same goes for wp:blp/n, which I have spent some time at trying to assist resolving issues, including two notable ones that I recall where arguable notability combined with vocal detractors as anonymous editors made the situations particularly challenging for the biography subjects. In both of those cases, time, mediation, and a lot of patience resulted in resolutions that all sides agreed with. All of this to say that I agree deletion has its place, and if either of those two individuals had requested deletion, I would have supported their requests. Deletion should not, however, be carried out without that request or without community consensus. user:J aka justen (talk) 19:12, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

It appears that I lack the je ne sais quoi that the OTRS mailing-list requires per what I consider reliable evaluation. I'm sitting in the dead OTRS IRC channel per the meta page waiting for someone to request help. I'll do that in lieu of being poked and prodded by max-level MMOchampions at meta. Hipocrite (talk) 00:57, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

• Strong oppose. I see several issues here. (i) Subjects of articles that are seen as having marginal notability can ask to have their articles removed and that would tip any no consensus scale to delete. (ii) As they are living people who have already gained at least borderline notability ... seemingly they are simply one or two interviews or other media coverage about them to meet the GNG. (iii) The very real next step of logic is that all discussions should be ruled as default to delete unless an umambiguous keep is proven. Thus gaming the systems for those that seem to be into that becomes that much easier. (iv) The default to keep seems to work well in that it presumes that with more time and attention an article can and will improve. We still waste a lot of good content that our readers want when alternatives are readily available but unfortunately the entire XfD system thrives on a battleground basis instead of working to ultimately serve our readers. This is seen repeated daily and the very people who are willing to do the work are repelled by the perpetual toxic atmosphere. IMHO, this will only add fuel to an already contentious area serving only those who wish to simply delete content - we instead should reward assessment and finding ways to keep the best material. I think we fall very short in that. -- Banjeboi 19:19, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

• Weak oppose. I do work at OTRS (though I don't see a "quality" queue, just the normal vandalism, courtesy etc. queues; does one need to apply especially?) as well as at AfD and I can't say that I remember a case where such a deletion policy would have been required to delete an actually harmful BLP article. Such cases are normally rather extraordinary and can be dealt with under CSD or BLP rules directly. That means I don't think the "do no harm" argument is applicable here. Whether it is more generally desirable to have more borderline notable articles around is another question, but I have no clear and general opinion on that subject.  Sandstein  19:28, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• Strong Support Until such time as WP can make a reasonable assurance that material on a living person, who serves to be potentially damaged by writings here, is protected, monitored, otherwise, this is to me the only sensible option. "SOFIXIT", etc, etc, do nothing to solve the root problem. Why should a subject of a BLP that is inaccurate and/or defamatory have to find someone who is NOTCOI to fix these issues? They shouldn't. Achromatic (talk) 19:48, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• Support. We have too many marginally notable BLPs that prove to be unmaintainable. Not only are these unfair to their subjects, they also reflect poorly on Wikipedia. Until and unless a better solution can be found, we should default to deleting them. *** Crotalus *** 19:54, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Deleting is not a way to clean. The policy states clearly that if an article can be improved by editing, it should not be deleted but improved. We have protection and semiprotection for problematic cases, and why can't we use these tools to avoid BLP troubles instead of shutting down content even if no consensus to delete exists? --Cyclopia^talk 22:31, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

• Support Per comment above, we don't even have enough personnel to watch clearly-notable BLPs. Privacy issues must ever trump content issues. I'm amazed that all the people above who are NOT posting under their birth names, don't see that. What goes around, comes around. I don't want to see Wikipedia become an internet repository for any piece of biographical information on living people which gets loose, and is published somewhere, by anybody. Particularly in this day and age when internet publication (not just WP) is almost completely unregulated due to CDA sec 230. SBHarris 20:07, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Ehm, we're not talking of completely unnotable people. These are already deleted, and privacy is protected as such. We are talking of people for which there are enough sources to be unable to reach a consensus on what to do. This usually means that even a problematic article is based on some kind of public source. Privacy concerns are already dealt with other policies, and they are irrelevant here. --Cyclopia^talk 20:10, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

• Support default to delete. Oppose admin discretion. We can have only one default position. My preference is that it be delete; if the community decides that it should be keep, so be it. Either way, it should not be within the gift of any individual editor, admin or not, to override the default position. If the community is unable to find consensus, it shouldn't then issue an open invitation to any passing admin: we can't decide, you choose. The whole point of a default position is that it obtains in the absence of a consensus against it. Talk of allowing an admin to choose to default to keep or default to delete is really just talk of handing personal discretionary control over content to a single editor. MoreThings (talk) 20:53, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose. The community needs to understand BLP, and the !voters should understand the importance of BLP, and presumably, the !voters understand that real BLP concerns weigh in favour of deletion. If the !voters don't understand this, then they need it better explained to them. It is not desirable to have processes or individuals in the habit of overriding the community. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 21:23, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

  Sorry to nitpick here, but the problem being described is one where there is no clear consensus from the community if an article should be deleted or not. If there's a clear indication that it should be kept or deleted, then it's quite right that an admin should carry out the community's will. But for those situations where it's not clear either way, the reccomendation is that the article be deleted precisely because of the importance of BLPs. Hope this helps. Gazimoff 21:31, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

• Strong support Per Lar, Jimbo, Alison, and others, including Common Sense. Privacy, marginal notability, the all-too-common libel and slander that happens—all point to 'we have way too many non-notable bios for a serious encyclopedia.' Priyanath ^talk 21:43, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose I don't believe in giving admins discretion as it invites capricious decisions from people whose judgments are no better nor worse than those of ordinary editors, and the results of which lead to unknown outcomes and drawn-out dramas. I believe in default-to-keep, given our philosophy and attempt to become the summation of human knowledge, with a default to delete if the subject requests it for borderline notability with no clear consensus. I'm well aware of the problems with BLPs. -->David Shankbone 22:06, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• Strong Support for Default to Delete with a side of WTF for the people who are saying that there's too many tools for admins to enforce BLP. Default to Delete and Liberal Semi is the least we should be doing to protect living people as much as possible from being defamed by Wikipedia. How many Siegenthalers.. how many Fuzzy Zoellers.. How many do we need to get it through our heads that the potential for Wikipedia to do serious unwarranted harm to people. SirFozzie (talk) 22:46, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
• Different I don't like, and in fact oppose, "default to delete". I also, for marginal BLPs, don't like, and in fact oppose, "default to keep". Both "default to" positions are too easy to abuse. I prefer the standard of "follow consensus if there is one, if there is not allow the administrator to apply judgment". This has previously been recorded in the BLP policy for subject requested deletions as allowing the admin to decide how much weight to assign to the subject's request. (I don't follow the policy on a regular basis to know if it is still there in that form or when it changed if it has.) I know that many such decisions will end up going to DRV. DRV isn't exactly overworked, could readily handle another case or two per day, and the precedent condition of whether or not there was a consensus can be tested by DRV editors just the same way they test the existence of consensus on other XfDs on a day in and day out basis - if they find that there was not consensus, then the closing admin's judgment will usually be endorsed. GRBerry 23:03, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] random break

• DRV on the Shankbone AfD has been started [2] JohnWBarber (talk) 00:06, 27 October 2009 (UTC)
• Support - Me and my wife were talking about this all afternoon as we went for one of our drives. We stopped at this little spot by the lake and I lit up one of my cigars. She made the very reasonable point that Wikipedia has a duty to the people whose biographies it carries. If someone has their biography up here it is a big deal - because it means any no good street punk can sidle onto their article and start hacking at it with a tyre iron. If my wife was ever a minor photographer or someone who made a blimp, I wouldnt want some little teenage bastard putting a claim on there that she once choked a horse to death, unless she actually did. If you're salman rushdie or soemone that famous, then it's unavoidable - we'd be laughed out of town on the end of a long dance parade if we deleted salman's article. But someone minor? I'd want to know it was pretty certain that they should have a biography on here, not that a load of people talked about it and couldn't make up their minds. Just as it is the burden of the person adding the information to prove it's the case, it should be the burden of the people who want wikipedia to carry this article that it's worthy of being here, and to face the consequences when someone like Bob Cherry^[who?] complains that some kid has put that he hacked a busload of kids to death with a chainsaw and that it's been up there for three months. If it can't be proved, they can't be kept. I thought she was speaking a great heap of sense, so once I'd put out my cigar and driven us home, I thought I'd give you just our two cents. Yours, Hands of gorse, heart of steel (talk) 00:12, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

• Is there an rss feed of your posts? I'd quite enjoy subscribing. It's like our own sort of version of A Prairie Home Companion. user:J aka justen (talk) 00:23, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

• Nod. The posts certainly are all above average! For me, I just want to know what kind of cigar it was. :) ++Lar: t/c 15:39, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

• Interesting prose apart, I still wait for a definition of "minor" or "marginable" notability. I want to remind everyone, again, that "no consensus" means that there is no consensus on the notability, not that editors agree that it is of marginal notability. --Cyclopia^talk 00:26, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

Isn't that typically the same thing though? We have drawn an arbitrary line in the sand for notability, and if editors cannot agree which side a subject falls on then I would have though that meets the definition of "marginal". Kevin (talk) 00:38, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict) It is a subtle but, in my opinion, not meaningless distinction. Example, rather artificial but not too much: Imagine we have a discussion about a BLP of a guy from, say, Mongolia (just a random choice). Few or no sources in English seem to exist on the guy, and a bunch of !deletes come out. Someone brings up some Mongolian sources, and a debate ensues about their reliability, which is affected by the fact that only one editor is able to read them and assess them. The sources in truth were truly enough for notability, but almost no one knows, and it is hard to decide -discussion closes as nc. That's just an example, but lots of situations like that, even if less blatant, happen every day on AfD. --Cyclopia^talk 01:30, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

(continuing the hypothetical scenario) So, seeing that we have no idea whether the person is notable and the only sources are extremely difficult to verify, and we have no idea whether anyone is ever going to actually do so, we err on the side of caution and delete the article. If someone later manages to prove that the sources establish notability then they can DRV the article, or just create a new version, based on the sources (since the original was apparently unreferenced); the reason for deletion would be addressed, so it wouldn't meet the G4 CSD. Mr.Z-man 03:55, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

Ok if you like it so, but it was not "consensus of marginal notability". It was "no consensus on notability". That's the point. People here want to defend "marginally notable" people without realizing that such a concept is much more problematic than it seems at a first look.--Cyclopia^talk 14:25, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

If you're going to disagree, would you mind at least arguing about the reasoning (the important part), rather than the semantics? What we call it is not important, the important part is why we do it (erring on the side of caution). Mr.Z-man 16:07, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

