Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/Biographies of living people

x minutes after creation

I'm suggesting that to avoid biting editors, and I might add avoid pointlessly tagging articles that will be referenced once the ensuing edit conflict is resolved; we add this to the note on Special:NewPages "please consider not tagging new articles for CSD:A1 and CSD:A3 within moments of creation, as not all users will place all their information in their first revision". I have a view as to what within moments of creation might mean, but I'd rather that we agree here whether we want to add stickyprods to that list and treat changes to "within moments of creation" as an issue for New page patrol policy. What I don't want is to add some sort of complication that some tags can be applied immediately, others after an hour and yet others after some days. ϢereSpielChequers 16:24, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

I would agree to this. Not all editors know what tags are and many fear removing tags even though they are long since irrelevant. That fear to remove tags has led to the many mislabeled unreferenced BLP articles in the first place. We also have thousands of editors who have no clue what you are talking about in terms of inserting references. I've seen quite a few misguided valiant attempts. Pointless tagging won't help these cases. Most of these are done by BOTs. They don't really read an article, they just see a certain set of circumstances if:then and tag (deface) the article. When the situation is corrected, does the bot return to remove its damage, no. Turn off the bots, or at least, set a realistic time limit into the programming. Since BOT programming deals in hard numbers, make it creation date plus 1 week.Trackinfo (talk) 17:02, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

I'm confused by the intent of you starting this string. Are you against any 'x minutes' in favor of 'moments' or are you saying that we should first decide on the concept of waiting then define 'moments', or is it something else that I'm just too dense to pick up on? J04n(talk page) 19:42, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

We already have the concept of waiting established for A1 and A3, I'm just suggesting we add sticky prods to that. ϢereSpielChequers 09:48, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

I disagree. A1/A3 the wait is necessary because those will invoke immediate deletion---often while a person is writing an article. (I've had two articles speedily deleted because I saved the first draft and the first draft sucked.) The sticky-prod can be quick because sometimes these new users are here for one-time one article stints. If you don't catch them while they are working on the article, you may never get a second chance.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 20:58, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

In an ideal world Wikipedia would have some kind of superpoke feature where you could post a nice friendly "are you going to reference that? click here for details!" message to the newbie user as soon as they save and before they log off. And there is the talk page. I'm sure that's technically feasible... if someone is patrolling new articles they could leave a relatively cordial non-wikipedia-speak talk page message that they'll check back in a few minutes and if the article isn't referenced they'll propose it for deletion. - Wikidemon (talk) 21:35, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

In an ideal world... but that is kind of what BLP-Prod should be doing.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 21:41, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

re: superpoke: Something like Twinkle, I'd imagine, could be modifed for the purpose. I think that's an interesting and quite possibly quite positive suggestion. One way to make a cordial non-WP-speak message more so, I'd think, would be to include (optionally?) an offer to answer questions/lend a hand if the person has a source but doesn't quite know what to do. I imagine (I could be quite wrong, but I imagine) that fear of screwing up "how to do a reference" is actually a barrier to them including a source--whereas I (and I suspect many folks who've been sourcing articles) would give our eyeteeth for just a pointer to a good reference if the article creator knew of one, and more than happy to insert angle-bracket-ref-angle-brackets around it with the rest of the appropriate mojo. --Joe Decker (talk) 21:45, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

I can see positives and negatives of implementing this, but I'm inclined to think that it probably isn't necessary. The PROD gives the creator (and everyone else for that matter) ten days to source the article. An extra few minutes before it's added is unlikely to make much difference. Alzarian16 (talk) 21:44, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

True. I just took a look at the template and it is reasonably clear, friendly, helpful, and avoids swamping a newbie in wiki process. Good job to all who wrote it! The only thing I would add is a "please forgive me if you were planning to source this but...", which I think is a matter of personal style. - Wikidemon (talk) 22:24, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

Some editors stick around despite having someone attempt to delete their first article in its initial minutes. But many don't. I can see the need to tag and delete vandalism, attack pages and other bad faith stuff as fast as it is posted. But for good faith contributors AFAIK it does more harm than good - a welcome message or perhaps a category or two is a much more collaborative approach than an attempt to delete their submission. ϢereSpielChequers 16:20, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

BLP-PROD does not delete their article right away, in fact it is a warning that their article will be deleted if a source isn't provided. My history here firmly puts me in the camp of people who don't like careless speedy deleters and find the process potentially harmful, but for the same reasons that I don't like speedy tagging of new articles with a CSD taggings, are the same reasons I like BLP-PROD. I see it as a means to help the new author keep an article. BUT the quicker we can get the message to the author, ideally while they are still working on it, the better.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 18:14, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

Discussion on View by Gigs

Partial endorsement. Whatever a BLP can meet a SNG should be based only on the verified facts with reliable source even primary ones. --KrebMarkt 18:18, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

I feel like this is missing the point. My point is it's not sufficient to apply WP:V standards merely to the primary sources that are so often used to establish biographical notability under SNGs, we need verifiable third party sources of biographical information. A statistics site that verifies that a sportsman played in the big leagues for one season is not sufficient sourcing to write a biography. Likewise, a professor's high level of citations in Google Scholar, while itself verifiable information, does not provide us with any sourcing for a biography on the professor. Gigs (talk) 02:38, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

I think the bare minimum requirement to meet any SNG is WP:V. There are Afds where editors vote Keep per XYZ SNG based on unverified facts inside the article this is my key issue with SNGs. Others than that i found the SNGs rather useful against the systemic bias. While SNGs need to be tighten up, it should not be done in a way that increases the western cultures centric bias. --KrebMarkt 08:40, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

Gigs, could you explain how this relates to the sticky prod thing? If there is a link to, say, a statistics site for sportsmen, isn't that enough to ward off a sticky prod? Are you arguing it shouldn't be? Hobit (talk) 03:52, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

This RFC isn't only about sticky prods, it's about unreferenced and poorly referenced BLPs. My view has little to do with sticky prods. Gigs (talk) 19:49, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

notifying the author

There is a bit of a discrepancy between DGG's suggestion "notifying the author of the article be absolutely mandatory for this and all forms of deletion" and my suggestion "As these articles are by definition good faith contributions, the prodder should inform the author unless there is a good reason to make an exception".

I don't think that our differences over bad faith contributors are relevant to to sticky prods; but there is a difference between informing the authors being mandatory and doing so unless there is good reason to make an exception. These are some examples where I think an exception is relevant:

1. Users who've chosen to WP:VANISH
2. Users who've retired
3. Users who are indef blocked or community banned
4. Users who've died
5. users who are being template bombed with large numbers of similar messages that they don't seem to be responding to.

Do people agree with these and are there other scenarios where people think it would be sensible not to inform the author? Since Sticky prods can only be applied to articles created in the last three months, all but the last of these will be rare at the moment. Though they will presumably become more common in the future. Do people agree that thee exceptions are sensible, or conversely should one template such talkpages so that any talkpage stalkers have the opportunity to source their friends articles? ϢereSpielChequers 14:28, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

While I think authors/projects should be notified, I have a problem with "absolutely" requiring anything. It's bad form not to, but no I would not support this. Plus, the author who wrote the article may not care. There have been articles I wrote 4 years ago, where I am not the one to go to to salvage them.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 14:55, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

Oh yeah, my fear of "absolutely" requiring something is that it is one of those requirements that will end up byting us in the butt down the road and lead to endless debates/ani reports/and wikilawyering.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 18:10, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

Discussion under my name

Shouldn't that discussion be moved here? I would do it if A) it wasn't under my name and B) I wasn't involved... but it is getting entirely too long for the main page.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 22:34, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

Agree entirely. I'm not involved in that particular discussion so I could probaly move it if no-one objects. Alzarian16 (talk) 08:47, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

Done. Any objections anyone? Alzarian16 (talk) 13:39, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

I don't think it makes sense to jump around like that so I'd prefer it go back. But if you _are_ going to do that I'd suggest we consider moving all comments. Also if you're going to move something like that you certainly should replace it with a link (which I've done). Hobit (talk) 02:42, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

It's pretty standard that when conversation on the main page becomes too long to move it to the talk page and provide a link to it...---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 07:46, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, good point. Still needed the link though, so I get half credit  :-) Hobit (talk) 19:50, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Yes, sorry, wasn't really thinking straight. Of course I should have included a link! Thank you for correcting my error. Alzarian16 (talk) 19:56, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Discussion on view by DGG

In his view, DGG makes the suggestion that WP:BEFORE be a mandatory part of the process. Others have remarked that this would be unenforceable, but I think it's worth discussing before dismissing it. How could a nominator demonstrate that he or she has taken steps to source an article? If this were to happen in every case, it would not only reduce the bad faith prodding, it would reduce the accusations of bad faith prodding. I suspect that some of the cases that appear to ignore WP:BEFORE are really just examples of weaker researching skills. If I prod an article and document what I did beforehand, and DGG reviews it and finds several sources, it changes the situation from "you didn't look for sources" to "here are places you might consider looking for sources next time." More articles get sources, and the nominations become learning experiences for those editors.

So what could be done to make this suggestion enforceable?--~TPW 13:00, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

I don't agree with making WP:BEFORE mandatory, but I usually show my work by indicating relevant websites I've searched. For example, for a Turkish pro football player from the 1990s or more recent, I will mention in the prod reasoning that the person is not listed on the www.tff.org website (Turkish Football Federation). I also think people could indicate the type of google news search they did (e.g., "John Doe football") in the description with a brief overview of the results. Jogurney (talk) 15:23, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

I don't think that enforceability is really the issue here, or that its difficult to spot when an editor is tagging their way through new page patrol without actually referencing any articles. The previous RFC left an air of ambiguity as to whether editors needed to make a good faith attempt to source an article before applying a sticky prod, I believe we should resolve that ambiguity. If we resolve it by making wp:before necessary for sticky prods then in my view we might as well abolish the sticky prod, as most such articles can either be referenced or prod/afded as non-notable. But if we slow down the prodders by asking them to reference these articles we will be back to where we were in January, with a large backlog of unreferenced BLPS and as many new one being added as are being deleted and referenced. Having seen enough of these to now have a feel for how uncontentious the contents of the vast majority of these unreferenced BLPS are, I'm not as worried as I would have been in January at the idea of accepting that people can go on adding new unreferenced BLPs, and I'm very much of the view that there are much better ways to improve the quality of our BLPS than to prioritise those tagged as unreferenced BLPs. However referencing an article takes longer than prodding it, and if we revert to the old policy that editors should not prod an article for deletion as unreferenced without a good faith attempt to reference it, then I don't believe that we will be able to keep up with the flow of new unreferenced BLPs. ϢereSpielChequers 15:37, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

If you want piles of unreferenced BLPs in the encyclopedia because creators aren't bothered to reference them and reviewers aren't allowed to delete them unless they jump through hoops, this is the way to do it. Stifle (talk) 09:44, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

So now doing a bit of quick source-checking is considered "jump through hoops"? --Cyclopia^talk 09:47, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

That might be a stronger argument if the number of unreferenced BLPs were not clearly declining. Mark me as in favor of some hoops. Collect (talk) 14:25, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

You can't accuse a basketball ref of making the players go through hoops, right? The difficulty is entirely a matter of the rules of the game, not the ref's enforcing them. All the same, it's reasonable to question whether having a go / no go decision based on the existence of a single source is a good first test of having created a viable article. - Wikidemon (talk) 14:39, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Discussion on view by Balloonman

• Ehm, this is FUD at its best. Can you provide some specific example of which negative consequences can come out by requiring WP:BEFORE for articles? At least Scott Mac above tried to reason about that. To simply say "don't follow the dark path!" without any reasoning behind, makes no real sense. We're not going to jail people if they don't follow BEFORE, we simply ask them to do that if they want their deletion suggestion to have value. --Cyclopia^talk 16:38, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

• If I understand it correctly, the gist is that we already ask people to search first and we're still going to ask them to search first - but trying to make it mandatory in any sense is a lost cause. VernoWhitney (talk) 16:51, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

• Why is it a lost cause? Make it this way: if there is no explicit indication of BEFORE having been made (like links to reasonable searches actually showing nothing) then the PROD can be removed. So if you really care about removing articles, first show that you have looked if the article really ought to be removed. And also WP:BURDEN says: It has always been good practice to make reasonable efforts to find sources oneself that support such material, and cite them. --Cyclopia^talk 16:57, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

• And it still is a good practice, but BURDEN doesn't say it is required. It is also good practice to source the articles you write. The burden should be upon the author of the article, not somebody who doesn't care one whit about some obscure person in some unknown location that did something the reviewer finds uninteresting.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 19:52, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

• If you are "somebody who don't care one whit about some obscure person in some unknown location that did something the reviewer finds uninteresting.", why do you even care to PROD it? If you are here to help the encyclopedia, you should help even by taking someone else burden. You can help by deleting articles, of course, but only if you show positively that it is a reasonable course of action. Proposing for deletion only because you don't care at all about helping content becoming better is NOT what I call a reasonable course of action. Articles do not have owners: the first author of an article doesn't have more responsibility than any other editor for it. --Cyclopia^talk 20:04, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

• I'm talking about the person who is doing some mindless patrolling. The person who has logged on and just wants to help out, but not get too deep into the project---who doesn't care about some obscure yokel that nobody has heard of. The burden for providing evidence of notability is on the person who wrote the article. The community has spoken that new unsourced BLPs should be deleted---that was decided in rounds 1 and 2. Putting a BLP-PROD was the compromise rather than having them speedied. Sorry, and existing policy supports this, the burden is not on the person who is reviewing the BLP, but rather on the person who wrote the BLP to provide sources. Here is another problem with making this an "absolutely mandatory" rule---you might end up with people fulfilling the letter of the law but not the spirit. "Oh, I added a source, so it's ok." But the source is a piece of crap. If the person doing the reviewing isn't inclined to add sources, and that can be a time consuming endeavor, then you are going to get crap results. You are also going to chase off our first line of reviewers with "absolutely mandatory" language.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 22:17, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

If you make something an absolute mandatory action, then failure to do so results in consequences. What will end up happening is that we are going to have ANI reports that so and so didn't look for resources. We are going to have bickering that one person was notified, but it was the wrong person. We're going to have disputes about what was and wasn't done, and allegations of bad faith made along the way. Then there are going to be issues that we do not forsee popping up, which invariably happen with "absolutely mandatory rules." The wikilawyering that this might bring about is a nightmare.

States/businesses/schools that have implemented absolute requirements, generally regret them because they impact the organization in ways not forseen. There is a reason why when you are studying for those standardized tests in HS/College, that the old addage goes, "if the answer includes words like 'always' it is probably false."