• Maybe simplistic, but I see a two-way street. In the closure of any no-consensus AfD (and lets presume that consensus was not reached because notability was marginal.. acccepted as existing per guideline, but not overwhelming), in order to justify a delete it should be shown how or why the keeping the article would harm the subject per WP:BLP and that such harm could not be corrected through normal editing prossesses. If there is no harm and there is no consensus, the default should be to maintain the staus quo... which would default to close as keep... and walk away until next time. Before any such close... keep or delete... due process must be followed in order to preserve the integrity of the project and its indivudual editors. And no, I'm not saying to keep something because it does no harm... I'm saying that a delete of a non-consensus closure should hapen ONLY if it can be shown how a keep would harm the subject. Status quo folks... status quo. Schmidt, ^{MICHAEL Q.} 01:24, 27 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose. Give up, people, this has been mooted before and it will not happen.—S Marshall ^Talk/_Cont 01:47, 27 October 2009 (UTC)
  • Do you have an actual opinion on this, or are you just opposing because other people have in the past? Mr.Z-man 03:48, 27 October 2009 (UTC)
    • Yes, I have an opinion. I've expressed it on a number of occasions in a number of different venues. The issue is that every time this idea gets voted down, we have another discussion "just to make sure". I'm quite sure it will resurface several more times yet.—S Marshall ^Talk/_Cont 11:35, 27 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose per "In truth, the aim of an encyclopédie is to collect all knowledge scattered over the face of the earth...All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings." - Denis Diderot explaining the goal of the Encyclopedia. Bad faith accounts make deliberate attention grabbing and disgraceful errors in articles on real people as noted here, but we would be foolish to delete the article discussed there just because of a bad apple that made the ridiculous edit. Deleting specific diffs that contain personal attacks on real people that could mar them in real life could be justifiable and we absolutely should be vigilant against such vandalism, but certainly not to the point of eliminating the articles themselves. Doing so is actually letting the vandals win by bullying us and scaring us away from being as comprehensive of an encyclopedia as we can and should be. If anything, perhaps we should be just as concerned about not having discussions in which editors make these sorts of over the top comments (I have seen a number of such insults in Afds by participants against the subject under discussion...such as Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jeff Dwire in which the first TWO deletes by two different editors following the nomination refer to a president by whimsical nicknames; how can we be taken seriously if an article is deleted and we are left with what looks more like mocking reasons for deletion rather than academic reasons and I know people well enough to know that they zero in on the name calling when reading such things). I can never get the logic behind it being okay to delete an article on someone, then having on the redlink page, something like deleted per Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Random BLP, which the subject of the former article and any interested party can read only to see these smears on him or her by the Wikipedians who determine the article's fate. How it is better for us to not have an article that is of interest to someone, but to keep a discussion with swearing and other jibes makes little to no sense. Sincerely, --A Nobody^{My talk} 02:27, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

  For that reason AFDs may be courtesy-blanked. In addition all AFDs are excluded from search engine access (via MediaWiki:Robots.txt). Rd232 ^talk 16:07, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

• Fully support with my mind, body and soul Admins just need to start doing this and to hell with what anybody says otherwise. Sometimes you just gotta do what's right and hope that eventually policy will be dragged along with the practice. This is almost enough to make me ask for my admin bit again. almost, but not quite Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 03:03, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

  I certainly appreciate the ardor of your comment... but it is my understanding that Admins enforce policy, but do not create it nor are they to act outside of it. Schmidt, ^{MICHAEL Q.} 03:38, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

  Indeed, and admin who does the "right thing(tm)" in their mind against the wishes of the community ceases to be a servant to the community and will also cease to be an admin before too long. Chillum 14:24, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

  So what? Is being an admin on some website more important than the harm done to innocent people by keeping around lousy, unwatched articles about them? That's sick. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 01:19, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

• Strong support per Lar, per Lara. Marginally notable people should not be covered here; marginally notable *anything* should not be here. In the case of BLP that have no strong ground under them, just delete them; it's the humane thing to do. Sincerely, Jack Merridew 03:50, 27 October 2009 (UTC)
• oppose This is a really bad idea. We've repeatedly have people push for it and the community has repeatedly said no. The primary problem is very simple: This doesn't solve anything substantially. The BLPs that are problems aren't the ones that are getting massive look-throughs at AfD pages. Once a BLP is at AfD and has anywhere near enough people commenting that one could reasonably define a lack of consensus then the page has been looked at by many people and many people will have it on their watchlist. That's not the sort of BLP that's a problem. The primary BLP problem are the many BLPs that no one is paying careful attention to, those vulnerable to repeated POV pushing, libel and the like. This is a bad idea that will simply delete many articles while doing nothing to actually solve any substantial BLP problems. Seriously cutting the nose to spite the face. There are many good ideas about what we should do to improve the BLP situation. Flagged revisions is the biggest one. We need to focus on dealing with the genuinely helpful things and not kid ourselves that everything that on its surface sounds like it will help the BLP situation will actually do much. JoshuaZ (talk) 05:00, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

I endorse the JoshuaZ summary completely. I wonder why can't we discuss, for example, semiprotection by default on BLP articles instead than deletion? --Cyclopia^talk 12:43, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

We can discuss it... in fact, I'm all for it (in addition, rather than instead). However unlike default to delete, a practice that has been done repeatedly, and has survived for some time, even if it's not done consistently, there is no support at all for default to semi. Even User:Lar/Liberal Semi (where if there was clear evidence of repeated or egregious vandalism, a BLP would get semi for a significantly longer period (but not indef) than the norm) ran into a lot of people sniping at it. So I don't think that it's an alternative. Application of it tends to get reverted quickly. Unlike default to delete where the track record is that most closes that way don't get overturned. ++Lar: t/c 15:00, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

Agree with Lar that there are multiple options here. Having the option to delete in a no consensus BLP of marginal notability would be just one way to deal with the BLP problem, and I could easily imagine instances where it would be useful. I know I'm not the only editor here who has come across marginal BLPs with some really problematic stuff in them, cleaned them up, and then watchlisted them. But I might have been the only regular editor to look at it, and since I'm hardly on Wiki all the time I could easily miss future BLP defamation and/or completely forget about the article completely. Maybe I think the article should just be deleted since I'm worried we can't protect it adequately, but if I think it passes the notability bar (albeit not by much) there's not much point taking it to AfD given the current deletion policy. If we make this slight adjustment in policy to allow for the possibility of deleting BLPs that are technically but marginally notable, then it provides another way for editors on a BLP patrol to deal with the problems they encounter. Each would be handled on a case by case basis, and (in my view at least) the closing admin would not be required to delete the article if there was no consensus, it would just be an option. As I said there are times where that would be useful. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 15:14, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

• Strong Oppose. There are enough problems as it is with rogue admins. Now we wish to give them even more power? Nuts. The agenda of the group (as mentioned somewhere above) that keeps appearing on the same AfD's, DelRev's and discusses at WR etc. needs to be examined. I suspect it is the same group that is pushing for this rule change. I try to imagine what kind of an admin goes into policy and enacts a change in rules in order to close per his wishes, and I see an admin psychopath who needs be impeached (or whatever you call it here when admins are turned away). I try to imagine what the motivations of a group that wants this change is, and I see (on the innocent side) a bored bunch to whom Wiki means so much that they wish to make it very difficult for BLP's to be put on because marginal BLP articles would discredit their involvement with Wiki, on the sinister side I can discern a bunch that wishes to eventually control much of the content on Wiki by having strength in numbers. Editors, I implore you to not allow this change, it is a step in the wrong direction. Turqoise127 (talk) 15:07, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

You're welcome to your views, but we don't suggest that other editors are psychopaths. That's completely out of line, and quite frankly ridiculous given the circumstances. Please try to assume good faith a bit more, both because it's the right thing to do and because people are far more likely to listen to what you say. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 15:19, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

Agree with Bigtimepeace. Turquoise127, in addition to assuming good faith, please avoid personal attacks, and also invoking conspiracy theories is not going to help your cause being listened. --Cyclopia^talk 15:21, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

I apologize for name calling, have struck out. On the other hand, I do not care much about being popular here, making friends or being liked. In my brief time here I have encountered so many inappropriate things that it makes me puke in my mouth quite frequently. This makes my comments overly-passionate. My take is that this encyclopedia can be a wonderful legacy for future generations. Frankly, AGF seems so childish and outdated to me. Who AGF's in real life? Would you AGF when you are getting wronged (I really wanted to say f....d, see, self-control)? What is different here, just the same people that are out there in real life, with personal agendas and motivations. Anyhow, an admin must be impartial, polite, knowlegeable, eloquent, must know the rules and interpret/apply them correctly, not have a Napoleon syndrome, not be deletionist or inclusionist. And must give thorough rationale for closures (otherwise has too much power). I do not see this happening, nor do I see too many admins displaying the traits I mention. And now, let's let them have even more power! My point on groupations is not a conspiracy theory, it is a fact of life. I did not say they are zombies. It is natural that similar minded persons stick together, my point is nothing is being done to discourage this behavior.

In conclusion, to rephrase my comments with AGF, pretty flowers please all you well meaning deletionists with absolutely no alterior motives, hug hug, kiss kiss, I beg to humbly and modestly say that I oppose this idea, please do not be mad, I deeply apologize, chocolate and puppies. Turqoise127 (talk) 16:01, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

My wife's friend Wanda has the problem where she pukes in her mouth, and I have to say it also makes her overly passionate. This is not a good combination for a man like myself who is quite revolted by vomit. I agree with your rules for the admin, but I would add that they must be chivalrous, as well as pure in word, thought and deed. They must not be like Napoleon, or indeed Stalin or Pinochet or any of these unsavoury sorts. They must strive for the noble cause of the encyclopaedia, and whenever they must decide the outcome of an AFD, they have the weight of history on their shoulders. Those who do not meet up shall be consigned to the flames, for they contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

I pity the well meaning deletionists - they do not understand how essential our articles on minor actors, lighting designers and sports stars are to the world's sum of knowledge, and how we must couple this with vigilance to ensure no damaging slurs are printed on their biographies and Google. It's not a paper encyclopaedia, after all!

Yours, Hands of gorse, heart of steel (talk) 16:34, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

I would be lying if I said your comment did not make me laugh. Almost to the point of another mouth puke. The wife thing must be pretty rough when it is time to give a kiss...

Anyhow, your point is taken, but you over simplify a bit. I do not think I ask too much of admins (although I like the weight of history and consigned to flames bits) if I propose they should not be obviously impartial. And I think you know I am not referring to lighting designers, minor actors and curb-side taco sellers, I am talking marginally notable subjects of some certain value... You did brighten up my day a bit though...Turqoise127 (talk) 16:54, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

• Comment Jimbo was making a general comment about ethics of biographies, not a specific one about what to do with 'no consensus' Afds. Before we start hailing his opinions and using it as wedge, I want to hear what Jimbo would do with this Wikipedian's biography, which has actually been kept multiple times (yet none since May 2007, a long time ago in BLP policy terms), because to me, it looks no different in quality or substance than Shankbone's biography. MickMacNee (talk) 15:58, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

Not to mention that he appears to be of two minds on the issue: "every single person on the planet" (here, last sentence). Nomoskedasticity (talk) 16:13, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

N: I think that's an incomplete quote. You left out the bolded part in this longer quote "I'd be happy to have, in theory, a good, neutral biography on every single person on the planet" and you omitted the context of the earlier paragraphs where he talked about how hard it is to maintain good, neutral, non hatchet job bios. I agree that "in theory" a bio on every single person on the planet would be OK,... IF we had something akin to Maxwell's Demon to make sure they were prefetly good and perfectly neutral. But that doesn't exist in practice. Better safe than sorry. If we cannot do a good job, we should do no harm by doing no job at all. Conserve our scarce resources. ++Lar: t/c 16:37, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

I mean to be making a point about our dear leader's confused state of mind re Shankbone. For the nth time, there were no problems of neutrality in that bio. Why then wouldn't Wales want a biography on him, if (at least for that one) neutrality isn't a problem and "in theory" billions of (neutral) biographies would be a good thing? Again, he's confused. No reason to give it any weight. Nomoskedasticity (talk) 16:47, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

"were no problems of neutrality in that bio" ... good choice of past tense there. Should it come back, give it time. I'd start a pool on when the thing gets semi'ed due to persistent vandalism but that's too easy to rig. And before you point out that it can be kept clean with effort, tell me which 20 other articles, more important, and farl less likely vandalism targets, we should abandon so we have the needed effort available. For what? A puff piece. This was a good close. ++Lar: t/c 16:52, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

MMN: That's a reasonable question. Why don't you ask him? Or I will if I remember. I know you didn't ask but that bio seems to have quite a bit more notability inherent in it, as Connolley seems to be published in the scientific literature multiple times. I'd cut the Wikipedia Work section way down though. (but here I am saying what I'd say in an AfD that isn't even this subject's AfD :) ... rather far afield. ) ++Lar: t/c 16:17, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

Take alook at WP:ACADEMIC. If that were the sum total of his publications, on face value it would definitely not mark him out as a particlarly noted academic. People can rack off five or ten before they even get their Doctorate, depending on their actual amount of input they put in. (Connolley appears to have only been the primary author of about 5 of those papers as well) MickMacNee (talk) 16:41, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

Fair enough. ++Lar: t/c 16:52, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

I think discussions about wikipedian biographies should be kept distinct from discussions about biographies generally. I lean toward deleting wikipedia related articles because they are very often navel-gazing in the extreme, but the community tends to disagree w/ me. Protonk (talk) 16:27, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

Damn that community. Bless its heart. user:J aka justen (talk) 20:51, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

• Oppose per Fabrictramp and JoshuaZ. Also agree with MuZemike et al. that this is not the best time for discussion. The tone of some of the supporters does not help things. Tim Song (talk) 16:47, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

• This is not the correct solution to the problem. Deletion is, ideally, a last resort measure to deal with articles that cannot be fixed in any way. There are other solutions to this problem, and they should be used rather than this. Chainsaws and barricades are preferable to bombs, as others have said. lifebaka++ 18:26, 27 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose as I have argued before in that last discussion on this topic here and on the previous discussion on the BLP talk page a year or two ago. I do not see why BLPs should default to delete as opposed to any article in which BLP material is included such as events, elections, etc, and sooner or later if this is successful default to delete will be proposed/stealth introduced by individual admin decision for those articles. Combined with the ease in which a few editors can make a discussion lack consensus, this is a stealth way in which editors can in effect make inlcusion of articles in wikipedia harder. I have seen nothing to make me change my opinion from previous discussions, although I continue to support flagged revisions for any/all BLPs which would be a far better way to improve protection for ALL BLP subjects rather than just a few where someone nominates them for deletion. Davewild (talk) 18:57, 27 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose If a person who barely satisfies WP:BIO or who had minor notability but is mostly known for one bad thing requests deletion, I would favor it. Otherwise, if an article satisfies WP:N, "no consensus" should default to "keep" as for other articles. This proposal would inevitably be used on occasion to advance some admin's cause, whatever it might be. It also smacks of censorship. Edison (talk) 23:12, 27 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose with qualification: The default in the case of No Consensus should certainly not be to delete the whole thing. The strongest negative default in such cases should be to keep the article as a place-holder with the basic verifiable facts, such as date and place of birth, public offices held, and maybe significant works. If protection or semi-protection is required to stop vandalism or defamation, so be it, but at least those looking for more information about Adolph Q. Notorious, who's suddenly appeared in the headlines or a trivia quiz, won't find a red-link and be tempted to create their own article. The very fact that about half those who've commented on a BLP article think it's notable enough to keep suggests that the default should be to keep the verifiable information so long as it's reasonably balanced (not everyone with a rap sheet or multiple divorces gets into Wikipedia, and if that's the only verifiable information besides birth and schooling, we should probably omit the negative records.) —— Shakescene (talk) 23:48, 27 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose. Notablity is a guideline. So long as the article is neutral, verified by reliable sources, and adheres to BLP, a lack of consensus on notability should not override policy to result in deletion. If you want to delete what you see as marginal biogs then be more persuasive at AfD. Fences&Windows 00:54, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose AFD participants should allready be thinking about BLP issues when they make their vote, there is no need to account for the same thing twice. Icewedge (talk) 01:39, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
• Support - I agree with the premise that the default should be 'delete', particularly under those circumstances I mention below. Whilst I accept that WP is a work in progress, it is mentioned several times above the potential for issues, such as promotion and abuse, is amplified with lesser known individuals. I believe the chances of a bias-free article approximates to zero in many of these cases, and should be deleted if in doubt. A biography of a person meeting WP:BIO should be properly sourced, completely free of blatant promotion AND unsourced negative information. Anything short of this is worthy of a Speedy, in my view. I disliked the way the proponent of this debate started it with a Jimbo quote - not very necessary, and irrelevant, IMHO. I don't think the wishes of the subject (or indeed Jimmy Wales, perish the thought) should be written into the policy in the way that it has, though - to me, it reads like they have a casting vote for deletion - which they ought not to. (Clarification: I don't think the subject's view in this matter (or Jimbo's) should carry any more or less weight as any other editor) Ohconfucius ^¡digame! 01:56, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

• Strong oppose - there is no compelling reason why BLPs should have different inclusion standards than other articles. I have never seen any evidence to demonstrate that deleting barely notable living persons would have any effect on our BLP problems. Indeed, in my experience it is the clearly notable (but not extremely notable) ones that are the most susceptible to lingering libel and related problems. Allowing admins to delete based on "no consensus" is a license for admins to delete most controversial BLP figures as nearly always some people will argue for deletion. 75% keep !votes is often a legitimate "no consensus" outcome in passionate debates. Pick any controversial figure and you'll probably get 25% delete votes, which means the closing admin could use their discretion to close as "no consensus," delete, and probably not be overturned by DRV. That is not a situation I want to see anytime soon.
  Finally, from a philosophical standpoint "no consensus" should never be used to take final action on a subject. "Keeping for now" is not final action, but deletion effectively is as the barriers to recreation after AfD deletion are quite high. --ThaddeusB (talk) 02:00, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

• The definition of 'no consensus' probably needs a rejig if that is the case. Excepting the arguments, I would call a 75:25 vote a clear keep. Ohconfucius ^¡digame! 02:09, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

• Oppose This needs to have more limited application. If there is concern that an article is a particular target for BLP vios, or if the subject requests deletion, this may be a good idea. (though I'm concerned it would practically make such deletions irreversible). If you're just debating whether some professor or politician or footballer is notable, there's no need to change the rules. 140.247.248.180 (talk) 02:46, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
• Mild oppose- honestly, i have no opinion on Mr. Shankbone's article, however I do think policy was violated in that case, hence my comment in the most recent DRV. That said, someone earlier on said it better than I: if there's no CURRENT issues, such as potential libel, BLP1E, or the subject requesting deletion, then there's no pressing need to delete that policy needs to be re-written. Umbralcorax (talk) 03:26, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
  • Very strong oppose, and I suggest we move in the opposite direction. slippery slope arguments are much misused--almost anything could conceivably develop to become mush worse than it is initially. But this is a true s.s. towards the abnegation of POV and the loss of objectivity. We've just proven it. Someone feels so strongly that it ought to be policy, that he makes a surreptitious change to bring it about, in order to support his own view in an AfD, which he then closes according to his view of policy. We never should have accepted even the option of what people want influencing the results, except that they can contribute to the discussion , and be considered as anyone else with Conflict of Interest--and the possibility of an appeal through OTRS if there really is a valid concern, which has certainly happened. We were stampeded into this by one or two public incidents of such vandalism. but in general we have an excellent record. We are about to be trying an extension which would thoroughly deal with such in the future. , if it does manage to work satisfactorily. There's a basic problem with borderline notable for BLP means not covered. First, we already have slightly stronger standards for BLP articles, and this has already dealt with the borderline--what we are now considering the borderline would, without BLP 1E and associated changes, be well within clear notability. Second, it can always be argued that something which is not quite borderline ought to be, and then the standard keeps slipping--an excellent example was the insistence that a full article in Columbia Journalism Review was not significant coverage--when it would have been for any other topic or for any other person. That this was used for an a article on a person that some of us here like very much, and others dislike, shows the lack of objectivity inherent in relaxing the standards for what can be deleted. (I point out that he himself was neutral, and said he had no opinion one way or another). The result is that the standard for BLP will be famous, not notable. I can forsee people arguing that olympic athletes who did not win first place are not famous. DGG ( talk ) 04:11, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
• Very Strong Support Here's the thing - forget about when JW made his change and whether you are personally affronted by his action - the question at this forum is; Is the change (repeated below for ease of reference) suitable and usable for admins who are attempting to find appropriate conclusion for BLP articles? IMO Jake puts it simply and well when he changes the words to Discussions concerning biographical articles of relatively unknown, non-public figures,especially if the subject has requested deletion, where there is no rough consensus may be closed as delete? For me I must answer the question as to whether this change is suitable or usable with a resounding yes. Okay I have noted the comments about what is a relatively unknown public figure - but that part usually always works itself out as a part of the 5 day AfD process through the normal discussion about weight of sources and the like & for heck's sake articles can be recreated when the subject becomes well known, or the close can go to DRV on the basis of the Admin not reading correctly the level of public awareness of the subject. Much, much more importantly Jake's change reflects exactly what should happen when a relatively unknown non-public figure requests deletion and where the AfD community do not reach an obvious consensus to keep. Please note Jake's suggestion is a two part process - it still therefore includes an "and" connotation. Admins cannot close as delete easily where there is no request by the subject of the article; "and" they cannot close as delete where there is a consensus to keep. Really now, take the whole thing in context and I ask you what exactly is the problem with that process? Nothing because it is exactly what we do here or should do here anyway.--VirtualSteve ^{need admin support?} 05:52, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
• Comment. I'm leaving this comment only because I've been asked for my views. I was one of the people who first proposed default-to-delete closures for BLPs in 2007, a proposal that failed—see [3]— and people have been wondering if I've changed my mind about it.

  My aim with that proposal was to make it easier for borderline subjects who didn't want BLPs to have them deleted. However, I've been concerned, for the last year or so, at what seems to be a significant tightening of the notability criteria for BLPs, to the point where, as DGG argues, people are now expected to be almost famous rather than simply notable. I'll post links later to some examples if I can find them.

  If we're going to apply very stringent criteria for notability, we can't also have a default-to-delete criterion, because that combination will threaten perfectly viable BLPs. I can't oppose this proposal, because it's coming from the right place, and I still strongly support it for borderline subjects who've said they don't want a bio. But I have concerns about applying it across the board before we've developed a sensible BLP-notability policy. SlimVirgin ^{talk|contribs} 06:06, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

• I said I'd post some examples. There's a list here of some BLPs Jake's friends were using to show that default delete is common practice. There are only six but several are of concern. John Theon, for example, is a notable scientist. Jeff Schoep is a notable neo-Nazi. Gary Lynch, who had several mentions in The New York Times. I'd support deletion if the subject didn't want it, or if there were intrinsic POV concerns, but in most of the cases listed here neither of those applied. SlimVirgin ^{talk|contribs} 10:51, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

• Oppose. Some time back, an AFD for Ellen Hambro, a subject so notable that a paper encyclopedia set aside space for her biography looked something like this, and that after the paper encyclopedia source had been added. Were it not for heavy action by Geschichte and myself to improve the article, there is a good chance that it would have been a roughly evenly split "no consensus". Let's be blunt: Wikipedia would have been the laughing stock in the Norwegian press if we had deleted that article, and I oppose any policy change which would make the deletion of subjects like that easier. BLP is a policy to ensure that we write good BLPs and to hold a tight and strict standard in ensuring they meet the WP:V, WP:NPOV and WP:NOR policies. It is not a policy to forbid BLPs or declare living people as inherently less notable. Sjakkalle (Check!) 09:23, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

• Comment Sorry but I find the reference you provide unhelpful and slightly disingenous. The more accurate reference is this conclusion which is what the closing admin would have seen at the end of the AfD discussion. Firstly I do not see anywhere that the subject asked for deletion of the article, secondly clearly the subject was considered notable by almost all commentators (even DGG who changed his mind correctly to !vote keep) and so with respect I doubt any Admin would gauge a consensus for anything but keep at the conclusion of the discussion. Indeed Stifle did that on the basis of a clear consensus. From that perspective it would never have been deleted under the proposal that forms the subject of this discussion.--VirtualSteve ^{need admin support?} 10:43, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

• I had to rewrite almost the entire article before the keep votes started coming in. I went to DGG's talkpage to specifically ask him to reconsider his vote. Had I not actively worked with the article, I think the end result would have looked very different. Sjakkalle (Check!) 10:51, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