There is also a reason why WP has that policy, WP:IAR. Absolute requirements trap you into a corner that people do not want find themselves in. Yes, I would like to see people do BEFORE and notify the author/pertinent parties, but that is a preference and something we should encourage---especially as this project is manned by volunteers. NOTHING we do is absolutely required.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 18:36, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

• absolute mandatory action, then failure to do so results in consequences. - Sure.
• What will end up happening is that we are going to have ANI reports that so and so didn't look for resources. - No, we will simply end up removing the PROD. Of course if someone persists in disruptively nominating stuff without caring of requirements, ANI could be a venue: so what?
• We're going to have disputes about what was and wasn't done, and allegations of bad faith made along the way. - Well, like for everything. We put a rule, a few people don't follow it, discussion follows. Again, what's the problem there? If that's the point, why don't we ditch all policies? After all, the very reason ANI exists is because there are policies. Remove them and -poof!- problem solved!
• Then there are going to be issues that we do not forsee popping up, which invariably happen with "absolutely mandatory rules." - This is again FUD pure and simple, not an argument.
• The wikilawyering that this might bring about is a nightmare. - No more a nightmare than other policies.
• States/businesses/schools that.... Nonsense. Apart that we're not a state/business/school, all states I am aware of have mandatory rules: they are called laws. Guess what, they function pretty well, usually (provided laws are reasonable, of course). --Cyclopia^talk 19:05, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

• States that have enacted mandatory 3 strikes and your out or mandatory sentencing laws often end up having problems. You can call it what you want, but if anything is made absolutely mandatory, then there will be problems. There is a reason why we have IAR---to explicitly state that there are exceptions to every rule. Absolutely mandatory rules are a mistake.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 19:15, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

• What has "3 strikes and your out" to do with this? Really, your combination of FUD and straw man arguments is amazing. I am not saying to block on sight anyone who by chance doesn't follow BEFORE. I am just saying that it should be a requirement put in policy, and that persistent violations of this would constitute disruptive editing. Of course IAR can have a place in special unforeseen cases -it is there exactly for this reason. We require already many things without problems, for example, we require in (almost) all cases to follow WP:3RR. That we can't require anything is ridicolous -this is not an anarchy. --Cyclopia^talk 19:32, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

• You're not familiar with the 3 strikes laws in many states? Get three convictions and life imprisonment? It failed. This is also a volunteer project, people volunteer their time and effort here. As for making a mandatory requirement, then why don't we make it a mandatory requirement to put sources to articles? If we are going to have absolutely mandatory rules, put the onus on the person creating the unsourced document, not the people who are trying to maintain standards. As for straw man, again, places that have set up "absolute rules" have almost universally found them to be more problematic than they are worth. I'm not saying don't ask for it, but anytime you put "absolutely mandatory" you are asking for problems. History is repleat with examples of how that type of language has come back and created more problems than it solves.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 19:40, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

• You're not familiar with the 3 strikes laws in many states? I am familiar with their existence, and I disapprove them. The straw man argument comes from the fact that it is an issue completely irrelevant to the case in point. Three-strikes laws are bad. Nice, let's talk about this in a politics forum. It has nothing to do with requirements for WP articles. I understand you mean it as some kind of metaphor, but it is not a good metaphor here -we're not talking of 3 strikes, we're not talking of indef bans.
• put the onus on the person creating the unsourced document, not the people who are trying to maintain standards. : Trying to maintain standards doesn't necessarly conflict with trying to build an encyclopedia. If you slash articles without even looking if they can be worthwile, then you are not helping to maintain standards, you are just throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
• places that have set up "absolute rules" have almost universally found them to be more problematic than they are worth. - Are you serious? I shouldn't remind this to anyone older than 6-years old, but you may not know that basically all governments worldwide have some kind of legislation -which means: rules that are mandatory for people to follow. Also, basically all organizations I am aware of, including volunteer ones, have internal rules, statuses, policies etc. The world seems to have no intention to change this. And again, this is not an anarchy either, since we have policies.
• History is repleat with examples of how that type of language has come back and created more problems than it solves. : Please point us at multiple historical examples where the mere existence of a body of laws (not single, isolated laws) has created so many problems that it has been successfully and stably replaced by some kind of lawless anarchy. --Cyclopia^talk 19:55, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

• I didn't say any law, you are putting words in my mouth, I've explicitly said "absolutely mandatory" rules. When you start defining terms like that, then you have problems. Jay Walking is illegal in many places, but it becomes totalitarian when you make it absolute. Going over the speed limit is illegal, but it becomes totalitarian when you make it absolute. Corporations/organizations have rules, but unless you are dealing with life/death situations, the ones that are "absolutes" are the one's that cause problems. Again, per policy, the burden is on the person wanting to add the material---if an absolute rule must exist apply it to the author who cares about the subject. It is not our job to clean up the messes other people make; if we choose to do so, kudos. But making it absolutely required---mistake.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 20:45, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

• Facepalm I am not putting anything in your mouth: A law is a mandatory requirement of behaviour. That it is not always fully enforced doesn't make it less mandatory in principle -it can be, and that's the essential point. A non-mandatory law is not a law: it is an advice. Just for the sake of discussion: Going over the speed limit is illegal, but it becomes totalitarian when you make it absolute. - Let's substitute "Going over the speed limit" with "Beating children to death". Is it totalitarian to make it "absolutely illegal", in your opinion? Should we say something like "If you choose not to beat children to death, kudos, but making it absolutely required mistake"? (Of course I am not comparing WP:BEFORE to child murder, but just making the point that your argument is, in general, nonsensical). That said: nobody is arguing for sending people who don't follow WP:BEFORE to the death squad. The only consequence would be the PROD being invalidated.
• It is not our job to clean up the messes other people make : Ehm, so why do you care about PRODding articles? Isn't this "cleaning up the mess"? The only thing I ask is: clean this mess the proper way, by verifying that what you're going to throw away really needs to be thrown away instead of being salvaged. --Cyclopia^talk 21:10, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

*CSDify by turning it into a pseudo-criterion for speedy deletion. For instance, request that users contest it with a {{hangon}} tag. T3h 1337 b0y 22:26, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

Cyclopia, how would you propose making WP:BEFORE mandatory? What would be gained by giving an additional reason to bicker over article deletions? I personally have enjoyed adding references to unreferenced BLPs, but I can certainly understand if some do not, given that it's fairly time-consuming and unglamorous work.

I would urge that we stop viewing new articles as a battleground of PRODers vs rescuers and work together to write the encyclopedia.  --Joshua Scott (LiberalFascist) 23:08, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

A possibility could be the following:

• The PRODder is required to bring proof of at least a couple of searches for RS on the subject (say, for example, Gbooks and Gnews) that give no significant results.
• A PROD which fails this requirement can be removed
• The PRODder however must be notified and the PROD tag can be readded as long as the previous requirement is met this time.

What would be gained is that if a good faith editor finds that a search indeed find something akin to reasonable sources on the subject, the editor may prefer sourcing the article or request a more thorough discussion at AfD.

About your urge to stop the battleground, I couldn't agree more: the problem is that slashing articles without doing good-faith searches is not working to write the encyclopedia. --Cyclopia^talk 23:36, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

Section break

• My 2 cents about how this works If someone clearly NOT following WP:BEFORE (say they tag 10 articles in 1 minute or tag articles where a Gnews search hits a NYT article on the first page that is on the topic) then whoever notices A) adds the source, B) removes the tag and C) asks that the tagger be more careful in the future. If a given editor continues to do the same thing then we do the same thing we'd do for any other kind of disruptive editing. Warn, and if needed, block. I honestly don't forsee this being a big issue at ANI, I think the folks patrolling this articles are good and reasonable people. It _will_ slow down the tagging and if it means articles slip through the cracks that would be a concern. But I honestly don't think there will be any significant problems and if there is we'll need to revisit it. Hobit (talk) 23:50, 18 June 2010 (UTC)
  • This is completely backwards and counterproductive for teaching editors the importance of doing good research prior to adding content to an article about a living person. Why should people doing new page patrol be required to do the sourcing work for other people that skip that essential step in writing a good article? Our standards of quality are not going to be raised on articles if we don't structure our processes so that the procedures place the work of sourcing on the people creating the content. FloNight♥♥♥♥ 10:08, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
    • The thing is that a lot of new editors begin by working on BLPs. New pages patrollers sometimes struggle to apply Hanlon's razor, and giving them a mandate to remove anything unsourced without even a perfunctory search for sources is rather absolutist. As well as the obvious bite issues, when it comes to assigning the burden of searching for sources, I think we ought to have some regard for Sturgeon's Law.—S Marshall T/C 11:37, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
      • It doesn't fix the problem with unsourced content to have a person uninterested in the topic add a random source that merely shows notability of the person. The best way to get the article content sourced is inform the creating editor that the article will be deleted unless they provide sources for the content. This can be done in a firm but friendly way. They may be the only person that will ever care enough to work on the article so unless they do it, the material will stay unsourced forever. Wikipedia is founded on the premise that instead of using topic experts to create content, the work will be based on information from reliable sources. When we get away from this standard, imo, we are undermining the creditability of Wikipedia. If this is explained to new users, then they will learn good habits about sourcing from the start and create good quality articles that we can all be proud to display. FloNight♥♥♥♥ 12:11, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
        • The final goal is a well-written, well-sourced article. It is unrealistic to assume we'll start with one. That each person who touches the article is expected to try to move it toward that state (or start a deletion action if it looks impossible to source) doesn't seem unreasonable. Hobit (talk) 12:40, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
          • Years of having new page patrol editors or people that monitor BLPs merely tag them as unreferenced has not advanced us toward well written, well sourced articles. Many of these articles are unwatched, and unviewed except for occasionally clean up work that is unrelated to the content. The only way that these minimal improvements have occurred is by raising the standard so that a source is required for retaining the article. This is a standard that is entirely too low and needs to be greatly raised if we are going to have the majority of the WP articles well written, well sourced. I have great concerns about the approach being used to retain these articles. It is not possible to evaluate an article for copyright violations and plagiarism unless sources are identified for the work. Adding a random source that indicates some level of written recognition of the person hardly fixes the vast problems with many of these article. For example, it is not possible to evaluate an article for copyright violations and plagiarism unless sources are identified for the work. Adding a reference to the article that does not directly support the article content could very well be disguising and compounding the quality problems with the content. So, unless someone interested in the subject voluntarily comes forward to do a thorough clean up, many of these articles will be destined to remain poorly written and poorly sourced. The only real solution is to have the person creating the content be responsible for adding supporting sources for the material or have someone else do a complete rewrite of the content which is not really much less bitey for newcomers. FloNight♥♥♥♥ 13:09, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
            • (edit conflict)FloNight, why do you insist in giving the article creator a special status? Nobody owns an article. Once the article is released, anybody touching it should have an interest in maintaining it and helping it if possible,and deleting it should be only the last resort. All that we're asking is that the PROD nominator has done some quick good-faith research and has therefore grounded the deletion case. --Cyclopia^talk 13:15, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
              • Nothing in my comment is related to ownership issues. Instead, I'm insisting that the person creating content be the person responsible for adding the sources to support it. If the person is a new editor, then they need to have the importance of the sourcing explained to them the same as we explain all the other policies. While it is reasonable for other editors to help the person with formatting and style, in many instances, no one else can add sources for this specific content wording accept the person that added the material. We have been dancing around this issue for years with tags but in the end either the content will be removed, modified when sources are added, or remain unsourced and therefore unreliable. Essentially you are saying that the person that notices the problems with the content must then take responsibility for the problem. In a volunteer project, this is unworkable in addition to being counterproductive towards identifying problematic content. FloNight♥♥♥♥ 13:41, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
                • • Nothing in my comment is related to ownership issues. Instead, I'm insisting that the person creating content be the person responsible for adding the sources to support it. : You're therefore giving the article creator a special status that hasn't.
                  • in many instances, no one else can add sources for this specific content wording accept the person that added the material. : So what? Noticing the article author in case your reasonable attempt to find sources failed and you PROD is perfectly OK, and goes along your suggestion.
                  • Essentially you are saying that the person that notices the problems with the content must then take responsibility for the problem.  : Essentially, yes. When you PROD you already take responsibility, in that you are already dealing with the problem. If you notice a problem and decide to take action on it, you ought to be positively driven to take the best course of action -that is looking for sources before deciding to slap a tag.
                    • In a volunteer project, this is unworkable : Why?
                    • in addition to being counterproductive towards identifying problematic content.: Why? I am not talking of identifying problematic content, I am talking of how you deal with it. --Cyclopia^talk 15:47, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
          • (edit conflict)x2 I agree with this in principle - but when I do NPP and find an unreferenced BLP, I remove BLP violations, BLPPROD it, and mark it as patrolled. Then I may do a search (depending on the size of the backlog of unpatrolled new pages) to see if I can find sources. If I can, then I'll add them and remove the tag. It's important IMO to quickly tag & mark as patrolled because it signals to others doing NPP that they don't have to review that page now. Also, the longer we wait to tag the page, the more likely it is that the original author has moved on and will never add references.  --Joshua Scott (LiberalFascist) 13:17, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
            • I agree with you that it is necessary to quickly BLPPROD it before the editor loses interest in the article and moves on. Looking through unreferenced articles dating back years, it is noticeable that a large number of them had one primary editor that added content in a few sessions, and left the project years ago, and then the rest of the edits were maintenance edits from established users. So catching them ASAP is key. FloNight♥♥♥♥ 14:10, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Cyclopia, anyone who adds material is required by policy ["Any material lacking a reliable source directly supporting it may be removed" (WP:V#Burden of evidence)] to prove that the information is supported by reliable sources, or it can be removed. In this case, the creator of an unreferenced BLP is the one who is adding material, and in many cases, these are new editors. Notifying them in the first minutes after the article creation is the most effective way of making sure they know the policy and soliciting a source for their additions. In the case of BLPs, if a source is not forthcoming, the burden doesn't rest on my shoulders to find it, but to remove the unsourced material, per WP:BLP. If I choose to look for a source instead, then great, but making it mandatory will backfire. The moment an AN/I thread pops up saying "User:LiberalFascist doesn't follow WP:BEFORE when BLPPRODing" will be the last time I do New Page Patrol. I'm sure others feel the same.  --Joshua Scott (LiberalFascist) 00:00, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

• Well, I think there's a basic expectation that new pages patrollers will use a minimum of editorial judgment when tagging. With some kinds of material I think it's quite understandable that a patroller would tag first and ask questions later. But the reason we don't want bots tagging is because we want some thought to go into it. Personally, I'm of the view that we might add wording like: New pages patrollers are encouraged to use speedy deletion tags thoughtfully and with material from new users that may be in good faith, should consider searching for sources themselves, whether before or after adding the tag. Nothing mandatory in there, but it's appropriate to remind those wishing to do NPP that it's best to be sensible about it.—S Marshall T/C 00:57, 20 June 2010 (UTC)
  • The moment an AN/I thread pops up saying "User:LiberalFascist doesn't follow WP:BEFORE when BLPPRODing" will be the last time I do New Page Patrol. : Which would be a very much desirable outcome, since if your definition of doing NPP is slapping tags without taking care of the actual merits of the article subject, then you're doing it wrong and better you avoid doing it. --Cyclopia^talk 18:06, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

Surely you can't think that eliminating all the NPPers is a good idea! Last I checked, WP:BEFORE is not required on BLPPROD, so I'm not sure how you can assert that adding a BLPPROD is "doing it wrong".  --Joshua Scott (LiberalFascist) 23:39, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

Surely you can't think that eliminating all the NPPers is a good idea! - No, only the ones that don't do that properly.

Last I checked, WP:BEFORE is not required on BLPPROD - Yes. But it should very much be, otherwise we will continue having editors living in the delusion that slapping tags on articles without checking the subject potential/sourcing/notability is "helping the encyclopedia". That's why it is doing it wrong, even if policies do not (yet) consider it. --Cyclopia^talk 01:23, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

I like looking for references. I know that others do not, though. As this is a volunteer project, I'm more than happy for others to tag the article as needing sources and move on. I certainly prefer tagging to pretending there is no problem - after all, I would not have referenced any BLPs if someone had not tagged them as unsourced.  --Joshua Scott (LiberalFascist) 04:54, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

But tagging as unsourced and move on is perfectly fine, because it doesn't rob the chance of improving in the future. Is tagging with impending deletion that carries more responsibility.--Cyclopia^talk 09:12, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Cyclopia, I can't follow your reasoning here in general. Above in this section, you state that articles don't have owners, and that it is therefor incorrect to put the burden of sourcing on the article creators. Fine, but why do you support then the completely opposite view by DGG, namely "notifying the author of the article be absolutely mandatory for this and all forms of deletion". If they aren't the owner when it comes to sourcing, why should they suddenly become the owner when it comes to deletion? Fram (talk) 10:53, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Cyclopia is neither alone nor unusual in taking the view that whilst authors are not responsible for the maintenance and improvement of articles they have started, those who wish to delete good faith contributions should inform the principal authors, and for these unreferenced BLPs that almost always means the person who started the article. As editors we all agree that our contributions can be ruthlessly edited, but deletion is a step beyond that, not least because unless you are an admin those deleted edits are not available to you. ϢereSpielChequers 12:24, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Agree with WSC. That said, I would theorically support the view that every editor who contributed to an article should be informed, exactly because the article creator has no special status. But until there is a script for that, informing the original creator (which for new articles will usually be the principal contributor) is better than nothing. --Cyclopia^talk 12:26, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

And why is that better than nothing? Why would it be mandatory to inform the creator of an article which is e.g. at AfD, while the creator at the same time supposedly has no special status? You (plural) still want to have it both ways. No one (I hope) is claiming the opposite, that an article will be deleted unless the creator improves it. Everyone is free to improve an article, just like everyone is free to tag it, nominate it for deletion, redirect it, etcetera. Why people would want to make the requirements for the deletion more strict, while at the same time giving special attention to article creators, without anyone indicating what the actual problem is that these changes are supposed to solve, is beyond me (well, it isn't beyond me, but the only explanation I can see is that those people who were unhappy with the outcome of the previous RfCs which after much, much input ended with the creation of the BLPprod as a compromise between the insta-deletion of unsourced BLPs and the status quo, now try to make the BLPprod toothless by restarting this discussion). Fram (talk) 12:55, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

And why is that better than nothing? Because notifying 1 prominent contributor is better than notifying 0? Again: I would love a script that notifies all editors, and I'd prefer notifying the author that contributed most than the original author. But since identifying this is technically a bit more difficult, we are stuck with notifying the author that, while being suboptimal, is (again) better than doing nothing. I'd also make notifying a related Wikiproject mandatory. --Cyclopia^talk 13:24, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Dear Fram, I understand that requiring prodders to make a good faith attempt to source an article before tagging it with a sticky prod would make the sticky prod ineffective at stemming the flow of new unreferenced articles. However I don't understand why you think that requiring them to inform the creator would make the stcky prod ineffective. In my experience most prodders do inform the article creators, so getting the few who choose not to to change would not "make the BLPprod toothless". Rather it would make the process more effective, someone logging on a month after they'd created a bio should in my view see a note on their talkpage explaining what had happened to their article, but if their talkpage was still red they might well submit the same unreferenced article not knowing why their previous attempt didn't work. Remember the primary purpose of the sticky prod is to get the creators of new BLPs to source any new BLPS they create after the 18th March this year. So quite apart from not wanting editors to bite the newbies, informing the author is as important a part of the process as prodding their article.

PS to Cyclopia, I currently categorise and project tag lots of our prodded articles, so my deleted edits are rising by hundreds every month. If you ever get your script working please ignore minor edits and set an option that lets editors like me opt out unless we are a major contributor/creator. ϢereSpielChequers 13:52, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

I am NOT planning to write such a bot in the following months (already coding really a lot for work reasons!) but I take notice of your comments in case I'll change my mind --Cyclopia^talk 14:20, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Unless i'm mistaken making WP:BEFORE mandatory would be de facto raising it to the level of a Policy. Do we have community consensus to do a such thing if not i think a RfC on the subject is warranted. --KrebMarkt 09:09, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

• I think we'd (those in favor of it) would all be fine with something like "You are expected to follow WP:BEFORE before applying a BLPPROD other than in certain exceptional situations."
• There's a mandatory requirement on creators of articles to source the articles. Will the people wishing to make WP:BEFORE mandatory please explain how they propose to enforce the former requirement? Stifle (talk) 09:46, 21 June 2010 (UTC)
  • I assume we'd do so by A) deleting their work if it's not sourced and B) posting a message on their talk page that they are supposed to do this. I believe we do both right now, isn't that correct? Hobit (talk) 01:47, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

PRODs are utterly useless

If my points from the main page is lost, let me spell it out. There is no functional use for the sticky prod. It should not be available in a tagger's toolkit. Either the article is unsourced or it contains sources. If it is missing sources, fix it or ignore the problem (like all your predecessors). A google search will either provide you with sources, or will clearly show its a fraud. If its a fraud, which I contend is extremely rare, escalate to AfD. Get rid of the article. Obviously we'd like it to be sourced, but defacing the article isn't going to MAKE that happen--your laziness is just kicking the can down the street. Its black or white. WP:BEFORE is just another way of putting that. It becomes self-evident. If the tag is used, the user violated the rule.Trackinfo (talk) 06:28, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

I agree with your sentiments, but unfortunately consensus decided otherwise. But at least we can steer things in the right direction. --Cyclopia^talk 09:19, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

I'm assuming you mean sticky prods are useless not all prods? If so I'd partly agree with you, if we require wp:before - though one shouldn't assume that everything can be googled, especially in the third world. So even if we require prodders to make a good faith attempt to source articles Sticky prod would still have a small role for bios that can't be sourced or marked as frauds from google, but where offline sources might exist. However I don't believe that we can promptly source or delete all new BLPS unless we continue to exempt sticky prods from BEFORE. Which leaves us a couple of questions:

1. Is the price of exempting new BLPs from BEFORE worth paying to make sure we no longer accept new unreferenced BLPs?
2. Is the focus on articles tagged as unreferenced BLPs becoming a distraction from the broader task of dealing with problematic BLPs?

I'm not sure how we wound up prioritising sorting out the unreferenced BLPs as our first priority for BLP improvement. But in my view it is the wrong area to prioritise, in my experience there are better and less contentious ways to identify BLP violations. I think we can get more BLP improvement per hour of editor time by targeting articles that contain high risk words for example the work going on at User:Botlaf/Abuse. ϢereSpielChequers 09:47, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Excellent comment, WSC. My personal answers to your questions are:

1. No. Unreferenced BLPs are a bad proxy for problematic BLPs, and deleting potentially good contribution only because they temporaneously lack referencing is harmful to the encyclopedia.
2. Yes. A proper course of action for BLPs would be for example applying semiprotection/pending changes to all BLPs, thus cutting off most of the more obvious vandalism. Allowing problematic BLPs to be noindexed while being discussed would be another good idea (even if I don't know how technically feasible). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cyclopia (talk • contribs)

Noindexing is a little dangerous. It lowers the visibility of a BLP which makes vandalism live longer. People searching for themselves will still find it even if it's noindexed. I am against noindexing BLPs in main space. If you must then move them to incubator first and then noindex. Gigs (talk) 14:15, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

I refer to cases in which a problematic article is actively discussed as a temporary measure; not "noindexing by default". --Cyclopia^talk 14:18, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

It is currently technically impossible to noindex a mainspace article. To turn on this ability would open the door for any article to become noindexed. My view is that if we don't want it in Google, then we don't want it in mainspace, even if the situation is temporary. Gigs (talk) 19:15, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Reasonable. There was talk of creating a "draft" namespace for this issue, but I think we could propose something like a temporary "triage" page where to temporarily move such articles; for example subpages of the BLP noticeboard. What do you think? --Cyclopia^talk 21:05, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

I agree that this would require programming, and needs to be limited to those articles in mainspace that we don't want in Google. I would limit NoIndex to articles tagged G3, G10, G11, G12 and new articles not yet marked as patrolled. ϢereSpielChequers 08:21, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Ignoring the problem is not in any way a solution, nor is requiring the handful of people doing NPP to fix all the poor quality articles that stream in constantly. Mr.Z-man 23:55, 28 June 2010 (UTC)

Something that would be helpful

I'd love to find out who, if anyone, made an attempt to source an article. I'm sure as I try to find sources sometimes others have already tried. I'm sure others have tried to source articles that I've punted on. If we had a nice way to communicate which articles people have tried and failed to source (and more so, which ones no one has tried yet) that would be really handy. Again, I'd prefer to see who tried... Hobit (talk) 00:11, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I totally agree. I do like that the BLPPROD box has a nice preexisting list of places to look in. It'd be nice if the tracking of who looked where for information could include the article creator, too. Honestly, sometimes I think if an article creation box just had another box below it that said "tell us why you think what you've just written is true, where you got the information from", cleaning up a lot of this stuff would be a lot easier. I'd love to see the self-promotional folks face this question directly, too. --j⚛e decker^talk 00:46, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Sometimes I use a dummy edit to add short comments about attempted sourcing. Gigs (talk) 14:15, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

Nice idea, Gigs, I'll try and remember that. --j⚛e decker^talk 04:41, 11 July 2010 (UTC)

BLPPROD -- What are folks seeing?

I've been working my way through some BLPPRODs. I'm finding that:

• About 10% of them aren't BLPs (2 bands, 1 or 2 non-living people)
• About 30% are fairly easy to source and fairly clearly notable.
• About 20% are sourcable (sometimes with moderate sources) but unlikely to be able to meet our sourcing requirements.
• About 15% are pretty likely hoaxes (though maybe not "blatant")
• The rest, mainly from non-English speaking countries, can't be sourced.

I'm also finding that about 20% of the BLPPRODS are on articles that had sources (even if primary or IMDB) at the time the PROD was applied.

Does that sound about right? What are others seeing? Hobit (talk) 01:28, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

I've dealt with a pretty small population (~50) of BLPPRODs, but your percentages seem reasonable. I've seen articles tagged that are already sourced and some that are about dead people. Others are easily sourced (even a google news search would turn up dozens of sources), but there are some hoaxes or totally unverifiable articles. Jogurney (talk) 02:47, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

I agree that there is some poor quality tagging out there, though I've been finding more like 5% non BLPs. I agree that a very common error is that people are tagging poorly referenced articles - a lot of taggers get confused by the prod applying to totally unsourced articles but requiring a reliable source to remove (I see a similar problem with people tagging poorly sourced articles as unreferenced rather than {{BLP sources}}). Also 15% is far higher than my experience of hoaxes, are you possibly including some puffed up non notables in that? But I agree that lots are easily sourcable and a minority probably are notable but the likely sources are not online. From your stats a large minority of these tags are incorrect even before you consider WP:Before, if we were to require at least a google search for sources than the vast majority of stickyprods would be incorrect. ϢereSpielChequers 08:15, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Seems to me these statistics indicate a 90% success rate. The tag is being (on the whole) correctly applied to unsourced BLPs - and correctly removed if someone is willing to source them. This is not about removing unsourcable BLPs. Unsourcable BLPs always were removed as unverifiable. It is about saying, "if no one cares enough about this article to provide at least one source, then we'll remove it until someone comes along willing to do that". If the person finding an unsourced BLP is willing to source it, fine. If they are not, and someone else is, fine. If no-one is then we delete for now. It is that simple. Those complaining that somethings are sourcable are missing the point - the point is "is anyone willing to source them?". If we demand a googlesearch, then all that will happen is that if no one is willing to do a google, then the article will be kept - and we'll retain unsourced articles that no one cares about at all, and no one is willing to verify, that's not at all what we want at all.--Scott Mac 08:31, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

10% non BLPs and 20% on articles that had sources would actually mean a 30% fail rate, which is much worse than I would have expected. Though it would help to clarify if these were sources that actually mentioned the subject, as I've certainly seen new BLPs with a reference that proves their town or university exists without mentioning them. ϢereSpielChequers 08:49, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

OK, 30%. But as long as those 30% are being checked and de-prodded, then the final "fail rate" is 0%.--Scott Mac 10:53, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

More like 40% (10% non-BLPs +30% notable and sourceable), if Hobit has it right. But the point is as long as. There is not nearly enough monitoring of PRODs, and I feel it is a failed mechanism in general. I monitor WP:PRODSUM for generic prods about once a week, and the rate of PRODs which are applied to articles which are obviously notable (and that in fact then usually pass AfD with flying colours, when the prodder insists) is about 20-30%. And the most worrying symptom is that I am talking of PRODs going to expire or even already technically expired (top of the PRODSUM list). That is why I am so worried. I am currently analyzing in general what is the fate of contested PRODs at AfD, to have an idea of the efficiency of such tags. --Cyclopia^talk 13:13, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

• * About 10% of them aren't BLPs (2 bands, 1 or 2 non-living people) raises two questions: how did you know they were non-living people if they were unsourced? (I.e.: were they about people whose date of birth makes it impossible they are alive today?) And, did the bands discuss the members of those bands? (That's an interesting edge case I don't believe has been discussed to date— it seems clear to me that an article that contains elements of BLP is just as problematic than one that is just a BLP. Arguably, the former is easier to fix by removing unsourced BLP elements rather than deleting the entire article however). — Coren ^(talk) 10:55, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

• I haven't looked at Hobit's examples, and my experience has been rather less than 10% of these tags are on non BLPs. But I've seen mistags either of stickyprods or unreferencedBLPs as odd as a 9th century monarch and a fictional character. I would agree that it is an anomaly of our focus on uBLPs that an unreferenced article on a 1920s footballer who died in 1970 would be treated very differently than an unreferenced bio of his 1920s team-mate of whose bio stops in 1925. In my view the answer to that is to rethink our definition of what is a high risk article, not to start labelling people as possibly living because we have an unsourced date of death and if their unsourced date of birth is correct they could potentially be a new contender for the worlds oldest person. ϢereSpielChequers 13:09, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

• Example of one I just hit: [1]. It needs to be rewritten, but the sources are way over the bar for WP:N, let alone BLPPROD. I honestly think the problem is Twinkle and related tools. When selecting BLPPROD there should be more details about the requirements there of. I tried to source about 4 articles this morning. 2 I suspect to be hoaxes, 1 has sources (now) but are weak at best (I left the prod as RS isn't clear, plus it really should have been a speedy for a recreated article) and 1 was that one... Hobit (talk) 13:53, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

The uBLP tags I've found on dead people are usually justified because the article didn't mention the person's death (although one was about a person who would have been over 100 years of age). It was rather easy to find out the person had died through a simple google search. Jogurney (talk) 13:57, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

I just looked at six of them. The three oldest, and the three newest. The three old ones were Uzbeki (or something) soccer players that google had barely heard of. The three new ones were 1 easily sourced, 1 easy to source if you speak Norwegian, and 1 where an editor added a ref in response to the BLP tag, removed the tag, and was reverted by the tagger. It wasn't a great ref, and the subject is probably not notable, but still there's some confusion. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 14:31, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

I've dealt with a lot of old unreferenced BLPs. By the time I see them, the fraudulent articles have virtually disappeared. Like I said before, I found ONE that obviously did not check out. I've had to work for others, using more sophisticated google search techniques, but I've found hits to all the others I've tried. Yes, a good percentage outside the english speaking sphere of influence are not sources I can include in good conscience, but I got hits. Yesterday I tried the opposite, brand WP:Special:NewPages and found different results. Lots more fraud, junk like Tyler is fat and personal fluff pieces that only source to Facebook. New BLP articles probably need a different scrutiny than the old. Frankly, I think the fact that so much of that kind of junk is not in the historical list of BLPs means that part of the system, the New Article Patrol, is doing a good job, though I don't know what good articles they are also deleting in the process. My point was, the old articles do not need a sticky tag, nor do they need to be deleted, en masse or one at a time. And I agree with Peregrine Fisher that I see too many cases of taggers with an agenda to delete an article, reverting sources just to make an article look bad. I've caught and exposed a few who do it DURING the AfD process. Frankly, I think we should have disciplinary action for such malicious activity.Trackinfo (talk) 17:57, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Twinkle

I've just installed Twinkle to see how it works for these, and to see if this might explain some of the many mistags. At the moment the BLP prod description within Twinkle is:

"Please note that only unsourced biographies of living persons are eligible for this tag, narrowly construed."