• As it should be Sjakkalle - it is fundamental that any article that is written about a subject must meet this project's basic premises for inclusion. If (as it appears in this instance) the article relating to Ellen Hambro did not meet our fundamentals at the time of it being put forward as an AfD then that is a fair call by the nominator for deletion. If no person came forward to establish that she was in fact notable then at that time the article would have been quite rightly deleted - but again with respect none of that would have been caused by the proposal we are discussing today; and the article could have been restarted easily as soon as someone (with the intention of good research work like your own) decided to pull their finger out and find sources etc.--VirtualSteve ^{need admin support?} 11:13, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

• This proposal isn't about culling articles that don't meet our "basic premises for inclusion." It's about providing administrators the ability to substitute their own judgment, even if all of our "basic premises for inclusion" are met, in lieu of consensus. user:J aka justen (talk) 11:21, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
• J, thank you for saying, perhaps even more elonquently, exactly what I just said - except that consensus is always relevant.--VirtualSteve^{need admin support?} 11:48, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Yes, and for clarifying exactly what it is that many of us are rejecting. Nomoskedasticity (talk) 11:57, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

I agree with Nomoskedasticity. Letting administrators (actually: the one admininstrator who gets to the AFD first) substitute their own judgement for that of the community is a recipe for inconsistent decisions, and a great deal of apathy and resentment in the community. People will start believing (correctly) that their opinions don't matter because the closing admin will just close whatever way he or she wishes. Sjakkalle (Check!) 12:12, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

(Replying to j above) It isn't about that either. If there is a consensus then a closing admin must follow that consensus. The discussion here is about what actions to take in the event that there is no consensus. Don't you see the difference? If the community cannot decide during a debate then some means of making the decision has to be allowed for. In these cases we must make some kind of arbitrary decision no matter what we do. The proposers argument is that for the limited subset of non-consensus debate + BLP article offers the choice to delete. That is a very limited set of circumstances in which this proposal would be enacted. Kevin (talk) 12:23, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Kevin, the difference is more than apparent and has been noted several times, including some suggestions that this is an attempt by a group of admins who want to force a policy change. Per DGG, the guideline is "notable" not "famous" and whether we think that too low a bar or not, the community has consistently rejected efforts to amend it. So, I don't think what's lost is J's understanding of the issue; I think the only thing lost here is acceptance, by a particular group of admins who want to instead force the community's hand by acting out of policy (by claiming they have the discretion to delete and that this policy only enshrines it). -->David Shankbone 12:45, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Kevin, if an editor wants to make a change to an article and can't gain consensus for it, that change is not made. Deletion policy as it currently stands works exactly the same way: if there isn't consensus to delete, it isn't deleted (and those who do it anyway are simply ignoring policy as it is). It is also becoming clear that there isn't consensus for the change proposed by Lar. (Unless the result here is going to be: "no consensus, default to adopt"...) Nomoskedasticity (talk) 13:00, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Aren't there two different cases here? One where there is no dispute over the criteria for BLP deletion (i.e. of relatively unknown, non-public figures) being met, but there is no consensus on making an exception for the specific article, and the other case where the criteria for deletion are disputed. patsw (talk) 15:37, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Random break 2

• Comment - the BLP problem is real. The status quo and policy is that no consensus defaults to keep, not that admins have discretion (if that wasn't the default, we wouldn't be having this proposal, which has been repeatedly rejected in favor of the status quo). What Lar et al. have done is said, 'We're tired of waiting, we'll do it ourselves by giving admins more power if not in policy, then in practice.' That is exactly what Scott MacDonald/Docglasgow said here when he wrote, "Yes, granted your excellent proposal, to make a 'default to delete' solid policy, failed. But policy is created by doing and not by legislating....It may not be current solid policy - but we are moving in that direction." He just described anarchy. That should concern the community greatly, particularly as other BLP fixes are in the works. WP:FLAGGEDREVS is precisely a prescription for the BLP problem that Jimmy Wales himself has publicly said will happen. That has support from the community, and keeps power with the community. The other is known as "Liberal Semi", which means we liberally semi-protect BLPs. That proposal that Lar is also connected with has more support than this continually rejected idea of giving admins more power (which goes against WP:NOBIGDEAL). -->David Shankbone 15:43, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Noted just today in PC Week, Flagged Revs will be implemented on English Wikipedia by December. -->David Shankbone 16:46, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

• • Reply to Comment. Are you saying this is just another case of admins looking at a "no consensus" result and reading it as "enable admins to do whatever they want for any reason or no reason at all" rather than "do nothing"? This has been a problem since my first day here. patsw (talk) 16:49, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

• I think it's a case of a particular group of admins with good intentions brazenly overreaching their authority to achieve what they want. There is some admin closure discretion, such as "Were most of the keep/delete votes from Single Purpose Accounts or IPs?" "What were the policy/guideline arguments on each side, and which side made honest, accurate appeals to the sources and policy/guideline?" Yes, admins have that discretion, and if they do not exercise it wisely then there is Deletion Review. It's not a bad system. This proposal seeks to give extra status, weight in discussions and special privileges to admins to fix an issue--maintainability--with a rejected solution, on the eve of the accepted solution's implementation. -->David Shankbone 17:40, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

• Oppose. It is a real dickish move (IMHO) to characterize anyone who disagrees with this interpretation as "Bozo the Clown", too. JBsupreme (talk) 17:03, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
  • Um. I think that was added later by someone trying to criticize the appeal to authority in the Jimbo quote. I don't think anyone was trying to say that disagreement was akin to Bozo the Clown. JoshuaZ (talk) 17:14, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
    • That is certainly one way it can be interpreted and should probably just be removed since it borders on an ad hominem attack. JBsupreme (talk) 17:18, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
      • Incredible as it may sound, for once I and JBsupreme completely agree. --Cyclopia^talk 20:41, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

• As much as I'd rather avoid this, it seems to me that an important focus with BLP articles is maintainability: can we maintain an accurate, neutral article with available reliable sources? That, to me, is really the question people are getting at when they ask about notability -- if you can't find notability, it's because you can't find reliable sources, which begs the question of how you can ever hope to maintain an accurate, neutral article, as is absolutely required by BLP. We must keep our content reliable! In most articles, that's a duty to our readers, but with biographies we have an extra duty to the subject, and it's in everyone's interest to treat those duties with care. – Luna Santin (talk) 17:18, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

If no one can find notability, the meaningful consensus is delete, and the article is deleted. If there is no consensus, it means that notability is disputed and no reasonable agreement can be found. This means that it is entirely possible that the article is maintainable and reliable. "No consensus" does not mean "consensus on being not notable" or "consensus on being poorly notable", means "no consensus". --Cyclopia^talk 23:54, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Good point. I should probably make more clear that I'm referring to a pretty narrow slice of the concerns that led to this discussion; I'm not sure how I feel about the overall proposal. As I read it, this is more allowing some leeway in edge cases, which will hopefully be small in number, but I could be wrong. Certainly I hope everyone agrees the need for additional care is clear, and to some extent that prescribes a deletionist approach as far as rumors, loosely sourced content, and so on, but where a maintainable article is possible, I generally believe we should try for one. – Luna Santin (talk) 00:13, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

• Oppose: I don't agree with the sweeping discretion given to administrators under this wording; I don't think we have good processes in place to ensure that the decisions made with that additional discretion are consistent with each other and with broad community consensus. I would prefer incremental steps, e.g. indicating that the normal 2/3 rule of thumb would be 50% in the case of most BLPs. Taken together with other incremental steps such as flagged revisions, we can see what progress we make. Generally, the proposed change is drastic (from one extreme to the other) and I am suspicious of any such proposal unless it can be shown that incremental steps have been tried and failed. Christopher Parham (talk) 18:34, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose I also think that too much discretion is given to administrators under this. With reading all of this, I now wonder why anyone would iVote on these since there is such leeway to decide to ignore editors who bother. If an editor(s) come in late should they really have to say what has already been said, or can they just name editor(s) that already made the point they themselves would have made? It seems too easy to throw away editors comments to come to the no consensus. --CrohnieGal^Talk 19:15, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
• Support - it is already part of the deletion policy and the BLP policy. The opposes would need to start a community wide RFC to push their interpretation, because it just doesn't exist now. Ottava Rima (talk) 20:24, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
  • Ottava, we've been over this before. Pretty much everyone here including the people supporting this change acknowledge it is a change. May I tentatively suggest that when everyone else thinks something except for you, it is just possible, maybe, in some universe, somewhere that you are wrong? JoshuaZ (talk) 02:31, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
• Support - If consensus about person's notability cannot be established, then article probably does not add any real value to wikipedia anyway, while such articles can damage lives and reputations of real people. Article can be always recreated then notability is properly established.--Staberinde (talk) 20:50, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose - The benefits of no consensus defaulting to keep outweigh the costs in my opinion. One thing I particularly oppose is giving admins the "option" to close no consensus discussions as either keep or delete. This just begs for off-wiki admin shopping for contentious XfDs. VegaDark (talk) 03:17, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose, a policy change this extreme isn't warranted. If someone wants their article deleted, then default to delete is a reasonable thing to consider. But it's unreasonable to take something that applies in a very narrow and unusual set of circumstances and apply it to all BLPs. Better handling of these things on a case-by-case basis is the answer; a general policy change will only hurt us. Everyking (talk) 03:37, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose - If this has become common practice it should stop. The original wording - default to delete on marginal cases with no consensus only when the subject has requested deletion - is more appropriate. Otherwise, no consensus BLPs should be kept. The degree of notability will have already been considered by the editors discussing the possible deletion, so if deletion is truly warranted, that should be reflected in an actual consensus to delete. Rlendog (talk) 16:24, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose - no one's advanced a good reason to do this other than to protect BLP's from vandalism. DGG has a very good response as to why that is a very bad argument. Indeed, David Shankbone has a good reply too. In short, deletion is waay to strong of a measure. We don't burn down houses because of graffiti. We wait a few more months until Dec, then put out the fires when they occur. --Bfigura ^(talk) 02:27, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose like last time. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) (contribs) 06:13, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose If the consensus is not for deletion than such a change would allow admins to act against consensus which elevates their role from simply judging what the community wants to deciding what the community should have wanted. No consensus means that there is no consensus - for anything to change. For the same reason, a no consensus at DRV will not result in a deleted article to be restored for example. I'm all in favor of protecting people's privacy but we already do have the proper measures for doing so - editing and rewriting or G10 deletion where necessary. If a deletion of a problematic BLP article is desirable under our current BLP policy(!), then the better arguments at an AFD will and thus consensus will be deletion. The proposed change would basically allow deletion where consensus and thus by extension policy does not allow it. Also, per DGG. Regards SoWhy 12:09, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
• Support Admins already have permission from ArbCom to use whatever tools they have at their disposal to enforce the BLP policy (the footnotes ruling that is being ignored). Sadly that isn't happening and I applaud Lar for taking this initiative to codify what ought to be happening already but sadly isn't. It's time we grow up and realize that consensus on a website is not a substitute for human decency and taking responsibility for the content on this website. We've been over this for how many years now yet nothing of significance has happened. This needs to end. Vyvyan Basterd (talk) 17:03, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose as a clear matter of principle. Reliably sourced material should never default to delete. Jim Miller ^{See me | Touch me} 21:40, 31 October 2009 (UTC)
• Strong support. Even after reading the opposes, i can't understand their rationales. It we can't decide whether they should have an article, and the article is troubled by defamation issues and the like, why the heck would we keep it? It's a shame that this discussion doesn't look like it'll reach a verdict, because this is sorely, sorely needed. Wizardman 02:16, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