I think we could reduce the number of mistags if that was revised either to:

For totally unsourced (not poorly sourced) bios of living people that have been created after 18 March 2010

Or

This is an unsourced (not poorly sourced) bio of a living person, it was created after 18 March 2010, and I have made an unsuccessful but good faith attempt to source it

Depending on whether or not this RFC resolves the so far fudged issue of whether sticky prod is exempt from WP:Before; I would suggest we request that Twinkle change to one or the other wording. ϢereSpielChequers 14:26, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Totally agree.--Cyclopia^talk 14:48, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

I'd change "bio" to "biography", but otherwise strongly agree. Hobit (talk) 14:55, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Sounds good. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 15:10, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

I can accept the first optional, but totally oppose the second option. We should not have a default statement declaring an action that may or may not be true. While we may want somebody to do BEFORE (even if we made BEFORE absolutely mandatory) we should not have wording indicating that somebody did so---because even if absolutely mandatory, it does not mean that it was done.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 15:17, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

If we agree that BEFORE should be followed, there should be some statement there that says the nom understands that. I'm certainly open on the wording, do you have a suggestion? Something like "I understand I'm responsible for making a good faith effort to source this article before applying this PROD."? Hobit (talk) 15:27, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

IF, and that's a big iff, then yes, I would support something along the lines that you outlined above, I would not support a statement that says "I followed BEFORE." Because even a dilligent editor might not have on a specific article. Making a generic statement that it has been done is fallacious.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 17:00, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

WP:BEFORE is not going to be required here. There's no way on earth you will get consensus to make it mandatory. I for one will prod any applicable unsourced BLP I see, but I have no personal interest in doing sourcing. This is a volunteer project, and I simply don't volunteer for that.--Scott Mac 16:25, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Agreed with Scott, on this. SirFozzie (talk) 16:33, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

I agree as well. Its been tried at least twice before but failed to gain consensus. It wont get consensus here either. The Wordsmith^Communicate 16:45, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Whether or not this gets consensus I find your "I get to do what I want no matter what others say" to be both uncivil and par for the course from a certain set of editors involved in this subject. It is a volunteer project, but sometimes you are supposed to do certain things if you do certain other things. If you open a DrV you are to contact the closing admin first. If you recreate an article that was deleted, you are expected to address the issues that caused the deletion. If you comment on a topic, you are required to be civil. If you edit a page, you are required to not sock. If you have a problem with "if you do X you are required to do Y" things, you either need to not do X or be willing to do Y. This is nothing new, but the aptitude that "I don't have to follow the rules I don't like and you can't make me" is troubling in any user, and more so in 3 admins one of whom is an arbitrator. Hobit (talk) 17:16, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Considering BEFORE does not have consensus, I'd ask where you're coming up with that we're not following BEFORE. The onus to source articles comes not from the person who sees the unsourced data, but from the person who added it in the first place. SirFozzie (talk) 22:40, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Well, considering BEFORE has consensus in the meaning that it is implied in deletion policy. Which says, explicitly: If the page can be improved, this should be solved through regular editing, rather than deletion. Therefore, if you want to follow deletion policy, you should check that the page can actually be (reasonably and fastly) improved instead than deleted, and if yes, "it should be solved through regular editing rather than deletion". Not following BEFORE is a way to violate or anyway ignore deletion policy. Asking for a mandatory BEFORE is just another way of saying people "be sure to follow the deletion policy" --Cyclopia^talk 22:52, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

@SirFozzie, I'm saying that Scott said he'd ignore any such requirement to follow WP:BEFORE that might spring into existence ("I for one will prod any applicable unsourced BLP I see, but I have no personal interest in doing sourcing.") an you two seemed to agree that was just fine ("I agree as well"). Perhaps you only meant to agree with one part of what he said? Maybe I'm misunderstanding everyone (rereading it I might well be). Hobit (talk) 23:18, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

What I was saying is that as things stand, barring a consensus to force BEFORE otherwise (which there is none).. there is nothing wrong with what he is proposing. If you have any doubts, look at the ArbCom decision that precipitated this series of BLP RFCs (and consider that I was one of the few to actually oppose that!) SirFozzie (talk) 23:20, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Point made, I think Scott is saying he'd ignore any guideline that required WP:BEFORE and still use the BLPPROD, but I might well be misunderstanding... Hobit (talk) 23:58, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Question on external links

When something is labeled as a "Reference" and it supports the article as a reasonable source it meets the sourcing requirements to hold off a BLPPROD. What if it is listed under "external links" or in no section at all. I've had two users claim that those aren't references and so BLPPROD can still be used. I disagree, but would like to hear some other opinions. Hobit (talk) 17:04, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

I've come across the same issue, and tend to favour one course of action: change it into a reference. If it's explicitly shown to support the text then the article can't very well be considered an unreferenced BLP. Admittedly this is a little time-consuming, but much less so than sourcing an article from scratch. Alzarian16 (talk) 17:10, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

If something has no references but an external link, it is reasonable to BLPprod it, but better to check it and turn it into a reference if appropriate. If it is prodded, and someone else checks is and find it is suitable as a reference, it is reasonable to change it to such and deprod. However, no one should deprod merely because something has a link without checking whether it is a suitable reference.--Scott Mac 17:18, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

I wouldn't go so far as to say BLPPROD requires it, but I certainly think it's problematic and confusing to claim ELs as sources in general.. (I would not, myself, BLPPROD an article with a valid source as an EL. and I've removed BLPPRODs from articles with valid sources as ELs.) Why is it problematic? (1) Many if not most ELs are not valid sources, e.g, the canonical example of the article subject's home page. (2) Pretty much as a rule, external links are not made with inline ref tags. So, I consider it best practice to (1) change appropriate EL's to references, (2) try and reserve "External Links" for links that are valuable enough to include but not appropriate for sourcing, (3) make a strong effort to put all references in ref tags in a Reflist, (4) make the references inline and correspond to article claims, and (5) I often even get around to the appropriate cite template(s), and never leave blind links (e.g., [1]) as a reference. I think these steps are all valuable if WP:V and WP:BLP are to mean anything at all. Without 1, 2, and 3, it's not clear what's being claimed as a source. Without 4, it isn't clear that the "source" actually relates to anything in the article. 5 is just a matter of style, but it does make the references a LOT easier to check/verify. --j⚛e decker^talk 17:27, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

This anomaly has bothered me for some time. It caught me offguard many times in my earlier editing days before I learned to "play the game" which unfortunately means I've had to conform to the wishes of the critics. First we are told not to violate copyright, so our summation must be different from the source. But if in rewrite we don't exactly match the context of the source, we might not be telling the truth. It is easy to miss a slight semantic turn intended in the original source but not carried forth into our interpretation. This is made harder when sourcing an article somebody else (or the committee, as wikipedia goes), has written. Exactly what sources to what statement? It is far more APPROPRIATE to list a site, or sites, where this original material comes from without directly, point by point, saying this statement that I did not write, came from this source. But for the people forcing this sourcing issue upon us, External References don't count. They aren't even noticed by the Bots that automatically put in the unreferenced BLP tags. On many articles, maybe even 30%, that I have rescued from the ax, all I've had to do is place key content from the external links into in-line references. Folks, the source is already there!!!!Trackinfo (talk) 18:17, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

I'm not bothered whether a link is in the references, external links of buried in the text. What I'm not comfortable with is the idea that any link that mentions the subject is enough to prevent a BLPprod. If our extra concern about BLPs is the risk of hoaxes and concealed attack pages then I'm happy that a link to a bio on a university website puts a BLP on a par with any other article with a self published source. I'm not so happy to treat a BLP with a myspace link differently to a totally unsourced one.ϢereSpielChequers 22:34, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

External links, bare links, and properly formatted references are all "references" within the meaning of BLPPROD. The bare existence of any relevant link, including that to site of known unreliability like MySpace, should signal an AfD as the appropriate process, rather than a BLPPROD. Of course, nothing about either venue prevents G10 and deletion of unsourced statements potentially causing harm--nor should they. Jclemens (talk) 04:01, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Yes within the current meaning of BLPprod, any link that supports BLP information in the article is a sufficient reference to save it from a BLPprod; Though I would argue that a link which confirmed that Wisconsin is a US State is not a reference for a particularly rapper from that state. But this is an RFC on the BLPprod, and I would like to change the BLPprod to exclude links to Myspace and similar sites where there is a real risk that the same hoax or attack is being perpetrated on both that site and this. ϢereSpielChequers 08:22, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Jclemens might say it, but the reality is there are a lot of unreferenced BLP tags placed on articles with External Links, or Sources, or Notes. Bots cannot read articles but have been programmed to simply look for the absence of the phrase References. Those same bots also don't recognize dates of death (as in, these are no longer BLPs), but they place tags that require attention from an editor. Many newbies don't even know what (if anything) is wrong with the article, nor that they can remove the tags when fixed. The person who left the tag doesn't take responsibility for their tagging and don't check back. Rapidly placing tags leaves no responsibility, just the damage. If you are attacking an article by a well meaning newbie, you are speaking gibberish and won't get the desired results.Trackinfo (talk) 06:50, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

There are bots that change {{unreferenced}} to {{unreferencedBLP}}, but they only do so if editors have tagged the article as unreferenced and categorised it as category:Living People. This can cause anomalies, most frequently when an article is tagged as unreferenced, another editor adds a reference without changing the tag and a third editor categorises it as living people. So in my experience the bots are not making mistakes, they are merely acting on articles with tags that are incorrect.

Where I do see mistakes are that some taggers tag poorly sourced articles as unsourced. I think this is a shame as we have several good informative tags for articles that with primary or self published sources. If an editor is sourcing articles from Myspace and they get tagged as {{Selfpublished}} there is a chance they will learn that we don't want them to use that sort of source. If the same article is tagged as unsourced they are likely to either ignore the tag as some weird wiki thing, or boldly remove it as incorrect. ϢereSpielChequers 08:22, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

What Jclemens said. An article containing external links, but no references, is not unsourced. (Providing the external links in some way support the claims made in the article.) Such articles should be tagged with {{nofootnotes}}, and possibly taken to AFD, but not tagged with {{unreferenced}} or sent to BLPPROD. Robofish (talk) 12:26, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

All the claims or any claim? Currently we only require a source that supports a claim in the article, so moving to "the claims" would make many more articles eligible, whilst still leaving attack pages where every smear if supported by an attack page on a self published site. ϢereSpielChequers 01:56, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

Question for Sir Fozzie

SF, You said that you think BEFORE is part of the problem? Howso? I am generally in favor of it especially if it is strongly encouraged. (I am just opposed to tyranical wording such as "absolutely mandatory" and I don't think it should be required, but encouraged.) But why do you think it is part of the problem?---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 21:49, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

I just came up with a few problems with making BEFORE mandatory/required. It takes the burden off of the article writer and puts it on the tagger: "I don't have to reference this, I'll let somebody else do so." It creates a new form of vandalism: "I'll create all sorts of stubs on marginally notable people and force taggers to apply tags, it'll waster their time and energy."---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 21:51, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

It's because of the things above. It's a massive time-shift. I have nothing but respect for those who try to create articles, having created a couple in the past myself. However, to write a quick two paragraph article and then expect others to back up what you're saying isn't going to work. Not only because a LOT of the articles (let's say, of questionably-notable people) are not going to appear on many people's watchlists, so these articles are a lot more open to vandalism (both blatant and sneaky), but also because it does not provide much knowledge on a subject. It also restarts the backlog that folks have worked hard to reduce, to PREVENT these things from happening again. The burden is not on the person who realizes an article has no sources (and as such, can not confirm what it says), but on the person who ADDED that data in the first place. By "BEFORE being part of the problem", that is what I mean. Someone saying "I can add data, and source it to nothing, but before you remove it, you better have found no sources!" It's a blame-shift. SirFozzie (talk) 22:38, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

The burden is not on the person who realizes an article has no sources (and as such, can not confirm what it says), but on the person who ADDED that data in the first place. - The burden is on both. I'd say the burden is on anyone. This is a project that works on building on each other's contribution, and each one improving the not-so-good contributions of others. It's the very concept on which this project is based, and I am astonished an ArbCom member (!!) doesn't get it. --Cyclopia^talk 23:00, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

No, I get it. And you completely miss my point, that for a great deal of the articles that's on Wikipedia. THERE IS NO COMMUNITY, because quite frankly, with some of the questionably notable people who have articles here on Wikipedia, the community who will look at these articles is low, and in some cases will just be that one and only editor. You're pretending that the community, as a gigantic monolithic entity will care about "questionably-notable band #237" or "Local Politician #915" or "Vietnamese Soccer player #430" or "one-hit wonder #51,566" (remember our discussions about the bunny lady?). The burden is on the person adding the data, b ecause there MAY NOT BE ANY OTHER EDITOR who gives two shakes of a lamb's tail about the subject. The efforts to make BEFORE mandatory are some folks attempts to make it so much easier to add data to Wikipedia than to remove it, that the balance that Wikipedia maintains will go completely out of whack. SirFozzie (talk) 23:12, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

To insist that folks try to source things before they try to delete them doesn't seem outrageous. It's only a minute or two of work to see if there _is_ a source out there. The reason we have this sticky prod is because there are a group of folks who think having unsourced BLPs is the root cause of the problematic BLPs (which is bogus IMO and no one has shown any correlation between unsourced BLPs and problematic ones such as false negative information). I believe we would ideally have quality coverage of all notable topics and I think deleting articles on notable topics is therefor going the wrong direction. Others prefer to delete notable material that may have taken some serious time to write rather than spending 2 minutes helping out. Hobit (talk) 23:30, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

The burden is on the person adding the data, because there MAY NOT BE ANY OTHER EDITOR who gives two shakes of a lamb's tail about the subject. : That's exactly the point (well, one of the essential points) of making BEFORE mandatory: to make it possible that another editor tackles the subject (namely, the tagger). I refuse arguments like "I volunteer to tag but I don't volunteer to source" like Scott Mac above said. If you volunteer to tag, you also should volunteer to check for sources, because they are both instruments to the same aim. If you are not doing both, you are doing it wrong. --Cyclopia^talk 23:36, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

No, Cyclopia, you are doing what exactly I say in the last few sentences. You are trying to maximize the quantity of data that gets added to Wikipedia, while I am focusing on the quality. I would much rather have fewer, higher-quality articles, then more poorly sourced, poor-quality articles. If no one responds within ten days of the BLP-PROD, then according to your own philosophy, then there must not be any sources out there, right? Otherwise someone would have made the effort to take "Two minutes" (trust me, it's nothing of the sort, having built and improved articles) to adequately source an articles. Especially since administrators (of which I am one), are glad to restore articles on request at a later point if sources ARE provided. You are proposing that we leave unsourced, poor quality articles around indefinitely because "someone will get to them, eventually!" That's EXACTLY what got us into this mess. And it was quite clear from the arbitration committee decision and the previous phases of RfC, that we're not willing to get back into that situation. Personally, if I had God-king fiat, it wouldn't be ten days for a BLP-PROD, it'd be three. Three days are plenty of time to me. SirFozzie (talk) 23:44, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

You are proposing that we leave unsourced, poor quality articles around indefinitely because "someone will get to them, eventually!": About articles in general, yes, absolutely, that's the way it works, we have no deadline. I respect your point of view but it's not the one with which this project came to be. About BLPs I fully understand that more care is needed. And while I feel that unsourced BLPs are not a proxy for problematic BLPs, I accept that the community wants something to be done with that. Now, all I am saying is: fine tagging unsourced BLPs for deletion, fine not leaving them around indefinitely if they are reasonably probable to remain unsourced, but before tagging, please do it responsibly: that is: check quickly if obvious sources consistent with the content exist, if yes add them (even in a haste as links at the bottom) and don't tag, if nothing obvious comes out BLPPROD, if in doubt take to AfD. --Cyclopia^talk 00:06, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Could you explain why we are better off without say, Halbe_Zijlstra than with it? We all agree a well-sourced article would be ideal, but A) someone started creating decent stubs (which we allow and encourage) for all the Dutch MPs and B) others took it upon themselves to tag them for deletion with no attempt to fix them. Is that really the outcome you want? Once the stub is there people can expand them (I just did for one Dutch MP actually). But I'd say we are worse off without that stub than with it... Hobit (talk) 23:55, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

I disagree. Not only can the person finding this article not get ANY information about the person, someone who knows enough about Dutch politicans who searches for it, will already likely KNOW who he is, and get nothing out of it. The reaction from both the uninformed and informed will be "Yeah, so?" It's a useless article as there is no confirmation that he is what the article says he is. In short, it's not useful, and provides no knowledge. I would support the BLP Prod on this, and if people are unable to expand it beyond this point as to his notability, I'd be willing to AfD it as YANNP (Yet another not-notable politician) SirFozzie (talk) 23:59, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

That's a good practical example of a borderline situation. It is probable that Zijlstra is notable, looking at the Google News hits, for example. However most of the relevant sources are in Dutch, a language I do not know. The best thing to do in this case should be: 1)checking the English sources and adding them. If stuff amounting to notability comes out, good, triage finished otherwise: 2)notify Wikipedia:WikiProject Netherlands and, if nothing comes out in a short period from them, 3)send at AfD. --Cyclopia^talk 00:13, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Just pointing out he meets WP:POLITICIAN... Hobit (talk) 00:25, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

<ec>So if articles don't come in full-form they aren't useful? I've long thought that stubs are generally considered a good thing. We have a massive stub sorting scheme, and lots and lots of stubs. If you read WP:STUB it's plain that providing the context for the topic is a good and reasonable place to start. Are you suggesting that we are better off without stubs that don't do anything other than provide context? "When you write a stub, bear in mind that it should contain enough information for other editors to expand upon it. The key is to provide adequate context...". What I'm saying is that we not only allow such stubs in general, we encourage them. To argue that they should be deleted as they are useless in their current form ignores the whole point of a stub: it can be expanded. I feel like you somehow have become an admin and arb here but missed the whole way this place works: we start small and build up. Consider Obama or NASA or Yosemite (all more-or-less chosen randomly). Those provided basically no information anyone searching for them wouldn't have know to start. But now they've grown up and are great articles. Hobit (talk) 00:23, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

It is editors who so fervently fight to place the retention of content above all other values that causes editors like myself to cease contributing. You two (Hobit & Cyclopia) have views so far from the way that a responsible encyclopedia should work with regard to real people, and show so little empathy for BLP victims that I wonder why you edit in this area. I for one, wish you both didn't. Kevin (talk) 00:53, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

BLPs that _are_ problematic should be fixed. I wish we were focusing our effort on them, but instead we are going after unsourced articles. The lack of demonstrated correlation between unsourced BLPs (see the Dutch MP article above) and problematic BLPs that cause harm has been discussed many times. I just went through about 30 unsourced BLPs and saw very little that could be considered problematic (one article was about a female porn exec, but it turns out that's exactly what she is and she makes no bones about it). To say X is bad therefor we should eliminate Y is not only a logical fallacy without showing some kind of correlation, but actively harmful to the BLP victims because it focuses effort in the wrong place. In other words I think you and yours are the ones causing actual and real harm. Throw in the rule breaking that seems part-and-parcel with many that hold that viewpoint (off site canvasing, out-of-process actions, etc.) and we not only see real harm to the victims of BLPs but real harm to the encyclopedia also. Frankly, if the big BLP movement had been to identify and fix problematic BLPs rather than deleting unsourced ones we'd be in a much better place. But instead we're here. Hobit (talk) 08:17, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Endorse 100% what Hobit says. Couldn't have said better. --Cyclopia^talk 17:45, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Agreed, I've gone through maybe 2000 unref'd ones and found maybe 5-10 that were "problematic" (unsourced negative statements) and probably half of those were fairly easy to source. Unfortunately it's much easier to find an unsourced article than a problematic one, so the easy way out is to look at the unsourced ones.  --Joshua Scott (formerly LiberalFascist) 04:58, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

You might want to familiarize yourself with the history, Jimbo pretty much summarized what is going on here. But basically, in the first RfC, which had much wider participation than this one. It was agreed that the BLP PROD process would go into place. Jimbo declared, Zero information is preferred to misleading or false information and it doesn't matter if the material is true or false... or if it positive or negative. Positive information can be a BLP violation, if it is untrue. He said, I acknowledge that there may be some who believe that unreferenced biographies should be kept on the site permanently, even if no one is willing to improve them. But that battle has been lost. [emphasis added]---the message was sent that if we as a community didn't act, then the foundation would. Unsourced BLPs would not be accepted on WP, the question was what mechanism would be used to get rid of them, the time scale, and would it be based upon a community driven plan or something dictated from on high?

Basically what was decided was that we were going to make it an expectation that NEW BLP's have to have sources. Notice, BLP PROD only affects NEW BLPs. The objective there being to stop the influx of poorer quality articles, especially in the light of Wikimedia's concerns related to BLPs. NEW BLP's would have a hard set rule that they have to have sources, if they don't then they fail to meet our expectations and could be deleted. Some wanted it to be a delete on sight, but the PROD suggestion won out. Older BLPs are exempt from BLP PROD, and as a result, the number of unreferenced BLP's has been rapidly declining.

As for the allegation that, Frankly, if the big BLP movement had been to identify and fix problematic BLPs rather than deleting unsourced ones we'd be in a much better place. But instead we're here. That is exactly what the BLP movement strove for---unfortunately, prior to the BLP RFC's it was a loosing battle. Your statement there is a complete mischaracterization of the BLP project. There were only a handful of people who were actively involved in that arena, and they were literally facing 50K+ unsourced articles and that number was growing because the number of new unsourced BLPs outpaced the number that they could "fix". After the BLP RFCs, more people became involved in the process and more people have been working on the issues. Today we are down to less than 30K---most of those due to people sourcing existing older articles and the fact that the floodgates of new unsourced articles has been stemmed.

The burden for adding new BLP's is and has been on the person creating the article, that's been existing policy for a while. BLP-PROD simply provides a means to enforce this policy. If a NEW BLP is created without sources, then it runs the risk of being deleted. NOTE, when creating a new article, the third bullet point reads: When creating an article, provide references to reliable published sources. An article without references, especially a biography of a living person, may be deleted. The instructions that, again pop up when you go to create a new article, will take you to You frist article which again gives you explicity instructions and the warning, Articles written about living persons must be referenced so that they can be verified. Biographies about living subjects that lack sources may be deleted. Users are warned that if they write an article without references, it may be deleted. And guess what, it may be.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 06:27, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

I understand where we are and how we got there. I just think it's a focus in the wrong direction and fixing the wrong thing. The focus should be on identifying and fixing unsourced negative material, not on deleting unsourced stubs that contain no negative material and are trivial to source. Hobit (talk) 14:32, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

I agree, but let's close the flood gates. BLP PROD only affects NEW BLP's, those which have a higher chance of being garbage or questionable in value to begin with. If we continue to let editors write articles without references and assume somebody else will do the leg work, we will never have a clean project. References are the closest thing we have to editor review. BLP PROD doesn't effect the tens of thousands of unreferenced BLP's that are older (and more likely to actually be notable.) We simply do not have the man power to keep up with the new as well as clean up the old. At a certain point we have to say, "This isn't the ideal, but it is good enough." The articles being lost generally are not ones that we are going to miss. How many people are going to search for a specific Dutch Politician? 1 a day? One a week? Oh no, we don't have an article saying that some obscure guy is a Dutch Politician? It's not really a loss. But having a fully referenced encyclopedia that people have more faith in than "Oh it's wikipedia" is worth having.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 14:44, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

The flood gates aren't. Sourcing these articles just means we have lots of articles with a single source. No real protection from the flood. So rather than spending time fixing BLPs that need fixing, we are spending time sourcing articles that don't really need sourcing (see previous Dutch MP). I think what you are really looking for is a higher bar than WP:N. That's the only thing that will slow the flood. And I have to imagine you realize that is unlikely to happen at this point. The "nc close defaults to deletion" and this BLPPROD are ways around the fact that raising the bar for inclusion of BLP articles is unlikely. As a side note, could someone reading this check out the BLP noticeboard. I think it's not getting the attention that might be needed from a wide enough cross section of folks. Hobit (talk) 15:29, 25 June 2010 (UTC)

Those who endorsed both WSC and DGG

Well, point one for WCS and DGG are exact opposites. WCS's point 1 reads, "Sticky Prods should be exempt from wp:Before in that they may be applied without first searching for sources other than within the article and its previous versions." DGG's point one reads, "WP:BEFORE be absolutely mandatory for a BLP PROD, or for any other form of deletion where it would be relevant." With that in mind, I decided to see how many people endorsed both WCS and DGG. I thought for sure that there might be some people who endorsed both WCS and DGG despite their having diametrically opposed views. Here is what I found:

Currently there are 14 people endorsing WCS's and 17 people endorsing DGG's positions. Of those people there are 5 people who have endorsed both view points. Of those 5 people: 1 person (Hobit) explicitly explained that he was endorsing WCS's overall post, but disagreed with him on BEFORE. 1 person (theycomefromspace) explicitly explained (on both endorsements) that they were neutral related to BEFORE. 3 people (Jclemens, Alazarian, and Joshua Scott) indicated that they liked the theory of BEFORE, but opposed it in practice.

I guess I was wrong. The people who chimed in did differentiate their views where necessary---nobody supported both DGG and WCS without reconciling this difference.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 03:11, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Heh. Thanks for taking the time to read all our idiosyncratic views. Jclemens (talk) 03:50, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

That is interesting. We are split, and we know what we're doing. Even harder to reconcile, but great analysis. Peregrine Fisher (talk) 05:01, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

I wouldn't say that my position is diametrically opposed to DGG's. DGG takes a principled position that WP:Before should apply to sticky prods; Whilst I take the pragmatic position that I would support BLPprodding of articles without attempting to source them, providing certain other changes are made to make the process less bitey. In other words my point 1 needs to be taken in combination with my points three and four (I would like people to consider these as a balanced package of reforms that if taken as a whole would from nearly all perspectives be a net improvement on the current process). I think we have consensus for my point 4, but if as seems likely we don't have consensus for my point 3, then that leaves me in the same camp as DGG. ϢereSpielChequers 07:42, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

BEFORE: New vs. Existing

SirFozzie's point WRT before on new articles and the burden-shifting is well taken, but not every article on Wikipedia is that way. Should our BEFORE expectations be tempered by the age of the article? Consider the possibilities:

• A new article, created without sources but with a clearly identified and recently active creator, should be userified or deleted if V and N are not met.
• An existing article, created earlier in Wikipedia's lifespan, is presumed to be worth something to the encyclopedia, and BEFORE is more appropriately the burden of an editor arguing for deletion once the original creator has moved on, and the article has become the property of "the community" rather than one identifiable editor.

I'm sure this would have some negative side effects, but I'm wondering if a split expectation like this might be a way to better police new articles, without giving free license to those who would rather delete salvageable content than make an effort to source it. Food for thought. Jclemens (talk) 03:57, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

JClem, I completely agree with you. I would be much more willing to support BEFORE on aged articles that have been around for a while, but on these new ones, it is too easy to write an article on some local mayor that clearly wouldn't pass WP:N, and researching it would be a waste of time. Sorry, but there are too many articles that aren't worth researching simply because somebody spent a minute typing a w sentence article does not mean that somebody else, who isn't interested in the local mayor, should spend five minutes looking for sources. On a newer article, the burden is on the article creator for a reason.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 04:05, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

As things stand, the unreferenced BLP backlog is dropping..,. as long as that continues to go down, I don't see any reason to extend it (well, personally my thoughts are that anything that would speed it up is good, but, eh. Probably don't have consensus to do that either!) But if the backlog gets stagnant or starts to grow back.. it means that other steps would need to be taken, such as expanding BLP to older articles. In a way, all those old unreferenced articles can be a bit of a time bomb. They're probably not on many watchlists, haven't been significantly worked on, and there's nothing in there verifying the information in the article. Probably a tempting target for sneaky vandalism by some folks. Just my running thoughts.... SirFozzie (talk) 04:28, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Hummm, I'd be fine with not needing to follow BEFORE on any article that doesn't assert notability, but in that case I'd assume we'd speedy them rather than BLPPROD them. Hobit (talk) 08:19, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Not necessarily. There are lots of articles that assert importance or significance and thereby shouldn't be deleted per A7, but which are probably not notable and therefore fair game for a prod. If you apply a sticky prod to them then anyone rescuing them has to not only disagree with you to the point of removing the prod, but they will probably add a reliable source. ϢereSpielChequers 14:02, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Agree with WCS, an article can make a claim to significance that is far below notablity, but still a claim to significance that protects it from and A7 deletion, but still be obviously below the standard necessary to survive an AFD. "John Smith was the first {fill in the blank}." That article makes a claim to significance, but would be a waste of time to try to source.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 18:25, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

Agree with the original post. New page patrollers should be able to simply tag articles identifying them for folks who want to remedy the article. J04n(talk page) 20:16, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

Statistics

I suspect that one reason why we are often at cross purposes here is that we lack statistics as to what has actually happened with these sticky prods. For example, one reason why I don't want these applied to articles in their first minutes after creation is that I think it will drive those editors away - others think it important that we inform those authors ASAP after they contribute a new unreferenced BLP. If we had figures for the number of articles tagged with sticky prods ideally broken down by:

1. Time from creation to tagging
2. Whether they were subsequently sourced by the author
3. Whether they were subsequently sourced by others
4. Whether they were ultimately deleted per BLPprod
5. Whether the authors have subsequently edited

Then we would have a much better understanding as to how these are working. If it turns out that many are subsequently referenced by their authors then my concerns would be greatly alleviated, if not then perhaps we can agree to put more thought into working out how to do this without losing those editors. ϢereSpielChequers 13:51, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

• I agree some information would be nice. I'd also be interested in some other issues: How many BLPPROD were applied to sourced articles? How many weren't BLPs? How many were actually notable? How many were hoaxes (I'm apparently seeing a LOT more of those than anyone else) etc. I don't think any of my suggestions would be easy, but that information would be helpful. Hobit (talk) 19:12, 23 June 2010 (UTC)
  • I would like to see if there's a way to generate objective data on this. Any way to obtain community support to run a research project resembling WP:NEWT, but without the problem of naming-and-shaming the mistaggers that caused all the drama last time?—S Marshall T/C 20:34, 24 June 2010 (UTC)
    • See my analysis of CSD's... where I explicitly avoided naming names.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 21:12, 24 June 2010 (UTC)
      • I'm not seeing that analysis, could you point me to it? Hobit (talk) 15:30, 25 June 2010 (UTC)
        • Goto my talk page and look for the green box in the upper right hand corner, there are several "surveys" there.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 16:30, 25 June 2010 (UTC)
          • As I remember them Balloonman's surveys were empirical and had too small a sample size to be statistically valid, like WP:NEWT they indicate that we have problems at CSD, but can't be used to quantify that in percentage terms. We did have some discussion during NEWT as to how one could define and analyse a group of articles in Wikipedia_talk:Newbie_treatment_at_Criteria_for_speedy_deletion#Control_test. But in my memory the people who objected to NEWT were mostly doing so not from the naming and shaming, as we decided not to do that right at the beginning of the project. As I remember it the main objections to NEWT were either from the viewpoint that Mystery shopping is unethical and a breaching experiment, or from the deletionist viewpoint that some of the article subjects were marginally notable. As far as I'm concerned the difference between mystery shopping and a breaching experiment is as wide as that between mystery shopping and mystery shoplifting. Personally I support breaching experiments such as getting the developers to try and crack admin passwords, but am a little uncomfortable when I read in the local press that my local Council has used 17 year old volunteers to try and buy alcohol and then prosecuted the entrapped shops. I would regard it as unethical if a restaurant reviewer or travel writer was not using mystery shopper techniques, but having learned that the technique is contentious on Wikipedia I have no intention of using it again, and would advise against anyone else doing so either. As for marginally notable or marginally sourced articles, I foresee that being a problem if one were to try and analyse a batch of articles that had been BLP prodded. The only solution I can suggest is that in doing this study rather than a binary sourced/unsourced and notable/unnotable classification you classify the articles into three or four bands. That way you could quantify if there were articles that everyone accepts as being incorrectly processed and measure the disputed areas. That won't work for everything - one of the critics of NEWT described a pair of BLPs as being unsourced when their references were to a leading German Newspaper (presumably they didn't accept the use of sources that were in German not English)

          So my advice if you do a study of BLPprods is:

          • 1. Start with a discussion on Wiki as to what you are thinking of doing and how you intend to do it, and (the bit we didn't do with NEWT) publicise that discussion on the village pump.
            2. Take a clearly defined sample of data, such as "every tenth article where a BLPprod was applied in the first half of June 2010", and make sure that whoever is extracting the data is including subsequently declined prods as well as subsequently deleted ones.
            3. Classify the articles into notable, "marginal or disputed" & non-notable (if deletionists and inclusionists might argue over it, it is disputed)
            4. Classify the articles into Sourced, poorly sourced, "effectively unsourced/disputed", unsourced.
            5. Only name the editors you want to praise, and where you spot mistakes just leave a clear but friendly note on the editors talkpage.