1)The articles we're talking about are not already "troubled by defamation issues": the proposal -as far as I understand that- would be applied to any non-consensual BLP, even if not troublesome at all. 2)If there are defamation/vandalism issues, these can be solved with methods that do not destroy the article, like semiprotection, protection and -in the future- flagged revisions. 3)For these reasons, the article can be kept: if there is no consensus the only neutral course of action is maintaining the status quo and if there are problems, we already have the means to deal with them at large. I hope this helps understanding our (well,at least my) rationale. --Cyclopia^talk 02:29, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

Fair enough, I understand better what you're saying. My oppose stands though, I still think deletion's the better alternative to messing around with other tools. Wizardman 02:43, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

But what about cases where we would be deleting things that don't require other tools? If the article has had no trouble, I don't see why we should be deleting it if it otherwise meets our inclusion guidelines. Hobit (talk) 04:21, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

• Strong Support per Gazimof and others. BLPs are very sensitive material and should not automatically be kept in cases of concern. Reywas92^Talk 00:26, 2 November 2009 (UTC)
• Support: WP:BLP clearly indicates that a higher standard, in terms of sourcing, applies to BLPs. Giving the closing admin wider discretion on such articles, to close 'no consensus' as delete can therefore clearly be seen as warranted. Hrafn^Talk_Stalk^(P) 12:16, 2 November 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose It's called "Article for Deletion", not "Article for Keep". So if there is no consensus to delete, the article shouldn't be deleted. This totally feels like a if-we-cannot-find-enough-people-in-favor-of-deletion-we-delete-it-anyway. I rarely vote on proposals, but this proposal is definitely one of the most bizarre ones I've seen in a while. Van der Hoorn (talk • contribs) 10:18, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
• Support: I have to echo the "BLPs are very sensitive" argument. While it can be fine to default to keep for things which do not or cannot live, we have to also recognise that we are playing with peoples' lives here. Wikipedia could quite easily ruin the reputation of a barely notable person. We have an ethical commitment to stop that, and switching the default AfD result to delete for BLPs will help somewhat. Sceptre ^(talk) 14:10, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
• Strong Oppose This policy will lead to the unnecessary removal of valuable encyclopedic content.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 17:13, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
• Support with caveat - I would say that "marginally notable" BLPs who are not public figures should be deleted, but "marginally notable" BLPs who are public figures should stand. The whole reason for special care for BLPs is to avoid libel and defamation, which isn't a concern for marginally notable BLPs who are public figures.--Blargh29 (talk) 20:48, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
• Strong Support - There is no reason to not have what we commonly do, in policy. It's a major rule when dealing with BLPs that they be gotten right, and therefore it's just as important when dealing with BLP AFDs that they too be gotten right. --Coffee // have a cup // ark // 18:26, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

1)Is it what is "commonly done"? There have been some attempts to find evidence of this statement but it seems it is practiced, seldomly, only by very few admins. 2)Even if it is what it is commonly done, it does not follow logically that it has to be policy. Actions like sockpuppetry are incredibly common, but are not going to become policy, for obvious reasons 3)The BLP being "right" has usually little to do with its reasons for deletion. Articles are not deleted because they are "not completely right", but for reasons, mostly, of notability. No consensus on notability does not imply that the article is "not right", implies only that there is a splitting debate on the sources. --Cyclopia^talk 19:18, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

• Oppose Admins already have licence enough to deal with truly problematic articles. This won't get used for articles that are truly problematic; rather, it will be used simply for articles that particular groups want to suppress. That should be resisted. Jheald (talk) 00:40, 7 November 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose: If we are going to delete all the articles which may be vandalized we might as well pack up and go home. Requests for protection is there for a reason, use it if necessary. No consensus seems to be a ridiculously easy conclusion to reach, more so for closing editors not having to justify their rationale further than saying 'each side had good reasons, and bad reasons'. Unomi (talk) 03:25, 8 November 2009 (UTC)
• Strongly oppose: Why in the world do we need to default to delete in the absence of a clear and present BLP issue? It's already a pain in the arse trying to keep the deletionist scalpels off of niche-notable articles (not-paper, global scope, etc.) without it defaulting to them. - BalthCat (talk) 09:21, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
• Comment if WP is going to have biographies of living people, then we should have some minimum content requirements for them lacking which they get deleted as more harm than help. Chopping them to minimize anything interesting as suggested below as an alternative is worse than nothing - WP is not a place where we enshrine the minor celebrities of our time with a one-liner that they exist. What we have is a problem caused by an excessive leniency on permitting articles on barely-known individuals of today: college prof's, minor-league sportspeople, local radio and tv personalities, anyone who has ever been on some sitcom or another, mayors and councilmembers of smaller towns, people who'd never be in a 100-volume paper encyclopedia 200 years from now - if 200 years from now, no one really cares about these people - as today we really don't care who was mayor of some small town 200 years ago or who wrote a column in some newspaper 200 years ago, or who played for what team, sailed on what ship, etc. - why have articles about them in the first place? Carlossuarez46 (talk) 16:01, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
  • Response I don't accept the premise of your argument. While me might want to consider what would be in a 10,000 volume encyclopedia 10 years from now, or even better 200 years ago, that would ask us to consider the same with continuing expansion to your 200 years from now mark. I don't accept the idea that if a paper encyclopedia was freed of the restrictions imposed by format, their editorial policies would ever involve the removal of an article from one edition to the next. We are striving to be what an ecyclopedia (and almanac and gazeteer) would be if it had no physical restrictions whatsoever. We don't have the restrictions of printing, shipping, storing, and replacement that necessitate those kind of editorial policies for a traditional encyclopedia. Jim Miller ^{See me | Touch me} 16:21, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
    • In a word: WP:NOTPAPER. --Cyclopia^talk 16:31, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
• Strong Oppose. BLP articles have enough protection as it is, and there seems to be an element of WP:AAJ here. Modest Genius ^talk 21:57, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Random break 3

• Oppose, consensus should come from the strength of the arguments on both sides, and from the discussion between editors weighing up the options. If there is no consensus, relist and gain consensus. There are pleanty of venues available at Wikipedia to facilitate discussions. Forgive me if I misunderstand the full weight of this issue, but as far as I see it no consensus means that we should attempt to gain consensus, then choose an action. Defaulting to delete isn't really "No consensus", because the action is taken. Defaulting to keep works because there is nothing stopping a relist/renom providing more discussion. --Taelus (talk) 16:32, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Alternative to policy change

It seems obvious to me that Lar's proposal is not going to result in consensus. Those supporting it should admit that simply changing written policy is not supported by a huge percentage of the community. But those in opposition need to admit that there is a huge percentage of the community that finds the current deletion policy for BLPs unacceptable, and in a consensus driven project that fact cannot simply be wished away. We are at an unacceptable impasse.

Above I asked about the possibility of a "trial" for the proposed change, and an editor opposing it (Jclemens) offered this reply. Based on that I'd like to propose an alternative to a policy change that would involve us actually doing something rather than simply arguing over a few words. I'm not asking for people to support or oppose, but rather to just discuss. Here (in rough form, and I'm not at all married to this idea) is what I'm proposing:

1) A policy page or WikiProject page is created called WP:Marginally Notable BLPs (or whatever, it doesn't really matter, so long as it's widely announced).

2) A number of administrators (say at least 10, and we probably would not want too many) agree to ignore the current deletion policy at times and, when they feel it is justified by the discussion, close certain no consensus AfDs of marginally notable BLPs as default to delete, and would list themselves at the above described project page as willing to do so. To my mind it would be critical to have admins from different points on the BLP-policy spectrum participate in this. The admins who do participate would agree to the following:

a) Only AfDs that truly ended in "no consensus" would be eligible for deletion (no putting the thumb on the scale when the consensus seems to be closer to keep).

b) It would have to be obvious from the AfD debate (based on significant debate about the subject's notability, or an admission by "keep" !voters that notability was a question) that we are dealing with a case of marginal notability.

c) Specific (i.e. not general) arguments about BLP would need to be present in the AfD. If no BLP concerns are raised, then a "no consensus, default to delete" close is not possible.

d) Admins would log these type of closes at the page described at point number 1 and would implicitly welcome a DRV (see below).

3) Any time an administrator chose to close a no consensus AfD of a BLP as delete, they would log that action at the page mentioned above. All of these closures would be open to DRV, which would proceed as it normally does, and where editors could simply argue that the close was out of process and should be overturned based on existing policy, or could argue that the specific close was a good one even if out of policy, etc. etc. Administrators who are participating in the "ignore policy, sometimes delete no consensus AfDs" project would agree not to close any DRVs of this nature. As to logging, administrators should also log occasions where they felt they could have closed an AfD as default to delete but chose not to, and explain why they did not in the AfD closing statement.

4) This project would run for a set amount of time (perhaps 1 or 2 months), after which the admins in question would cease closing AfDs against policy. At that point the community would evaluate the process and consider certain questions. How often were these kind of closes made relative to the total number of BLP AfDs? What was the overall community reaction to these out-of-process closes in DRVs, were they largely upheld, overturned, or was it mixed? How helpful did this actually seem to be in terms of addressing part of the BLP problem? Is there evidence of abuse by admins or other editors, e.g. trying to delete (or deleting) articles under the guise of this process but really as a way to forward another agenda?

5) After a period of discussion we would again call the question as to whether a change in deletion policy is a good idea or not, but this time we'd have an actual experience of it on which to base our opinions.

There's things here to like and not like for both sides of this debate. For those opposing a policy change, a process like this is limited in time and remains under community control to a significant degree since technically every AfD close could be reverted in a DRV, or reverted after the fact en masse if the community ends up rejecting the policy change. However it is a change from the status quo and if it gained momentum and consensus it could result in a significant change in policy which many oppose on principle. For those supporting a change to how we deal with marginal BLPs, this kind of process would let us act on a change many support but which does not have consensus, and it could sway opinion significantly if successful, while also helping to deal with the BLP problem (even if only in a small way). However the restrictions for deleting are rather tight (this is not at all an automatic "default to delete" scenario as some have proposed), and consensus for a change in policy is still required in the end.

While recognizing that probably everyone will have a problem with some aspect of this, how would folks feel about trying something along these lines? Technically a group of administrators could run off and start this right now, since they don't need anyone's permission to ignore all rules. That might be an interesting step, but it would certainly open those admins up to a possible loss of sysop powers, and more importantly it would be far better (and this effort would have a far better chance of proving useful in the end) if there was some rough consensus to this experiment from folks on both sides of this debate before it began.

As I said I think it would be more fruitful to simply discuss this proposal (and/or alternatives to it) here rather than structure it as a support or oppose !vote. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 18:50, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Not every compromise is good just because there is a compromise. This is a bad idea. The bottom line is that a handful of these editors have already tried and gone to close AfDs using their out of policy method and as SV documented above and elsewhere the result has been incredibly deletionist with zero evidence that we are actually getting rid of any articles that will actually have substantial BLP problems. This is a bad idea full stop. We don't need this sort of compromise. Maybe it would make sense for something if a majority of users favored the defaulting to deletion, but we don't even have that. We have a vocal minority. The majority of users don't want this. JoshuaZ (talk) 18:55, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

• I'm not seeing in your proposal what problem this seeks to address, but if it is the same one that Lar, Scott and others mention above then it's a current problem for which an approved solution, WP:FLAGGEDREVS, is due to take effect. FlaggedRevs is current on the German Wikipedia, and I understand it has worked well. In other words, the problem has an accepted solution that just has not come to pass (and...that...has...been...dragging...on...forever...) I'd prefer to wait to see how that solution works (it may not) before we start parsing down content and giving admins any more authority over what stays and what goes. -->David Shankbone 19:02, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Flagged revs has only been approved on a trial basis (people seem to forget that), and we literally have no idea how or even if it will be implemented permanently. Even if implemented on all BLPs (which, there's a good chance, would not even receive consensus), it likely would not prevent sneaky defamation. The argument is that there may be certain articles (even with flagged revs, and certainly while we don't have it) that we cannot adequately protect and which are marginal enough to warrant deletion. Flagged revs simply is not a solution to that issue.