            ϢereSpielChequers 12:33, 28 June 2010 (UTC)

            • I would NEVR claim that my samples were statistically valid, they relied too much on a judicious sampling. Namely, I quickly learned that there were two admins whom (to this day) I do not have respect for their CSD work and if I were to use a statistically valid sample, their work (at least at the time) would have had an adverse effect on the results. I believe that one (and perhaps both) use some sort of tool in aiding their CSD work. When I did my sample, I intentionally avoided reviewing their work.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 13:58, 28 June 2010 (UTC)

              • I wasn't criticising your methodology. I'm comfortable with the idea that a problem can be established without being quantified, But one of the things I learned from WP:NEWT is that we have members of the community who don't consider that a problem should be addressed until it has been quantified. Personally I like to have stats, I like to know how big problems are and I think it is useful when prioritising between different problems. But I also believe that some problems should be resolved first and quantified later. ϢereSpielChequers 08:20, 10 July 2010 (UTC)

June increase in numbers

Whatever effect BLPPROD is having, it is not reducing the backlog appreciably. During June, unsourced BLPs dropped by only 54. Possibly this is a temporary setback, but more likely all the easier fixed bios have been done, and the remainder are becoming harder to deal with. Some other method of dealing with the backlog needs to be implemented to address this. In January, Arbcom urged me along with Scott & Lar to "conduct future activities in a less chaotic manner". Well, I've waited several months and despite 3 RFCs the problem has not gone away. Everyone knows what my suggested method would be, what do others have to suggest? Kevin (talk) 05:29, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

I give one specific suggestion here, in the WikiProject UBLP talk discussion. Discuss there, i suggest. --doncram (talk) 17:56, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

There was a slowdown in June but it had more to do with increased tagging at the end of the month, June 1 it was 28946, then down to 28192 on the 15th, but back up to 28892 on the 30th. A lot more of these articles are being identified which is obviously a good thing. Considering it was at 42K in February and I forget how high when this all started in January I can't see how the effort can't be categorized as going well. J04n(talk page) 04:09, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

Note: It was at 52,760 on January 4, 2010Trackinfo (talk) 06:31, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

While I have some personal reservations about the question of whether the current BLP policy is sufficient to eventually empty the BLP backlog, it turns out that your statistics don't do much to actually show that, and actually getting an effective answer is probably going to take several additional months. I say this because your figures don't include unsourced BLPs not yet marked as unsourced BLPs.

If you look at the unsourced BLP backlog by month, you'll notice a much higher number of unsourced BLPs for June 2010 than for the previous months. I've investigated this anomoly, by informally tracking the addition of entires in the "B" subset of the June 2010 unsourced BLP list ever since I noticed the unusual size of the June 2010 pile. The size of the June 2010 additions appears to reflect a concerted effort by a few editors to track down and tag unsourced BLPs not already marked as such. It's not difficult to find the usernames of the folks involved, and let me be clear, I applaud their efforts--it's good to know how big a problem we have. But uncovering more of the iceberg doesn't mean we aren't making progress on the whole, it just means we have a better appreciation for the size of the problem.

To give a sense of this, I just unscientifically checked 10 BLPs added to the June 2010 pile in the last week, and seven of them were articles created from before the BLPPROD cutoff date. Most if not all of them were marked that way by one editor. As a result, I think it is quite possible that dip the last week or two (and I watch the numbers fairly religiously) comes from an increase in that tagging effort, and thus does not necessarily mean we're "losing ground" on the entire problem, it simply means that we're getting a better and better handle on the total size of the problem after including the "stealth unsourced BLPs".

With regard to the "we're getting to the difficult ones", I am convinced that interpretation is wrong, and have seen (but not maintained records of) evidence to disbelieve that interpretation. Tracking the pools of unsourced BLPs by month shows that most of the activity is at one end or the other of the list. I'm working personally the old end of the list (and I like to think I'm part of the reason August 2007 is nearly empty), and there's no question that some of those are fairly tenacious beasts. I've also done some work on the new end of the list, and it's a breeze. Most of the stuff in the middle, which makes up the bulk of the 29,000 or so unsourced articles, is at the easy end of the difficulty scale in my personal experience. So I really dispute the "we've gotten past the easy-to-source articles" point. I am concerned there may be a "sourcers burnout" factor, but there really is a big effort to tag "underwater" unsourced BLPs, and that's really screwing up your stats, and thus your conclusions. --j⚛e decker^talk 04:19, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

There may be another factor at play that nobody really anticipated or thought about... What is June? It's the first month of summer. A lot of our solid young adult/teenage contributors are students who are now home from school and/or working summer jobs. Stay at home parents now have kids to watch. They might not be working on WP as much. Similarly, our YOUNGEST contributors, are going to have a lot of time on their hands... I wonder if vandalism has gone up in June?---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 04:56, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

One more bit of data for my "uncovering the iceberg" theory, one of the editors who has been finding untagged unsourced BLPs and marting them claims (in a discussion on this very subject on his/her talk page) about 1400 tags this month (actually, 1200 so far a few days back and 200 left to go). If that was accurate, that would pretty much explain the jump, and leave us making some progress towards complete sourcing.

Also: I have seen increased clear vandalism in the last few days (sockpuppet stuff), but I haven't seen any reason at all to believe that's responsible for 1000+ new unsourced BLPs, and I've looked at a fair number of the June 2010 "Bs", so I think I'd notice. --j⚛e decker^talk 05:59, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

We've had previous spikes in June 2009 and August 2010 2009, if it hadn't been for this months tagging spree then figures would have continued to go down, as lots of the articles which were unreferenced BLPs at the beginning of the month have now been sorted. Also we need to keep this in context - several editors put in a lot of effort to meet the target of 30,000 by the 1st of June, it was challenging but we achieved that and I suspect some of those have like me put less time into uBLPs in June than we did in May, I've been one of the editors who contributed to reducing the backlog at Category:Uncategorized pages from 8,000 to 2,000 in the last few weeks, and reducing that backlog has uncovered lots of old uBLPs, I recently found one that had been created in 2002 but only identified as an unreferenced BLP this month. On the other hand we haven't yet repeated the DASHBot run in January that bot messaged the authors of these articles, I suspect if we do that in July we will get a big reduction in uBLPs. So this is nothing to do with "the easier fixed Bios have been done" and much to do with people like me identifying whole pageants worth of beauty pageant winners and tagging them as uBLPs. ϢereSpielChequers 06:58, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

I'm guessing you meant August 2009, since we haven't got to August 2010 yet! But otherwise I agree with most of what you say, and with Joe and Balloonman. More tagging + major milestone reached + lack of time for many younger contributors (myself included) --> Lower drop in numbers. If there was a massive jump in numbers in June 2009 and a small decrease in June 2010, then on some levels progress has clearly been made. Whether it is enough is another matter, but I'd suggest that we wait until a more "normal" month (September?) before we can draw any firm conclusions. Alzarian16 (talk) 10:40, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

It's not the time to overreact to the June 2010 backlog increase. There have been at least 1,000 old uBLPs that were tagged this month (and many of these have already been referenced). The backlog from February 28, 2010 is now at 24,800 from over 52,000 in January 2010 (which is the best measure of the success of the non-BLPPROD efforts). We are continuing to make enormous progress on the backlog, even though it should not be the priority that it is (I've found so few harmful uBLPs in the thousands I've referenced, it's frustrating to think of the time spent arguing here). Jogurney (talk) 16:02, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

How many of these are new articles? I'm aware of at least one parliamentary election (the Dutch), and possibly two or three more, that led to the creation of a raft of new unsourced BLPs. Those are easy to fix (I fixed one Dutch parliamentarian's entry myself, without knowing hardly any of the language), but they add to the total. That could have something to do with it. --Ser Amantio di Nicolao^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 20:32, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

From what I've seen, most of the articles tagged in June 2010 were "old", that is, predate the BLPPROD cutoff, often substantially. My unscientific sample came up with 7-of-10 were old, 3-of-10 were new. --j⚛e decker^talk 21:11, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

One particularly successful finder of unreferenced BLPs in June has told us that he found 1400 old unreferenced BLPs and tagged 1200 of them so far. I think that's the June spike explained. ϢereSpielChequers 18:52, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, you saw the same Talk page I did.  :) --j⚛e decker^talk 23:34, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

The question, Kevin, is not "how much has the identified backlog gone down?" but "how many unsourced BLPs have we sourced"? While it is very easy to tell that you are desperate to resume unbridled destruction of the encyclopedia, the fact is, unsourced BLPs are being both identified and fixed. The backlog is a living document, and will be one until all currently unsourced BLPs are tagged as such or fixed. Your selfish need to destroy the work of others is not beneficial to either this cleanup project or Wikipedia as a whole. Resolute 19:48, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

Here, here @ ResoluteTrackinfo (talk) 06:00, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

Try actually reading what I wrote. Suggesting that the easier fixes have been exhausted, and some other method needs to be discussed is not an unreasonable position to take. I have not advocated any particular action, nor have I taken any. And if you really think I'm just here to destroy the work of others, why haven't you just blocked indef? Kevin (talk) 22:00, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Because I am not stupid. I know you have several similar minded supporters that would rush to your aid immediately and re-start the war you helped precipitate in January. I did read what you wrote, and I believe that your own viewpoints have locked you into a false dichonomy. The iceberg theory that is so often thrown about is easily the superior explanation. Take a look at sports bios for instance. When this mess started, there were just under 400 articles related to ice hockey players tagged as blp-unsourced. We have that list below 70 today, but there is easily still a couple thousand unsourced blps that have not yet been tagged. If someone goes through all of those articles and tags them, you will see a jump in the backlog (and that is just one sport of dozens), but that will not mean that we have run out of easily sourced bios, that the problem has gotten worse or that it is unfixable. In fact, many of those will be fairly easy to source, and when I wash out of the WikiCup, I will likely turn my focus to those, but that work won't show up on the backlog list because I will be getting to those (likely) before they are tagged. Now, if you want to argue that a growing proportion of the existing backlog represents impossible to source articles, that is likely accurate. And if you can't find sources, then I encourage you to prod or AFD them on the basis that they can't meet WP:GNG, WP:V or the like. But frankly, when you come up with phrases like "everyone knows what my suggested method would be", it is difficult for me to trust that you would take the time to ensure the deletions are properly being done. Your history warns me that your suggested method is to use deletion as a nuclear bomb rather than in a tactical fashion. Resolute 22:45, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Kevin, you write "Suggesting that the easier fixes have been exhausted, and some other method needs to be discussed is not an unreasonable position to take." I don't think it was unreasonable prior to data that's now been presented (about the conversion of large #s of unsourced old artilces from untagged to tagged) to suggest that "earlier fixes have been exhausted", but I'm convinced now that earlier fixes haven't been exhausted, and I've said why I believe that. So, no hard feelings on my part, but it's not clear what you now believe. I ask that you address what I've called the iceberg argument, as well as the data that has been presented about it (by myself as well as others). Either you now agree with me that the sourcing effort has *not* stalled, or you believe that there's something wrong with the data, that seem to show that the blip up in tagged-unsourced-BLPs was more a fact of tagging old articles than new. Which is it? --j⚛e decker^talk 23:30, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

I believe that having 28000 or so unsourced biographies is an incompatible position for a reputable encyclopedia to take, and that March 2011 is too long a time frame to rectify this problem. You may well be right that there are more easily fixed bios to go, and that sourcing has not stalled, however that would mean that the problem is larger than anticipated, which is a problem in itself. Kevin (talk) 23:44, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Well, unless you are willing to dedicate yourself 24/7 to fixing the "problem", you are going to have to live with the efforts of the volunteers working on the project and their schedules. Frankly, I have yet to see compelling evidence that having unsourced BLPs is even a major problem. Resolute 13:59, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

Kevin: Gotcha: Thanks for responding. I wish it were faster, too, even if we may disagree on timing/strategy. FWIW (and I realize it's not worth much) the idea that there was a pile of unsourced untagged BLPs was not a surprise to me, and was discussed during the BLPPROD discussions by other editors, but I don't know how widely it was discussed. I don't think this particularly affects my estimates for hitting zero when I look at long-term trends. Again, thanks for clarifying. --j⚛e decker^talk 14:28, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

It isn't simply a case of moving articles from tagged as UBLP to sourced/merged or deleted. We are actually in a much more complex process where articles are progressing through a series of steps, which are often combined in various permutations, but sometimes follow the sequence:

1. NewPage patrol - screening out almost all the attack pages and most of the Bios with no claim of importance or significance
2. Unidentified uBLPs
3. Identified and correctly tagged UBLPs
4. Categorisation and Project tagging.
5. Project assessment
6. Referencing
7. Removing UBLP tag.

Moving the articles through each of these stages gives an opportunity to screen out hoaxes, prod non-notables and delete any attack pages that got past NPP. The focus on the number of articles currently tagged as unreferenced BLPs (the total at stages 3, 4, 5 and 6) is very disruptive to the BLP project. The fact that June saw a large number of articles move from stage 2 to stage 3 is a good thing, and the work done in the last few months to resolve the uncategorised and reduce the unproject tagged BLPs has also been useful, not least because the stages that are most important are either before articles are tagged as UBLPs (the vast majority of G10 and A7 candidates are screened out by newpage patrol), or in between, as the people who can best sort notable martial arts champions from non-notable ones, and who know which Boxers are hoaxes are quite probably the assessors for the wikiprojects. The easiest group of articles to resolve are actually those where someone has referenced an article and is hoping that the tagger will come back, reassess the article and remove the tag (or at least downgrade it to {{refimproveBLP}}, I believe that thousands of these remain. ϢereSpielChequers 16:46, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

Some more detailed stats

Yes the headline figure hasn't moved much in June, but as others above have mentioned, it is more to do with previously undetected UBLPs being tagged, than the referencing slowing down. Over the past 6 months, as part of my efforts to get the projects involved in this task, I've occasionally saved lists, including the full All unreferenced BLPs cat a few times. The earliest one I have is from 9 February, which has 45316 articles listed. Of those, 23182 are still in the All unreferenced BLPs cat, with 5224 being added to the cat since then. That leaves 22134 articles as being removed from the list, presumably most referenced or retagged with BLP sources or similar, some deleted or renamed. Comparing now to the 9th of June (before the numbers started to increase), which had 28256 pages listed, we've removed 1974 articles from that list, but added 2124, hence the recent increase. And Kevin, having 28000 unreferenced articles isn't a good thing... but for an Encyclopaedia that anyone can edit and hasn't been strict on the requirement to reference, it's not that surprising.

If it is such a problem, then why isn't the foundation doing something about it? Why is it up to me, Xeno, Tim1357, Plad2, WSC, J04n, Joe, Doncram and a few others (sorry to those I've missed) to organise, sort, enable and do a lot of the referencing? Why has the Article Alert bot been down for months? Why has Wolterbot, that identifies and sorts all sorts of article issues, not just UBLPs, been inactive for months? It's an encyclopedia for anyone to edit, but why is it also one for anyone to maintain? Shouldn't their be some administrative assistance, especially to detect and sort BLP issues? I'm getting sick of a few people complaining about the problem, but the Foundation doing nothing but organising a few IRC committees and strategic plans. Hire some programmers and get them coding, and if need be, editing the most problematic articles if it's such a big issue. The-Pope (talk) 08:12, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for those stats, very useful to see it put into perspective. Though I'd add corrected and redirected to your list of referenced, deleted or renamed. Quite a few of those that I've resolved are where the tag had become incorrect or was never correct in the first place. It is a good question re the Foundation, and I'll raise it Wikimania where we have a panel discussion on this saga. I spoke to a couple of foundation people at the London meetup, but they seemed more concerned with the biting of new article contributors than the sourcing of uncontentious articles. On the subject of stats though I'd love to see something on the actual sticky prods:

1. Are they actually being applied to all articles that are eligible for them? I think in June there was a bit of a dip, use of them has since gone up but 've just seen an article created in May 2010 but not sticky prodded until July.
2. Are they being applied correctly? It seems like every time I trawl through a random dozen I find two or three where the tagger ignored some sources, usually poor sources, but I have seen articles sticky prodded despite having a reliable source.
3. Are they being deleted or rescued? I have tagged a few articles with sticky prods and have seen some of those in my deleted contributions, but I don't know whether this is resulting in a hundred deletions a week or a hundred a month.
4. Are they being rescued by the original author or by DGG and others? One reason I don't want them applied to articles in their first few minutes is that I fear it loses us some of those editors. If someone could show that tagging in the first few minutes frequently results in the original author referencing their article then I would be prepared to reconsider my view of them. But at the moment I fear that a system intended to encourage authors to reference their articles has degenerated into a tool for newbie biting. ϢereSpielChequers 08:44, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

Those are great questions. I recently "rescued" a biography you had BLPPRODed, and wondered if there was an automated process to notify you or some tracking of the BLPPROD removal. It would be helpful to understand how BLPPRODs are working (resulting in improvement or deletion). Jogurney (talk) 14:14, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

I have sometimes left talkpages messages when I've declined incorrect prods, and sometimes used edit summaries. I also try and use a different edit summary where I remove a correctly applied sticky prod after I or others have referenced it. AFAIC if I've sticky prodded an article, I'm grateful if someone else references it and removes the sticky prod, and I would hope others feel the same. ϢereSpielChequers 23:07, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

And the discovery of "underwater" unsourced BLPs continues in July

It looks like another editor has found a treasure trove of unreferenced BLPs that are stubs for the 577 members of the French Assembly, and is or has been working through tagging them. All of these stubs were added prior to the BLPPROD cutoff date. If you look at the July 2010 pool, you'll note that 80+% of the pages there are from that effort. If someone were really clever, they'd figure out a way to find a single reference resource that lists those members and where they're from and tag all the articles in one big woosh. I'm not sure that I know how to accomplish that, anyone, Bueller, anyone? --j⚛e decker^talk 17:16, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

I've discovered other waves of this sort of tagging. The taggers swarm around them like sharks. In the case of politicians in non-english speaking countries, I find myself out of place adding references. One of the categories that I found a lot of things needing sources involve sources in other languages. Do we have any way of contacting other language wikipedians to deal with this sort of thing? It could take care of thousands of unreferenced BLPs.Trackinfo (talk) 17:42, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

Trackinfo--I don't know, I still haven't explored a lot of this giant mansion we call Wikipedia.

I've tried to look for a list of members of the French assembly with their districts, and haven't found one including that information yet, but if I did, that'd be a great way to speed up dealing with those few hundred articles.

If you want to drop me a note with what cat your stuck on that requires foreign language sources, I'll give it a shot myself in the next day or two, feel free to hit my talk page or whatever.

For individual foreign language articles I have been able to sometimes find and use foreign sources using Google Chrome. As a built-in feature, can usually detect the language a particular web page is in and offer to immediately perform the appropriate machine-translation to English. Working with machine-translated sources requires some caution, of course, but it does provide another way of "getting there" and has allowed me to source articles from at least a couple dozen langauges so far.

One other quick note--if I sound like I'm bothered by the tagging effort, I'm *not*, I think it's great that we're finding BLPs that need to be sourced. We don't know how much of the unreferenced BLP iceberg is underwater--but it's certainly a lot less than it was a couple months ago, and in time it'll be entirely above water. It does cause a little confusion with the numbers, though. --j⚛e decker^talk 18:43, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

AHA! LIst of members elected to French Assembly by District 2007 Anyone have any good ideas on how to use this information to source hundreds of articles while checking accuracy? (I'll be out of touch for a day or two, but will take a look at this when I'm back in town. --j⚛e decker^talk 19:02, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

It might be worth dropping a note on the project page for wikiproject France. Also if anyone's French is up to it, these articles are likely to exist on the French wikipedia with references... I don't know whether AWB or some other bot would help do this, but something that selected uBLPs categorised as French People, split screen, and showed the EN and FR wiki articles side by side and let you check references and do an update would be powerful. I think the edit summary would need to give attribution to FR:wiki though ϢereSpielChequers 19:08, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

5th Republic deputies from there you can get the lists of deputy for each legislature of the 5th Republic. This would be enough for near-all French politicians as most of them have been at lease one a deputy. --KrebMarkt 07:53, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

[2] from that site is even more on-target, I just either need to devote a day to it or figure out better automation. Won't be able to do either until tomorrow, helping folks move today.  :) --j⚛e decker^talk 15:39, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

Looks like it's by hand. Ah well. Managed 200 tonight while watching a movie. --j⚛e decker^talk 06:22, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

Negative comments about other editors

I was invited to participate in this dissusion by WereSpielChequers, but after seeing the comment "The taggers swarm around them like sharks" made by Trackinfo above I have no desire at all to become part of this. If s/he weren't an established editor I would consider giving them a NPA warning. 69.181.249.92 (talk) 16:56, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

That was a rather lightweight comment in the overall scheme of things, but it certainly and I hope obviously was not a personal attack toward anybody. I have been quite clear elsewhere as to how I equate the damage these tags do to the look of Wikipedia articles and the potential damage irresponsible deletion of articles (that had been originally threatened by this discussion) would be. These conversations have been led by the proposals and actions of some deletion oriented editors, so I have had to be a strong opposing viewpoint. Aside from responses and itemizing specific actions, I have never named any editor. Nothing I have ever said could be considered a personal attack. Trackinfo (talk) 05:27, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

You compared editors to a swarm of sharks. As an editor who has tagged articles and has no desire to do the work the original submitter should have done in providing sources, I take it as a personal attack. Names don't have to be mentioned when an entire class of "us versus them" is the subject. 69.181.249.92 (talk) 11:32, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

Regardless, I'm not inclined to participate in this discussion and will continue to add blp prods to articles that are unreferenced. 69.181.249.92 (talk) 11:33, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

If you choose to be unreasonably offended then that is your choice alone and not the fault of anyone else. Trackinfo's comment on the general nature of indiscriminate deletionists is apt. Resolute 15:16, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

Any percieved "damage to the look" of Wikipedia is far outstripped by actual damage having unverified information about living people. If the inclusionists would use their time and energy to fix the issues marked by tags rather than ragging on "lazy taggers", the encyclopedia would be in much better situation. Active Banana (talk) 20:59, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

Funny, I thought that if lazy deletionists would use their time and energy to fix the issues marked by tags rather than ragging on "lazy inclusionists", the encyclopedia would be in much better situation. See, name calling accomplishes *so* much! Jclemens (talk) 21:10, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

A tag is a fix. Not a complete fix, but it is a start - an identification for someone who wants to add sources and has access to them and also as a clear warning to an unsuspecting reader that Wikipedia does not fully endorse the claims. Many many readers take everything in a Wikipedia article as "true", not taking into consideration the fact that content is user generated with no overarching editorial proofing. Tags that help break that incorrect view are in my opinion much much much more valuable than an article "looking good" because it has no tags. Blessings to the Wikipedia:WikiImp like the above IP editor! Active Banana (talk) 21:29, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

In my opinion, tagging is of course good and exactly for the reasons you cite above. What worries me is proposing for deletion, which is another beast entirely. --Cyclopia^talk 22:48, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

I, for one, have sourced hundreds of articles. In other words, I have taken my time to add to the wikipedia project on each of these articles. That as opposed to the five seconds it takes to scan an article and not see the appropriate references section, post a tag and escape--as I have accused the taggers of doing. Worse yet, BOTs that do not understand the english but do the same damage to articles sourced with "notes," "sources" or text references. I'm into the hundreds even on such articles that only have such formatting errors, but were not fixed by the tagger, be it bot or human. Yes, I agree, a lot of the world gets their information from wikipedia. And they can't get that information from a deleted page. In the well over a thousand random unreferenced BLP articles I have checked, do you know how many have not checked out with a simple google search? One. ONE! That article was an obvious fraud, it even linked to a person who googled as having perpetrated other frauds. I had it (successfully) deleted. So, IMHO, all this #$% about the damage unreferenced BLPs are doing is paranoid overreaction. We have been talking about this for exactly six months, I've been on this most of that time. I still haven't seen the evidence.Trackinfo (talk) 23:46, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

Extended discussion RE Scott McDonald's view

• Those trying to put the onus back on the nominator with WP:BEFORE doom subjects to unmaintainable articles - if no one want to source it, then no one will maintain it. - Well, no. You can do your searches, find out that nothing comes out, and PROD it without problems. Otherwise, if you have doubts, you can send it to AfD, BLP noticeboard, etc. It's not like "either we BLPPROD it or the article will stay forever" --Cyclopia^talk 19:09, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

I think you are missing the point of BLP-PROD, the community has basically said that all new BLP's must have references. Any new BLP must be referenced, the primary burden for referencing is upon the articles creator. BLP-PROD is because CSD is too fast and AFD would be flooded with these requests. BLP-PROD exists so that we get the best of both world while granting the article a chance to be sourced. Per policy, The burden of evidence for any edit on Wikipedia rests with the person who adds or restores material..---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 19:59, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

I'm still not seeing the problem with having those that do the tagging do a quick search. I've asked a similar question below, perhaps we should hold the discussion there... Hobit (talk) 23:52, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

If people are willing to do that, then there is no problem. However, if they are not, and no one else is, then we delete the article until someone is at least willing to provide a source. That's the whole point of BLPprod. Are you arguing that we should keep an article if no one is willing to source it, or check it can be sourced?--Scott Mac 00:38, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

Do you really think that requiring taggers to try to source an article is going to result in people not tagging BLPs? Our goal is to end up with the best encyclopedia we can have. To me that means quality coverage as deep and broad as possible. Asking people to try to source articles before they try to delete them seems like a reasonable step. If it results in unsourced BLPs hanging around, we'd need to reevaluate. Hobit (talk) 02:53, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

Yes, it is common sense that making a job more demanding will stop people from starting or finishing it. I would like to point out that it takes only a few minutes to copy material from an online fansite and create dozens of unreferenced articles of low interest to the average WP reader and editor. But in order to delete a single article, it takes double or triple this time for multiple users to evaluate the article, add the templates, review the material prior to deletion. (This is the simplest form of deletion, with AFDs the process is more time intensive). As long as this dynamic is in place, we will continue to have a growing backlog of poor quality articles. This small step of identifying unsourced BLPs and removing them from the site is not adequate to fix the problem, but is movement in the right direction. Any addition requirements placed on the person reveiwing the article are counterproductive to fixing the problem of WP publishing low quality BLPs. FloNight♥♥♥♥ 13:28, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

You say "backlog of poor quality articles" like it's a bad thing. I'd rather have poor, though accurate, coverage of something than no coverage at all. You seem to disagree. I think that fundamental difference means we're not going to find any agreement on the subject at hand. Hobit (talk) 00:22, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

First, not having a stand alone article does not mean that Wikipedia has no coverage of a topic. If someone is notable enough for an article, then almost without exception, they will be covered in another article already or they could be. Second (and my main point), articles without fact checking line by line, and sources added to back up the content do not meet the publishing standards expected of reputable organizations. Unless we change our policies so that fact checking happens on all articles we can not be a reputable work of reference. Requiring a reliable sources for all BLP is a small step in this direction. The solution is not to pressure volunteers without an interest in the topic to add a general source about the subject of the article in order to satisfy the notability criteria (which is essentially what is occurring now.) Instead, the person creating the content needs to provide sources for the material, someone else needs to research and source it, or it needs to be deleted. This means a new article without sources will need to be deleted occasionally in order prevent inaccurate and biased material from being published. This idea is very mainstream thinking. Rushing a text to print is sloppy work and puts an organization in an ill light. This point is over looked by users on Wikipedia that vote to keep articles based on the premise that eventually the content will be improved. I hope that more editors will speak up and insist that we adopt polices and processes to bring us inline with reputable publishers. FloNight♥♥♥♥ 00:57, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

This idea is very mainstream thinking. Rushing a text to print is sloppy work and puts an organization in an ill light. This point is over looked by users on Wikipedia that vote to keep articles based on the premise that eventually the content will be improved. - It is "overlooked" because this "very mainstream thinking" is completely at odds with the concept of a wiki, and with what Wikipedia is. 1)We are not a paper encyclopedia, so "rushing a text to print" is not our concern. We have no deadline whatsover, so we don't have to rush anything. This is a work in progress and will ever be. 2)The "premise that eventually the content will be improved." is exactly the premise on which this website is founded. No article here was born perfect from start. The very core philosophy of this website is that each one adds its bit, and that things improve slowly and steadily. If something is half-finished, destroying it won't help it being improved, quite the opposite: maintaing it instead means maintaining a base on which to improve. You seem to want content to be fully in shape from the start, but that's the definition of how Wikipedia does not work. That's what Nupedia wanted, you can see how it finished. --Cyclopia^talk 01:16, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Cyclopia's comments are exactly what I was trying to get at, but said better than I could... Hobit (talk) 02:38, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the living people about whom we write. There is a deadline for them: it is the moment that Google puts our article about them in their top-5 results. That is something that was never contemplated at the time that Wikipedia was created. We must be responsive to changes in circumstances; this is about as big a change as can be. This is part of Wikipedia maturing and becoming a responsible citizen of the information world; when we were small and unnoticed, we had almost no impact on the life of an article subject. Now, what is published in our pages can (and sometimes does) cause long-lasting harm. Why do you think Google now crawls our articles incessantly to ensure it reflects the most current version of a page? We are no longer a little upstart in a distant corner of the Internet: we are now a top-10 website whose words, whether they should be or not, are taken as relatively accurate if not entirely authoritative. Not a day goes by that someone being interviewed on radio or television isn't confronted with a question that starts "I looked up your Wikipedia entry and it says..." The failure of individuals to recognise this collective responsibility to get things right about real people does more to harm the reputation and credibility of this project than any other error that is made. Risker (talk) 03:02, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Yes!! @Risker. Bielle (talk) 03:19, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Fully support Risker. Active Banana (talk) 03:29, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Risker is right, but what he says has nothing to do with the BLP being unsourced or not -it has to do with libel and false information creeping in. Our most embarrasing BLP incidents happenedin well sourced BLPs, if I remember correctly. --Cyclopia^talk 09:17, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

It all depends on what you call "embarrassing", Cyclopia. Many of the more harmful impacts we find out about are not matters of media attention; they're personal notes from the individuals affected, and in order to mitigate the harm already done, they are addressed as quietly as possible. To me, it is just as embarrassing that someone's boss called her into the office to "explain" a Wikipedia entry about herself that she didn't even know existed, even if the fact is never broadcast on CNN. What may appear benign to an outsider could be very damaging to the subject of the article. If it isn't well-sourced, it shouldn't be in the article; even then, not everything that can be sourced should be included, and not everyone on whom sources can be found should have an article. It worries me that you're implying that it's only a negative if it's "big news". Risker (talk) 13:49, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

You're completely missing the point. I simply wanted to point that BLP incidents can happen regardless of the sourcing status: I referred to the "most embarrassing BLP incidents" as well known case examples, nothing else. That said, I find very worrying your position that even then, not everything that can be sourced should be included, and not everyone on whom sources can be found should have an article., because it is completely at odds with the purpose of making an encyclopedia (but that's another story). --Cyclopia^talk 14:15, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

While Cylcopia is right about how errors can arise in BLP articles, Risker's point is not "at odds with the purpose"of WP but is rather supported by policy. From WP:BLP come these two statements:

(1) Ask yourself whether the source is reliable; whether the material is being presented as true; and whether, even if true, it is relevant to a disinterested article about the subject; and

(2) If reliable sources cover the person only in the context of a single event, and if that person otherwise remains, or is likely to remain, a low-profile individual, we should generally avoid having an article on them. Biographies in these cases can give undue weight to the event and conflict with neutral point of view. (Italics mine)

Bielle (talk) 15:05, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Well, I didn't mean articles with no reliable sources and I didn't mean violating BLP1E, of course. --Cyclopia^talk 23:59, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

People insisting on WP:BEFORE got us into this mess. It is not and cannot be part of the solution if we are going to fix the problem of unreferenced BLP's. BLP-PROD gives a good amount of time to update newly created articles, and of course, administrators can restore a deleted article if references are later found. SirFozzie (talk) 17:33, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

I'd like some evidence of that first sentence being true. Or in Wikipedia terms . Hobit (talk) 22:23, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

I'd like also a citation for the second sentence, and the third. And in general, I'd like to know how deleting notable articles just because it is easier to slap a tag than to do a 5-minutes Google check can be defined a "fix". --Cyclopia^talk 23:59, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Two comments: A) I think the third sentence is accurate B) I think 5 minutes is on the high side. 2-3 minutes is generally plenty. Hobit (talk) 01:49, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

The evidence is staring us all in the face. Until the last RFC, the backlog of unsourced BLPs was constantly growing. It was not until there was a threat of deletion via this process that there was any sort of concerted effort to source them. Mr.Z-man 23:50, 28 June 2010 (UTC)

I would be interested to know how people who have responded to out of process deletions and the controversy that generated constitutes evidence that SirFozzie's comments are anything other than a highly subjective opinion? Resolute 02:06, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

It's actually the case that the backlog of uBLPs was being reduced before the out of process deletion spree (I recall significant decreases in October and November 2009). There's little doubt that the chaos which followed those deletions resulting in new editors getting involved in sourcing uBLPs, but it also drove others away. The main reason the uBLP backlog grew so much during late 2008 and all of 2009 is because it was tagged systematically (although we are now finding that plenty of uBLPs were missed back then) - so many of these articles tagged during that timeframe were written long before. Jogurney (talk) 13:09, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

The views thus far...time to proceed?