To JoshuaZ, I take your point that "a handful of these editors have already tried and gone to close AfDs using their out of policy method and as SV documented above and elsewhere the result has been incredibly deletionist with zero evidence that we are actually getting rid of any articles that will actually have substantial BLP problems," but what I'm proposing would, if you are correct, demonstrate that even more concretely. Furthermore, if a majority of editors don't want this change then you have nothing to fear from this proposal since there is still a discussion at the end which requires consensus (not to mention DRVs along the way, which would give us a lot of useful info about how the community feels about marginal BLPs), and in the meantime we will have presumably better demonstrated your point that this is not helpful for BLP and would lead to abuses (I'm open to the possibility that one or both of those are true). If you're sick of discussing this ad infinitum (who isn't?), some sort of trial that results in a more wholesale rejection of this approach is a good way to put it to bed. The "vocal minority" (which is pretty large, you must admit) is not going away anytime soon, and I do not think ignoring their views and shunting them to the side is wise. We could have better dealt with BLP a long time ago if people on both sides of the issue we're a little more open to possible compromises and/or testing out new approaches, but instead we have warring camps shouting at each from firmly entrenched positions, often not even listening to what the other side is saying. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 19:42, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

The problem is that anything that takes power out of the hands of the community and invests it with a smaller group of people is going to cause problems, disenfranchisement and power struggles. It may cause people to leave. FlaggedRevs hasn’t been given a chance, and the German Wikipedia hasn’t needed to implement something akin to this somewhat complex proposal (it would be great to have a German Wikipedian jump in here).

Wikipedia essentially is “society”, or else I have no other way to explain why people who are banned from it or don't get their way then spend years staring at and talking about us, never moving on with their lives. The power structure being focused on the community, and not Admins, at least allows for more voices and less disenfranchisement. Anything that makes Wikipedia and decisions about its content less community-based ought to have extraordinary reasons to be implemented. With the pending arrival—fingers crossed—of FlaggedRevs, I feel that seeking to address the problem FRV seeks to address runs the risk of and disenfranchising the community, including new members with new articles. A lot of people don’t want to contribute to a website where a small power elite continue to remove their voice from important decisions. FlaggedRevs negates any extraordinary need at this moment and trying to double-correct may cause harm. However, pushing for that FRV December deadline to be firm might actually help. -->David Shankbone 20:10, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

The proposal above would have the community participate in overseeing these kind of deletions throughout (in the form of DRVs), and then at the end of a set period the community could say, "this was a disaster, shut this down and restore all articles." If there was strong opposition then as there is now then that's exactly what would and should happen. The entire process would be completely transparent, and I'm asking here for feedback on it before anything even happens. I'm sorry but I don't remotely see where I'm suggesting that we take "power out of the hands of the community" or how this is an example of "a small power elite continue to remove [the community] voice". I'm suggesting we try something for awhile, and if it sucks and people don't like it then we have a strong basis to not discuss it again anytime soon and we simply undo what was done. If people do like it then great. What's the big problem, and where's the power grab? I'm pretty sensitive to those kind of concerns, but I genuinely don't understand how you can read them into what I'm proposing. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 20:36, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

I like this idea. It would allow people to watch the effect of the proposed policy change, which at the moment it's hard to do, because this particular type of BLP deletion isn't being flagged, and hunting down examples isn't easy. I'd suggest a longer trial period, more like six months, but in principle I'd support this. SlimVirgin ^{talk|contribs} 20:42, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

I saw a great article earlier today on inertia in decision making, and it applies here: your position is that poor decisions will be reversed at wp:drv, but I'm not sure that's accurate: as a current deletion review that need not be named shows, deletion review is nowhere near a perfect process itself, and the inertia shifts even further against retention there than it would otherwise be in a deletion debate itself. Take, for example, a questioned close: you immediately have the community fractured between those that support the result and those that don't, and get a big portion of the debate becoming a pseudo rerun of the original deletion debate. The same issue at the original deletion debate, no consensus, becomes a very likely outcome at the deletion review, as well. We have policies in place to protect biographies of living people, we need to enforce those instead of trying to come up with new ones. There's technology coming that purports to help us with this, we should see if that ends up being the case. In the meantime, I don't see any consensus for shifting away from knowledge retention towards deletion, whether we call it a policy or a test. user:J aka justen (talk) 20:46, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

That is a bad example of the DRV process overall, which in general is a lot better than the current clusterfuck. Kevin (talk) 00:00, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

This proposal is simply giving SUPERVOTES to the admins. If you want to cement the idea that admins have the right to put thumbs on the scale whenever there is no consensus, then this is it. patsw (talk) 22:15, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

• Bigtimepeace, I think it might help for the sake of review if this was more in the form of a policy proposal page. Also, I wonder about the wisdom of trying to have the community see any well-meaning proposal independent of this strange moment. Timing might be better if you wait a week? Not sure, but your proposal might be somewhat tainted for prospective readers by Lar's out of policy actions and the proposal above to justify it. That's why I raise the idea of a proposal page and different timing. -->David Shankbone 22:39, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

• You might well be right about that. I thought it best to throw this out for some initial discussion here while there are a number of people looking at this page. Given the virulent negative reaction expressed already, I'm not going to worry about putting this forward more formally anytime soon. Of course any group of administrators could simply run off and start the kind of thing I'm proposing without seeking permission to do so, though that's far from ideal. However it becomes increasingly difficult to understand how (short of the much ballyhooed flagged revs, the exact nature and ultimate effect on BLP of which are complete unknowns) we will do anything about the BLP issue, given that a decent percentage of editors think there is no problem and another sizable percentage agrees there is a problem but is seemingly unwilling to make any changes to do anything about it. Hopefully we can salvage something useful out of this discussion (I'll offer support for a different proposal below on my next edit), but as someone who occupies neither extremity in the great BLP debate I continue to find these little BLP chit-chats we have extremely disheartening and more than a little embarrassing. It's a critical issue, and the extent to which we do not have our shit together is shameful and quite frankly the fault of all of us collectively. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 01:12, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

• Absolutely not. Per patsw. You write, BTP, "when they feel it is justified by the discussion", but the whole point is that it is not justified by the discussion. There was no consensus within the discussion. This is to overturn one of fundamental tenets. It puts content control into the hands of administrators. MoreThings (talk) 23:46, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

• Strong oppose - Unbelievably baroque: it's so complex and prone to every different interpretation that looks like a drama bomb. It creates a super-class of similar-minded editors which would rush to delete as much apparently problematic BLPs as possible using this test period as a temporary green light. It would create distrust by lending credence to often-cited conspiracy theories. Finally, "marginally notable" is a non-concept. I appreciate the intention, but this doesn't look even marginally close to a viable solution. --Cyclopia^talk 00:00, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose, I really don't see any consensus at all for no consensus discussions defaulting to delete in the absence of a specific subject request and clearly marginal notability. I think the proposal below is much more likely to achieve consensus than outright deletion at all in such cases, and be far less divisive if it is implemented and used. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 02:37, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose. Admins on this project already have far too much individual power; to suggest giving them even more is preposterous. Everyking (talk) 03:44, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
• Worth talking about further - that's what I think BTPeace was asking, is this worth talking about further? Yes, it is. ++Lar: t/c 05:30, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
  • How do you figure? There was no consensus to allow default to delete closes without subject request above. How is discussing an implementation plan worthwhile for something that's not, from the looks of it, going to be implemented at all? Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 13:09, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
    • Well, I could be reading the proposal wrong but here's how I read it. 1) NCDTD is not policy under this proposal and doesn't become policy under it. 2) Some of the arguments advanced against NCDTD make assertions about what might or might not happen if it were, which are untested 3) Experiments often clarify things, so run an experiment 3a) Identify a few admins that will close things that way (as defacto has been happening now) from time to time. 3b) Anything they close is subject to DRV. Since policy hasn't changed, the argument at DRV needs to be sound enough to overcome the fact that policy hasn't changed, and that the article needs to be deleted ("NCDTD is policy so endorse" doesn't cut it!) Or the article gets kept. 3c) Run this a while, then evaluate... did bad things happen because we have some deleteds? Did DRV pretty much every time overturn the deletes? Or did they mostly sustain? The answers to these will tell us more about what policy should be, but as of the end of the expermint, it hasn't changed. ... that's my understanding of the proposal. I could be wrong. But I think it's worth discussing further. ++Lar: t/c 17:36, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
      • Lar's summary of the proposal is completely accurate, with the notable benefit of being far shorter than what I wrote. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 21:27, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
• My feeling is that admins should not be given supervotes. BLP issues have to do with how the article is written, what we do to defend such articles against misinformation, undue weight, speculation and outright vandalism. There is already a "special enforcement" clause in place to deal with problematic situations where you need to cut through the red tape, and a frequently used G10 criterion in WP:CSD is an effective no-nonsense defense against attack articles. We should not make rules based on the viewpoint that the mere presence of BLPs are inherently Bad Things. Most deleted BLPs are removed due to lack of notability, not a violation of BLP policy. Decisions regarding the notability of a living person should rest with the community to ensure the widest possible range of views, and not be restricted to a limited supercommittee of admins who are "better" than all the others. The role of admins should be one of stewards, not politicians. Hence, I oppose this proposal. Sjakkalle (Check!) 08:54, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose (in case my response above didn't make it clear). The gist of this has been opposed by a majority of the community above, this is a slightly watered down trial version of it being called a "test." The objection is still there, and the reasons for opposing the principles behind this proposal are the same. user:J aka justen (talk) 13:14, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose Frankly I'm seeing admin discretion badly overreaching at the moment and there is no reason to increase that problem. Plus A) it's overly complex and B) it isn't needed and C) we don't need a cabal. Liberal use of semi-protection seems like a good idea though. Hobit (talk) 15:01, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose Seems to have the benefit of being overly complex while also not being any more likely to generate consensus. Agree with Hobit on the infinite semi-protection though. --Bfigura ^(talk) 02:34, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose on the grounds of not bureaucracy. If people think an article should not be included, all they need to do is show up at the AfD and say why. If anyone think there is an unrecognized BLP problem, there is the BLP noticeboard. DGG ( talk ) 00:16, 4 November 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose too often BLP exceptions are used when BLP is not the motive Power.corrupts (talk) 09:52, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Alternative to policy change no.2 : Default to keep+semiprotect

The aim of Lar and supporters of the change to the deletion policy is concern for the subjects of BLPs. However, Wikipedia has the methods to deal with such concerns without arriving at the point of deletion. The problem with BLPs is potential vandalism or conscious defamation effort. This can be countered in a much less drastic and disruptive way than deletion: semiprotection.