Please correct me if I'm wrong but all 9 of the Views expressed so far for this RfC can be summed up with the following three points:

1. Continue as is w/ Sticky Prods perhaps with a little tweaking
2. Require WP:N despite meeting a SNG or the inverse
3. Require WP:BEFORE for Sticky prods or the inverse

If everyone agree that these are the issues that need consensus, I think it is time to hash out which way we will proceed. J04n(talk page) 15:22, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

Indeed. I may have missed an issue in the comments, but those seem the primary ones, and without prejudice against including any additional issues when we move ahead, I also believe that it's probably time to move ahead. --j⚛e decker^talk 15:45, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

I don't know that I understand exactly how #2 applies here. Are you suggesting this only for BLPs? Only for stick prods? Something else? Hobit (talk) 16:30, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

At least two of the views (User:Gigs & User:Scott MacDonald) brought up increasing the notability requirements for BLPs. So, for the sake of this RfC, the question is "should WP:N supersede SNG" or vice versa. J04n(talk page) 17:32, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

Though I've tried to raise other items, I would say that the contentious areas are:

1. Do we require a good faith attempt at sourcing an article before someone applies a sticky prod?
2. Do we widen the sticky prods to any new BLP without a reliable source, only widen it slightly by ignoring the Myspace, Facebook, Utube and Linked in, or continue as at present.
3. However if we do decide to widen the sticky prods to some or all new poorly sourced BLPs we also need to decide whether to do this just for new BLPs or retrospectively to a group of articles created since March the 18th, which would mean a sudden splurge of BLP prods; Or we further complicate the rules by having two dates in them, or we keep it simple and replace March 18 with July 18 but accept that there could be a few new totally unreferenced BLPS that no-one has spotted and which would thereby get a temporary reprieve.

There have also been people who want to alter the notability rules, but I would suggest that would require discussion with the relevant projects, not a lot of people have participated here, and I suspect there will be many editors who have ignored this because the articles they are interested in are all well referenced. But they would have strong views if we were to review the success of the sticky prod and conclude that the notability criteria for referenced articles should be altered. ϢereSpielChequers 17:34, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

Proceed??? I think the one thing that is clear from this RfC is that with the exception of possibly tweaking the wording surrounding STICKYPROD, there is no consensus to make any changes at the current time. Notice, even in the summary of topics, the first item reads, Continue as is w/ Sticky Prods perhaps with a little tweaking the other two items include the phrase or the inverse. There has been discussion surrounding N/SNG and BEFORE, but there is not enough support for either issue to make any changes. The tweaking to sticky prods is fairly minor, it is just a tweak. Basically, nothing meaningful has emerged from this RfC except to proceed as we were.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 19:12, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

There we go. A comment I can agree with. I wanted something with BEFORE, and some others would like to require BLP articles to meet NOTE right now, but there wasn't consensus for either one, and it didn't look good to get consensus anytime soon. You might get a small blacklist with IMDB and myspace on it, but even that won't be easy, since those are sometimes reliable. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 19:30, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

You mention IMDB, a sore spot with me. I think there are at least a thousand, probably many more, BLPs that would be easily sourced by IMDB credits lists. Nobody yet has shown an acceptable alternative to that database. A couple of alternative sources I have attempted to use are actually blacklisted. I have always found IMDB to be quite reliable but because a few vocal people think that the subjects are able to submit their credits to the database (and even though those are subsequently, manually verified), that IMDB is unreliable. A few deletionists active on this discussion have removed IMDB sourcing from articles so they remain tagged as unreferenced BLPs. I contend IMDB is a source, whether you choose to accept it as a "reliable" source is your opinion. Trackinfo (talk) 20:34, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

We cannot create out of whole cloth a reliable source where one does not exist. Active Banana (talk) 20:39, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

I don't see how anyone can say that the book is closed in regards to WP:N or WP:BEFORE, both of the views by User:Gigs & User:Scott MacDonald had significant numbers of supporters. This RfC is on how we will deal with BLPs not just sticky prods. I'm not saying that there is consensus to change, but they certainly should remain on the table. J04n(talk page) 19:54, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

As did the ones from WCS, Hobit, and DGG... There is support both ways, but not enough to move consensus. As for N/SNG, that is a broader topic than this single (limited involement) RfC can resolve. Quite simply, the only proposal that really garnered support without a counter was the minor wording change that you proposed. Beyond that, the community (as represented in this RfC) is divided.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 20:21, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

Tend to agree with Balloonman especially since support votes were not counter-weighted directly with oppose votes. But i can bet for no consensus for near all statements had it been the case. --KrebMarkt 20:33, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

Balloonman etc., perhaps I misunderstand the procedures here, if so accept my apologies. It was my sense that the question was whether to move to close debate. It is my belief that the discussion has sort of worn itself out, that folks believe what they believe, and that another few weeks (or months) of debating each of these points will not change many minds, create consensus where there is none, etc. If that's the case, then it seems wise to me to measure the consensus or lack thereof, write that down, and put this to rest for a few months while additional experience with the process plays out. If you can look at the pages here and see much hope for minds being changed by this debate, well, I'm all for it, but I really don't think that the discussion, which has felt more and more repetitive to me, heading toward more consensus than we already have. So, I'd say, let's see if we do or don't have consensus, accept that that's the situation right now, and get to other issues for a few months before we inevitably revisit these issues. But if I'm not undestanding what's really going on, again, enlighten me and I'll stand corrected. --j⚛e decker^talk 21:45, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

Joe, your point is exactly my point. I do not see this moving anywhere soon. Typically, an "uninvolved" admin will come in and close the RfC and determine if consensus has been reached, but the participants can do so as well. There are people who are interested in some of the points here and there.... but no issue (IMHO) has garnered enough traction to say that it has consensus and no issue appears to have any where enough support (or even fervent enough supporters) to move anywhere. J04n's question was "where to proceed?" My answer is nowhere. I see no reason to have a "round 2" of this RfC.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 22:35, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

That's my opinion as well. It seems to be working good enough, with our limited abilities to judge that, and there wasn't a change that had enough support to be included. We should just pick around the edges, maybe figure out IMDB and adjust wording only slightly as we go, and let that be the consensus. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 23:50, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

Possible compromise

If we don't have consensus to require all new BLPs to have a reliable source, then I'm assuming that Scott and his supporters would prefer my suggestion of ruling out Myspace, Facebook, Utube and Linkedn rather than have zero change. Hobit and I suspect others who want a clear bright line can also live with that. I'd be interested in knowing whether DGG et al could accept that as a compromise, especially if we offered a new start date in July to prevent the first few weeks being skewed by the sort of instant backlog that bedevilled the beginning of sticky prods.

On top of that I think we've at least learned more of what divides us and we know what we don't know. If someone reopens this in a few months it would be really helpful if we had some sort of stats as to what is going on, at the moment this is a classic example of people prioritising what can be measured over what is important. We know how many articles are tagged as uBLPs, we don't know how many of them are uBLPs, or how many unidentified uBLPs are still out there. I have deleted far far fewer attack pages in the last few months than I did in the previous few months because this project has distracted me from other areas where there are more BLP problems.

Also I think it would be much easier to come to consensus decisions if we had some stats available that told us whether these BLP Prods were biting and driving away newbies, or were prompting them to reference their articles. As it is we don't even know how many articles have been tagged and of them how many have been deleted by the sticky prod process. ϢereSpielChequers 23:33, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

• As noted, I find that largely acceptable, though I'd like to wring some concession from others as I don't think this change is actively needed. In particular, at one point the sticky prod stuff had something about WP:BEFORE being a good idea before tagging, though not required. As far as I can tell that got removed even though it had consensus the last time around. I'm guessing the combination of the two would be acceptable to the "inclusionist" side of this debate, but I'm honestly not sure. No clue about the deletionist side. Thoughts? Hobit (talk) 02:25, 7 July 2010 (UTC)
  • Recommending BEFORE, and disallowing IMDB, MYSPACE, etc. would be a good compromise to me. I don't think BEFORE can be mandated, but it would be a nice reminder. Also, IMDB and other sites are occasionally reliable, but not in a way that new users will understand, so they won't use them correctly. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 02:36, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

I can state with absolute certainity that requiring BEFORE has NEVER had consensus... it has had support to be recommended, but never required.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 03:15, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

I think recommending it did have consensus and I'd swear such language was in there at one point.Hobit (talk) 03:59, 8 July 2010 (UTC)

• Disagree. The KISS principle is pretty clear on this: it either has a source, or it doesn't. If it has no source, use the automagic, lightweight process. If it has any source at all, use a different process--which can even be a straight PROD, at the discretion of the PRODing editor. Jclemens (talk) 02:44, 7 July 2010 (UTC)
  • That sounds good and workable too. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 02:45, 7 July 2010 (UTC)
    • In theory that might sound good, but in practice that will result in tons of crappily sourced articles with the one person who cared about them long gone and gazillions of hours of productive editors time wasted in afds instead of improving articles. Oppose. Active Banana (talk) 03:02, 7 July 2010 (UTC)
      • Actually, I think it would result in tons of crappily sourced articles deleted via PROD or AFD. I've no issue with disallowing what is pretty much just self published sources, but at the same time, there really is no harm in sending such articles to AfD. If the only sources are that bad, they are going to get SNOWed in a hurry. I think we need to beware of allowing this process to become a shortcut past AfD. Resolute 04:48, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

• I don't think it makes much of a difference. If I find such links as Facebook, Myspace, IMDB, Youtube, etc. being used as the sole sources for the article, I'm going to move them to the External links section (which is not the references section) and BLP-prod the article. NW (Talk) 01:22, 8 July 2010 (UTC)

  But since at present that's only your view and not an official one, formalising it would surely be a good idea. I'm going to support this if we can agree to recommending (but not enforcing) BEFORE as well. Alzarian16 (talk) 01:32, 8 July 2010 (UTC)

  I'd say it would be an abuse of this process to remove relevant references and then apply a BLPPROD... Hobit (talk) 04:07, 8 July 2010 (UTC)

  Tell me when Facebook can ever be used as a reference? NW (Talk) 02:09, 9 July 2010 (UTC)

I certainly wouldn't want to use a Facebook page as a source, but some Facebook users have made their space a usable resource. I found this one, for example. I don't know that every statement on this page is accurate, but based on the facts that I do know, I would accept what is here as reporting fact, not fiction. In this case, there are better sources to verify with, but to make a blanket statement suggesting Facebook can never provide valuable information is just as misleading as to say it can always provide good information. I have yet to use a Facebook page as a source, but there have been many occasions when I have only been able to reconstruct a quote or piece of trivial information based on something somebody posted on such a site recalling the same information which has set me on the correct path. Trackinfo (talk) 03:13, 9 July 2010 (UTC)

You've just described the purpose of external links... which is exactly what NW said he'd do with links to those sorts of sites.The-Pope (talk) 05:29, 9 July 2010 (UTC)

How often, within this BLP controversy, have true sources been degraded to External links? I have seen some external links that were so close to verbatim as to possibly infringe upon copyright, but because they were not inline sources, the article was listed as an unreferenced BLP. Whatever you wish to call it, External Links or References (or notes or sources etc etc) its a source for the information posted and the article is therefore not unreferenced. Trackinfo (talk) 06:36, 9 July 2010 (UTC)

The problem is that some use the phrase and template "unreferenced BLP" to mean "does not meet the requirements of WP:V in that it is from a WP:RS, independent of the subject and non-trivial in its coverage of the topic" (I've long used these three pointers as being the guide, but reading WP:V for the first time in a while, they don't seem to be listed anymore?) whilst others take the literal meaning of the word unreferenced to mean without any references, ignoring the requirements of being independent and from a reliable source. Which is the correct reading? Don't know, but eventually WP:V must be met, so we might as well start trying to match it from the start, rather than getting there in a few steps.The-Pope (talk) 08:33, 9 July 2010 (UTC)

That does lead to a point that I could support... before applying BLPPROD, the user is expected to check the history to see if there were any references removed. Sort of like we have an expectation at CSD for users to check the history before deleting articles to see if there was a version worth keeping.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 06:08, 8 July 2010 (UTC)

BLPProd is currently for totally unsourced articles. I'd like to disallow certain poor quality sources, but this is not for poorly formatted stuff or where people put a link in the lead or the external links. We created BLPprod because we want to be more cautious about biographies of living people, if we have a BLP on a professor with a link to their bio on a university website then they might not survive AFD, but they should not be subject to BLPprod because we have enough to check something in the bio. ϢereSpielChequers 07:59, 10 July 2010 (UTC)

• So we are going to stick with the status quo? It sounds like we can't get agreement on anything else. We only tag unsourced articles (note to all, that means unsourced, not poorly sourced) with BLPPROD, we only remove a correctly applied BLPPROD if a relevant RS is added (note again, it need not be in-line, just a source). Sound right? Hobit (talk) 23:20, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

  I'm fine with that. To answer some of the points brought up in this section: as I read the current procedural policy, these points are covered:

1. WP:BEFORE is already recommended: "If you see a biography about a living person without references, you are strongly encouraged to either source or remove any contentious material, and look for reliable sources that support the remainder of the biography's content." (emphasis mine)
2. BLPPROD is for unreferenced articles, i.e., articles with no indication of what the content is based on.
3. Editors applying a BLPPROD are expected to check the history to ensure that the article was created after 2010-03-18, and that no more suitable versions exist to revert to.

• See WP:BLPPROD#Nominating  –Joshua Scott ^[who?] 00:53, 13 July 2010 (UTC)

Sounds right. Anyone object to a close of this RfC? It was proposed in the section above, WereSpielChequers made a good attempt at finding some nugget of consensus and it looks like that got shot down. So back to the suggesting we close. As a note, I think the discussion was quite useful in that we got a fairly good sense where people are at and what the issues are. Hobit (talk) 01:04, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

I don't think we've reached a consensus either. However, I want to voice my continued opposition to attempts to call for an end-around of the uBLP backlog sourcing project (by editors claiming that progress has stalled - which is clearly not true) such as mass-PRODing articles simply because they are unsourced (and I'm worried by some actions I've seen on this front). Jogurney (talk) 01:30, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

Agreed that we're not finding a consensus. I would also like to add my voice to that of Jogurney's with respect to the sourcing effort. Looking closely at the data, it's clear to me that we are not losing ground yet against the total backlog of tagged and untagged unsourced BLPs. I'll add, just so that nobody is surprised, even now, a substantial remaining pool of untagged unsourced BLPs--if you want to see it in action, just go hit "random article" ten or twenty times and see what you find. --j⚛e decker^talk 02:04, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

I regret that we don't have consensus to alter what I currently consider a fudge re WP:Before. As far as sources are concerned we clearly don't have unanimity even for my compromise proposal. But we may have a rough consensus, unless that is some of those who wanted all new BLPs to have a reliable source would rather keep the sticky prods for totally unsourced articles, than only rule out Facebook, Utube, Linkedin and MySpace - unless I'm misreading things I only saw a couple of objections to that, and no-one arguing that any of those four is a reliable source. ϢereSpielChequers 09:59, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

Some statistics on the BLP-PROD

There was some discussion about finding statistics on the BLP-PROD, so I thought I'd give it a go. Basically, I watched 30 articles from Category:BLP articles proposed for deletion to see what happened to them. The results can be found at User:Alzarian16/BLP-PROD stats. Hope these are useful. Alzarian16 (talk) 14:49, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

That's interesting, and contains at least one surprise for me, I'm a little disappointed (and y'all can laugh at me if you want) that BLPPROD didn't produce more user sourcing attempts. I realize it's not a huge sample, but, I'd hoped that that figure (1/30, say) would be higher. --j⚛e decker^talk 18:33, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for doing this, I'd actually say there were three incorrect tags declined - though that wasn't the way you classified the one I declined. But the key thing I take out of this is that the sticky prods are failing to educate the article creators, I'll go through those thirty and see how many of the authors were new and how many were lost by this. ϢereSpielChequers 21:13, 25 July 2010 (UTC)