I propose that whenever a BLP is closed as no consensus, it is default to keep and semiprotect. This should help reduce drastically the amount of potential anonymous vandalism on the page, and help having vigilance on the page. It looks simple, reasonable and addresses at least some of the concerns of the "default to delete" people. They could perhaps argue that "it is not enough", but better than nothing, and it appears to my humble judgement a much reasonable compromise. --Cyclopia^talk 00:10, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

• Support I think that is a good compromise. Automatic Semi for No Consensus is simple, and alleviates much of the cause for concern of the significant minority above. Along with Flagged Revs in December, that should give these sensitive articles the necessary protection. If a subject increases in stature, someone can flag ANI. -->David Shankbone 00:41, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

• I assume this includes the same language about deleting if the subject requests? -->David Shankbone 01:16, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

• Correct. I very personally have some reserves with that policy section, but I am not going to discuss that at all. It would be simply a matter of saying something on the lines of "AfD on living people which end with no clear consensus should default to keep and the closing admin should, as a matter of precaution, semiprotect the page" - no more no less. --Cyclopia^talk 01:22, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

• Given how long it is taking to get flagged revisions this doesn't seem like an inherently bad idea. I think that in general, people misunderstand the general impact that semiprotection has. But this doesn't seem so bad if it tides us over until we get flagged revisions. JoshuaZ (talk) 01:09, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
• Why not, and as JoshuaZ says it would be more of a stopgap until some form of flagged revisions is implemented (if it is—the community has only okayed a trial for now, and we don't know what form it will ultimately take). Arguably no policy change is actually needed here, admins who close BLP AfDs as "no consensus" could presumably start doing this now (probably some have already) per protection policy, ["Administrators may apply indefinite semi-protection to pages which are subject to heavy and persistent vandalism or violations of content policy (such as biographies of living persons, neutral point of view)"], so long as there is evidence of persistent vandalism or violations of BLP. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 01:26, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

What I mean is, semiprotect them even if there is no current evidence of vandalism. That's the concern of the significant minority above who is proposing default to delete. I personally think that pre-emptive semiprotection is a much more constructive way of dealing with these BLP concerns, and even who disagrees on "much more constructive" I think can agree that at least it's something. --Cyclopia^talk 01:32, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

I understand, I'm just saying the main issues (articles that have already been vandalized or had harmful BLP stuff put in) can actually be dealt with now. Also I would suggest changing the language to "default to keep and the closing admin can, as a matter of precaution, semiprotect the page." There are any number of articles where anon editors are making good contributions, and automatically semi-protecting a no consensus AfD of a BLP could cut off article improvement in those situations (this is why flagged revs is better, obviously). So changing to "can" or "as a rule, albeit with some exceptions," is probably better since it allows for some flexibility. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 02:19, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

• Support, I could go for this as a compromise. Hopefully would alleviate the concerns of drive by vandalism while not resulting in unnecessary, divisive deletions. I like it. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 02:25, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
  • To clarify, my support is conditional on this being coupled with a default to keep in no consensus scenarios. What's the purpose to semiprotecting an article if you're going to delete it anyway? It's clear that defaulting to deletion has no consensus from the above discussion, I think this could be an alternative that could help to assuage concerns of those arguing to delete. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 13:04, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
• Support. This is a good idea that gets to the heart of the problem (blatantly malicious or deliberately false editing, which is almost always done by anons or brand new accounts) without undermining Wikipedia's mission of building an encyclopedia. In fact, I think semi-protecting all BLPs is a good idea. Everyking (talk) 03:51, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
• premature sighted edits will do this better--assuming they work. In any case, not just the closing admin but any admin, can semi-protect when necessary. DGG ( talk ) 04:06, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

The point is that sighted edits still do not exist, and a significant minority of editors is very concerned about that. I think semiprotecting these articles, even in the absence of vandalism/libel evidence, cannot harm, and for sure it helps the people concerned about disputed BLPs to sleep better. We're trying to find a middle ground. --Cyclopia^talk 12:42, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

While I originally opposed semi-protection of BLPs in favor of flagged revs/protection, the implementation has been delayed sufficiently that I can't say any longer that this proposal is premature. I actually think it is fairly surgical in its application in that, as I understand, it applies to BLPs all ready determined to be problematic by going through AFD. Xymmax ^{So let it be written} _{So let it be done} 15:59, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

• Support default to keep, oppose automatic semi-protect: Default to keep is already the policy, and there is no consensus to change it. Therefore, the only proposal to consider is that when an AfD for a "marginal" BLP is closed without consensus, the article should automatically (or presumptively?) be semi-protected. Semi-protecting a large category of articles where there is no evidence of vandalism or defamation (which, in this context, means criticism of the living person without a very reliable source) is a huge change of policy, and is inconsistent with the principle that individuals can edit the encyclopedia without registering. Further, I have not seen evidence (mere worries are not evidence) that vandalism or defamation is a major problem for articles about marginal BLPs; if anything, the problem should be greatest with the most notable (i.e., famous) living person biographies, not the least notable. Wikipedia deals adequately with vandalism and potential defamation with existing policies. We semi-protect articles when anon and new account activity warrants it. Policy is already to be especially sensitive with BLPs. Further, with BLPs there is the additional safety net of office actions, which are quick and aggressive, whenever there is a seemingly legitimate complaint. There is no reason to compromise, because there is no consensus to change the default-to-keep policy. Policy does not not support this proposed compromise. Further, if a semi-protection policy makes sense (and I do not see that it does), why should an AfD be required to trigger it? We should be very cautious about tinkering with fundamental policies, which have served Wikipedia well, in the absence of a compelling need to do so. Changing this policy while the community is strongly divided over one especially controversial BLP AfD is especially troublesome. —Finell (Talk) 05:20, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
• Support automatic semi-protect, oppose default to keep - Unbundle the semi from the outcome, please. If admin discretion is allowed about whether to keep, or if we get to where consensus is rock solid that we never default to delete, we will in either case have post AfD marginal notability BLPs remaining around. (some of them in the first case, all of them in the second case). Automatic semi is a great idea for those. ++Lar: t/c 05:25, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
• Support semi-protect in the case of no-consensus AfD's that have been closed as keep - default to keep is not a required part of this proposal as we would not be required to semi-protect non-existent articles (salting aside). Administrator judgement as to the strength of !vote arguments is still important. Pushed further for opinion I would say I am also inclined to agree with Everyking that all BLP's should be semi-protected.--VirtualSteve ^{need admin support?} 08:11, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
• Support automatic semi-protect, oppose default to keep - it's better than nothing. Personally, I'm more in favour of indef semi-prot and indef sysop move prot on all BLPs, but how and ever. Per Lar, I'd like to see this implemented and regarding Flagged Revisions, I've given up holding my breath on that one, too. Whether flagged revs is imminent or not should not be a determining factor in this outcome, IMO, as it's very much an unknown quantity at this time - Alison ^❤ 08:31, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
• Surprisingly, I also support the semi-protection bit, and oppose the default to keep. As the default to keep bit is being debated here, should we move this section to the protection policy talk page? Kevin (talk) 09:01, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
  • Yes, Move to WT:PROT. For continuity it should probably stay here, but for clarity it would be better rebooted there, to effectively unbundle from the "keep/delete in no consensus situations" issue. Rd232 ^talk 09:24, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

• Comment: I understand that ideas, once proposed, live their own life. I would like however to clarify: What I am trying here to do is to get a compromise. On one side there is people that want a default to delete because they are concerned with maintainability and possibility of harm made by the BLPs. On the other there is people who think that default should be keep, because no consensus implies "if you don't know what to do, do nothing", deletion is a drastic measure, it doesn't help BLPs, etc.

For these reasons, I think that defaulting to keep AND semiprotecting should be the compromise. The "and" is important. On one hand, we make people who prefer non consensual articles to be kept -and these people seem to be the majority, see above- happy. On the other, we make a constructive contribution towards maintainance and vandalism protection of these articles, which is basically what the other side wants. I think that if we want a middle ground, this should be, indeed, middle.

Of course everyone is free to endorse to split them, but this seems to me contrary to the concept of compromise Just my 0.02£. --Cyclopia^talk 12:38, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

I see your point. I just would rather see this decoupled. If you want I'll give you a weak support for one way and strong the other, I guess. I think the discussion a few sections up is going to end up as "no consensus for NCDTD closes at this time". So this doesn't need to be coupled, necessarily. But yes, I see your point, and full marks for trying to find a compromise here in any case. ++Lar: t/c 15:19, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

• This is the best option presented so far, since it does not wind up deleting stuff without a consensus to do so. I am not sure if it is truly necessary, and fear that it might stall development of a stub article which faces no BLP issues if a new user is unable to contribute to it. For articles where there is known to be trouble, I can support a widening of the use of semi-protection however, and "no consensus on AFD" BLPs are certainly among the articles where this is worth considering. Sjakkalle (Check!) 15:43, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your support, Sjakkalle. I understand very much the concern about new users/IP users, but I guess they can be told to work their contribs on their user page or on the talk page(s), and ask for a more experienced editor to include them. It's not optimal, I understand, but at least we address a concern of a significant part of the community.--Cyclopia^talk 16:02, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

• Support Default to keep+semiprotect Whole heartedly. With an obvious division of opinion on this matter, this alternative "gives a little, takes more". It addresses concerns of BLP subjects being harmed and yet keeps the policy/process as it has been all along; default to keep. Honestly, regardless of the fact that this alternative "takes more" as I mentioned, the opposition should be gracious and agree to this resolution, because the actions of some of the members of the "default to delete" ideology have been a bit less than tactful with existing policy changes that are totally against WP:BLP (third line down: Changes made to it should reflect consensus., and this discussion alone shows beautifuly the lack of consensus). Certain editors practically staged a Wikipedia coupe and made decisions in order to create precedent for policy changes as they suit their ideology. This is NEVER the way things ought to be done. Frankly, I am surprised to see this many (what is it, about 40%?) of editors actually wanting the "default to delete" so badly that they are willing to look the other way from a BLATANT disregard for the community and for the way things work around here.

So I ask you kindly, editors who wish BLP to default to delete, Deal, or No Deal? Turqoise127 (talk) 20:53, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

• Strong support – I think this is a good idea and compromise, at least until Flagged Revisions gets turned on, which IMO when turned on at that time this may not even be needed. MuZemike 22:48, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

• Question – I'm assuming that this would be indef, the protection? MuZemike 22:50, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

I personally would say "yes", but maybe someone knows better than me what is best. --Cyclopia^talk 22:43, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

• Weak support - would prefer sighted rev's to this (purely in terms of having the more elegant solution), but it does seem to be a good compromise. --Bfigura ^(talk) 02:35, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
• Support default to keep, oppose automatic semi The huge majority of articles where AFD results in "no consensus" have not been and are not targets for vandalism or unsourced negative BLP. They are simply of borderline inclusion-relevance. The protection policy currently states that protection should not be premature, i.e. preemptive without any prior disruption. Such a change would violate the protection policy and introduce a "semiprotect BLPs" system through the backdoor that is currently not supported by consensus. Semi-protect if needed, sure, but don't make it automatic. Nothing that drastically disables editing for a large number of people should be done automatic but manually when it's needed. Regards SoWhy 12:01, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

You have a good point in saying that this conflicts with the current protection policy. Any opinions on that? --Cyclopia^talk 22:50, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

The current protection policy is based around on of the main foundation issues, i.e. "anyone can edit". This foundation requires that we don't restrict editing for IPs or non-autoconfirmed members without a good reason to do so and the PPOL for that reason does only allow semi-protection is specific circumstances. For the same reason the PPOL forbids preemptive protection of a page that is not yet target of problematic editing. Your proposal would contradict this basic principle by requiring mandatory and automatic semi-protection even when there are no issues.

Admins can already apply protection where problematic editing occurs but they can and should only decide to do it on a case-to-case basis. It's unhelpful to require protection of all such articles regardless whether problems really exist (which they often don't). Your proposal is milder than the "default to delete" one but equally fails to address why this should be done with those articles (the majority of them) which were never plagued by such problems. I'm all in favor of protecting BLPs - but it should only protect those where there is a need for protection and not simply all of a specific set. Regards SoWhy 11:56, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

SoWhy, I understand absolutely your concerns and I am too personally inclined to think that such articles are not proven to have significantly higher rates of vandalism than average BLPs. However there is a significant part of editors and admins which happen to think differently, and what we're trying to do here is to find a compromise within the community. The support this proposal has seems to indicate that there is indeed the need of such a compromise, and semiprotecting such articles is one which anyway would lead to the semiprotection of very few articles at a given time. I understand this violates somehow the principle of no preemptive semiprotection, but we have contrasting issues on our table, and we have to adjust these somehow. I guess that if eventually discussion here shows widespread support, we can bring the issue at WP:PROT and see what to do. --Cyclopia^talk 12:18, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

I am not against using semi-protection in those cases where something needs to be done. It's the automatic part that strikes me as problematic since restricting editing to any article should never be done without an evaluation of the situation. Each article is unique and a "protect them automatically" solution will not serve our primary goal, i.e. building an encyclopedia. Regards SoWhy 14:02, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

• Support - this seems like a reasonable incremental step to take until flagged revisions are enabled. Christopher Parham (talk) 12:53, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

• Comment: I must say that at this point I am amazed and flattered by the amount of support this little idea has gained -the "split" opinions (support X, oppose Y) seem even to balance each other quite neatly. At this point I have two questions: 1)Should we discuss a wording of this? 2)How long do such discussion go before consensus is declared? Thanks! --Cyclopia^talk 22:43, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
  • I would go more slowly at this stage. This proposal is in the middle of a huge page that many people might find hard to navigate at this point; there might also be some fatigue that is keeping some from getting involved. There does seem to be support for it -- but perhaps the best path is to let things lie for a couple of weeks, let this page get archived, and then start a fresh discussion. I think it will be good to adopt your proposal, but given how things have gone recently perhaps it's best to go slow, to avoid doing something that would lead someone to say, wait I didn't agree to that. Nomoskedasticity (talk) 08:18, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

• Absolutely agree. There is also the issue of it being at odds with the protection policy. --Cyclopia^talk 12:29, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

• Support as a compromise. I'd much rather see FPPR and default-to-delete be implemented, but until it is, keep-and-semiprotect is an acceptable compromise if we can't default to delete. Sceptre ^(talk) 14:18, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
• Support - seems to be a reasonable compromise that would retain encyclopedic content but minimize risk of libel or other RL harm. Rlendog (talk) 02:28, 6 November 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose I regret not having read all the arguments on this page, but this little idea needs a lot more debate. Just because a BLP is marginally notable, that says absolutely nothing about whether it is or is not prone to bias or vandalism. If I remember right, blanket semi-protection or blanket flagged protection, without specific reason (ie previous vandalism), has never been allowed. This is a backdoor way to start mass-protecting articles without just cause. Joshdboz (talk) 22:42, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

You will maybe be surprised in knowing that I proposed this, but I actually agree with your basic argument: namely, that a "marginally notable" BLP is not significantly more at risk than any other article. However there is a split community with good arguments on both sides which is very concerned about that, and the thing is beginning to look like, intermittently, as a low-level power struggle. This is not good. We need a compromise that may work. This one seems to have some support, even if it is by no means perfect. I disagree that this specific proposal is a backdoor for mass protecting, because it would apply only to a very specific class of articles after a community debate -namely, BLPs which close as no consensus in AfD, probably a tiny percentage of the total. --Cyclopia^talk 23:24, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

I'll be honest I think it is an interesting idea, and my thoughts on BLP and protection/flagging are evolving, but the current policy (WP:PP) states "Semi-protection should not be used as a pre-emptive measure against vandalism that has not yet occurred, nor should it be used solely to prevent editing by anonymous and newly registered users." If they ever get around to the flagged protection trial we will have a better idea about how this could/should be applied to the BLP issue, and I would be more inclined to support flagged protection in the situation outlined above. I just don't think this is the right tool to bridge the gap until that is in place. Joshdboz (talk) 00:00, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

• Absolutely Oppose A compromise that compromises one of the wp:pillars is not acceptable. Page protection is reactive. Not proactive. Gigs (talk) 22:22, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Actually there's no wording in the pillars agains this proposal. The founding principles say: The ability of anyone to edit (most) articles without registration,. There's nothing about reactivity or proactivity. This depends on the protection policy. --Cyclopia^talk 23:10, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Alternative No 3.

The problem that I, and others appear to have with default to delete is that it's being used on high-visibility bios like the one that started this mess - bios that would be on more than enough watchlists, and not on unwatched shitty bios (where the default is obviously keep - by practice). I would support default to delete on biographies that the closing admin expects would be mostly unwatched. How's that? Hipocrite (talk) 15:04, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

• Hmmm...I like the way you're thinking, but it runs into the problem that if it's difficult to determine notability, it might be difficult to foresee how many watchers the article might attract. At the very least, I would suggest that out of all of this a WikiProject:Unloved articles crop up, along with a talk page category of Category:Articles in need of watching for those that don't have a certain threshold (5? 10?) of watchers. The beauty of Wikipedia is that there are so many kinds of people here, I could very well see a segment of our community wanting to step in to protect our most unloved biographies. -->David Shankbone 15:13, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

• Oppose - We cannot ask admins to read the future, and this is as arbitrary as everything. I would endorse, instead, the admin asking (and ensuring if possible) that keep !votes watch the page. --Cyclopia^talk 15:15, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
• I hear you Cyclopia, predicting the future is hard. But... we ask admins to exercise judgment in all sorts of areas. This would be another (new) area where they'd have to exercise good judgment and if they did not, DRV would be there to say "no, you're wrong this is a highly watched page"... and we could overturn just that part of the close without overturning the rest. I'm not sure how you efficiently make that determination (of how well watched something is) if the tool we have can't tell the difference between 0 watchers and 29 (29 is pretty comfy in my view, while 0?? not so much). Or how you predict the future. But we ask admins to exercise judgment and this is one reason why we pay them so much. support, with the comment that I'm willing to try just about anything to address this problem, so keep those ideas coming everyone. ++Lar: t/c 15:23, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

As an aside, I'll have to dig up the diff, but the 30 watcher limit was added to avoid use of the tool to facillitate vandalism. IIRC the tool originally did tell exactly how many watcher a given page has. Xymmax ^{So let it be written} _{So let it be done} 15:51, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Yep. (I think MZM's subpage for the tool has some discussion of this) I am not saying I think limiting is a bad thing. Just that it makes it hard to predict watched-ness or track. ++Lar: t/c 16:01, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Here's a relevant link - User talk:MZMcBride/watcher. It may not be necessary or desirable for everyone to have access to a list of unwatched articles or be able to check if an article is unwatched. But we should have a wikiproject like David suggests above to systematically apportion lists of some requested number of unwatched BLPs and other articles to trusted editors.John Z (talk) 18:46, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

• I am afraid that "expects would be mostly unwatched" would be little more than a wild guess. For some reason I think even well-known scientists - nobel laureates! - are "mostly unwatched" [4] while even obscure porn stars with an internet following are "mostly watched" [5]. Still, I think the trouble tends to lie in the second category of article. The semi-protection proposal one section over us is a better option than this, even though I am leery of limiting the free editing which Wikipedia is founded upon. Given that we have an alternative which does not wind up removing articles without consensus, I oppose this one. Sjakkalle (Check!) 15:38, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
• oppose Absolutely no way to tell. Would have all the problems of the original proposal and be even more arbitrary. Semi protection is a better idea. We need to stop having people trying to use BLP as an excuse to delete good content. If you can't convince the community to delete, stop trying to run around the consensus. JoshuaZ (talk) 16:14, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

• Oppose: An admin's opinion as to what BLPs are likely to be watched would be, at best, a wild guess. At worst, it would be the closing admin's proxy for WP:ILIKEIT versus WP:IDONTLIKEIT; that is not how the community wants AfDs to be closed. —Finell (Talk) 19:54, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

• Oppose This is not a compromise, this is worse than a simple "default to delete". This alternative gives all the deciding power into the hands of particular admins (who, we have witnessed as of recently, are sometimes a little less than perfect).Turqoise127 (talk) 20:56, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose: this is problematic because it also increases the role of admin discretion and because it would mean deciding inclusion on the basis of the Wikipedia community's behavior rather than the subject itself. Everyking (talk) 21:04, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose. This still allows admins to decide to delete an article when there is no consensus to do so, which will be likely used by Lar and others to delete as many bios as possible. Fences&Windows 23:10, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose, the opposition is to giving admins a "default to delete" option in the absence of subject request, period. Regardless of where exactly any given admin may wish to apply a "default to delete" option, deletion is an administrative tool that requires consensus for its use, not simply the absence of consensus against it. If someone is concerned that the bio may be unwatched and feels it needs to be deleted for that reason, they are welcome to bring up that concern during the discussion. They are not allowed to unilaterally decide they're right, when (given a no consensus situation) there is not agreement that they really are. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 23:31, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose - as above, worse than the other proposed ideas. Also, kind of logically unsound -- by the time a BLP gets to AfD, it's presumably already had a few eyes on it. Deleting those does nothing to solve the problem of unwatched BLP's that haven't even been AfD'd. So we're solving the wrong problem with the wrong tool. --Bfigura ^(talk) 02:32, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose - just another version of supervotes for the admins. A note to policy proposers: Content is the domain of the editors. Admins exist for the purpose of contending with editor misbehavior. A good fix for a perceived policy problem empowers editors to fix the articles. patsw (talk) 23:18, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed alternative No. 4

Since it seems unlikely that at this time any blanket "default to delete" is going to gain consensus, I'd like to propose an alternative. I would like to propose that we implement the proposal for indefinite semiprotection of any BLP that comes to a "no consensus" at AfD, and about which the closing administrator feels BLP concerns may arise. In conjunction with this, let's keep track of these articles at some central location. At any time anyone wants to, we can then examine these articles. If they have become vandalism and libel magnets, despite the application of a less extreme measure than deletion, I could certainly see myself reevaluating my position, and I imagine that others could be swayed as well. On the other hand, if they have by and large turned into workable articles, that may indicate that perhaps such an extreme measure as outright deletion is not required. I could much more easily support this, as it doesn't start from implementation of the most extreme measure, but rather will measure the effectiveness of a less extreme one. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 21:33, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

• Oppose Your proposal would require crystal balling by the closing admin whether such risks exist and would also be against the protection policy that limits semi-protection to those cases where problems actually happened, not where they might happen. If anything, we should discuss this as a change to the protection policy but then it should not be limited to articles that have been at AFD before because while libel and vandalism clearly have to be fought, we should not make it depending on whether an AFD of the subject was closed as no consensus or not. It should apply to any BLP in need of protection and as such not be discussed here. Regards SoWhy 23:25, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

• Oppose. Again, another version of supervotes for admins. It also enshrines the notion of precrime into policy. patsw (talk) 23:43, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

• Puzzled oppose I don't understand it. How is it different from re-AfDing the article if needed? And if the article is a vandalism magnet despite semiprotection, shouldn't just it be fully protected? --Cyclopia^talk 00:38, 1 November 2009 (UTC)
• Comment Alright, I guess I phrased this very poorly. Unfortunately, I do that sometimes. All I'm really suggesting here is that we implement Cyclopia's semiprotection suggestion (which seemed to have reasonable support), and see if there are any problems with the "no consensus" articles that get semiprotected by tracking them centrally, to see if they develop into decent articles (as it seems many believe they will), or into the horrible problems a lot of people here seem to be asserting they'll become. That's really all. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 01:23, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

• Puzzled oppose as well. A BPL AFD can go to no consensus for a variety of reasons, some of which warrant semi-protection, some of which do not. I have no problem with a closing admin saying "Based on the arguments presented here, there is a good case for semi-protecting the article now and for the foreseeable future. Semi-protection may be removed when it is no longer needed," then semi-protecting the article. Likewise, I have no problem with any admin semi-protecting any article that happens to be in AFD if it meets the criteria. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 23:52, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

• Strong Oppose as above. I view proactive blanket semi-protection as a violation of the wp:pillars. Any proposal that involves proactive and automatic protection is unacceptable. Gigs (talk) 22:26, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
• Endorse Semi-protection should help keep drive-by vandalism down, while not providing a challenge to established editors. Notions that anonymous editing must be enabled anywhere are idealistic, but not realistic in the face of the reality and importance of BLP. Jclemens (talk) 23:17, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] a lot of talk but seemingly little action

as in the continued existence of Habsburg-Snyder, which i have deleted except for the heading,and various other spurious claimants.76.71.93.151 (talk) 00:19, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Try nominating it for deletion instead of just blanking the text. Powers ^T 13:24, 23 November 2009 (UTC)