Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Unsourced biographies of living persons/Archive 1

Huge backlog of tagged unsourced biographies of living persons

• Links from articles to the "BLP unsourced" template

• Estimated transclusion count (from Jarry's tool): 22515 transclusion(s) found (2010-10-27 1340)

From Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Badlydrawnjeff

Principle 4, Summary deletion of BLPs

Any administrator, acting on their own judgment, may delete an article that is substantially a biography of a living person if they believe that it (and every previous version of it) significantly violates any aspect of the relevant policy. This deletion may be contested via the usual means; however, the article must not be restored, whether through undeletion or otherwise, without an actual consensus to do so. The burden of proof is on those who wish to retain the article to demonstrate that it is compliant with every aspect of the policy.

Obviously although we have the support of arbcom we've badly dropped the ball on this and we're badly letting down the living subjects of those biographies. Is there any reason why we should not encourage all admins to grab a whole bunch of these articles, do a revision check, and summarily delete the useless things before they bite somebody? --TS 13:47, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps it is time to extend {{BLP prod}} to all unsourced BLPs, and not just those after the Mar/2010 cutoff? –xeno^talk 13:54, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

I'm looking at the tags, and the two or three I checked had been tagged many months ago and had hardly seen a single edit since then, let alone an effort at sourcing. On the other hand one editor jumped in and added a source after I tagged one of them for speedy--which is great. --TS 13:57, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

I'm not talking about tagging for unsourced, I'm talking about the BLP prod (aka "sticky" prod) template. A cleanup tag is easily ignored, a tag that says 'this article will be deleted in ten days if not sourced' is a call-to-action. –xeno^talk 14:15, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Ah, it was you, was it :) I would concur with extending BLP prod, but that's going to be a longer argument. In the meantime.....--Elen of the Roads (talk) 13:59, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

We don't need to extend BLP prod or anything, we've already got arbcom specifying a procedure for unilateral deletion of articles based on the admin's judgement, which can only be reversed by consensus to restore. --TS 14:02, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

And you want yet another replay of the BLP dramafest earlier this year because...? T. Canens (talk) 14:11, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

What I was thinking (and I guess Xeno too) that PROD serves them up in daily chunks that one person feels they can tackle. The problem with these is that they were just all thrown in a box and left there (kind of like what my kids used to do with their summer holiday projects.....) until there are hordes of the things. Since these aren't all the unreferenced BLPs in the project (are they) it would be good not to add more in to the box, but just run new ones old ones that are newly discovered through the PROD process. Ultimately it might attract less dramah llamas than a mass deletion campaign. Elen of the Roads (talk) 14:13, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Indeed, I think a more orderly approach would be preferable to another round of speedy deletions. –xeno^talk 14:15, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

I don't disagree with expanding BLPPROD, Elen. My point is that unilateral deletions under the process TS proposed will only lead to more drama. T. Canens (talk) 14:19, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Arbcom is not Govcom and has no right to set any kind of policy on how we deal with BLPs or anything else. In fact, Arbcom specifically and frequently notes that it does not deal with content disputes, which the existence of unsourced BLPs most certainly is. Frankly, any admin who points to Arbcom's asinine proclamations earlier this year as justification for any kind of unilateral deletion action is not working in the best interest of Wikipedia and should resign the bit immediately. Resolute 00:43, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Arbcom decisions are binding and enforceable, and while I do not recommend drama or a sudden fit of mass deletions, I did want to respond lest anyone think otherwise. These biographies should be either improved or deleted, and I don't think there is any serious question or opposition to that idea. The remaining question is how to go about it in a thoughtful and harmonious way. I also think everyone is in favor of improvement as being preferable to deletion, whenever improvement is possible. My view is that either BLP prod or some other similar "timed" process is most likely to give the highest possible "yield" in terms of improved biographies.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 22:37, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

There doesn't need to be drama. My idea is just to encourage admins to exercise their right to delete these dodgy BLPs where necessary, and they can be taken through deletion review if required. At this stage--with some 20 000 unsourced BLPs tagged and many of those unimproved in months, mass deletion is the only way we'll ever sort out this real problem. But mass deletion doesn't mean we delete them all in a hurry. We can do it over six months or a year, as long as we do it. --TS 14:16, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Tagging them with BLP prod would still result in mass deletion, but give users a fair warning and time to source it without having to go through DRV or WP:REFUND. –xeno^talk 14:18, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Is anybody monitoring the BLPprod process? Is it reducing the backlog of old unsourced tagged BLPs? --TS 14:20, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

I would guess that it's only stemming the tide, as it's (currently) limited to newly created BLPs. Only 119 transclusions as of this writing [1]. –xeno^talk 14:22, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

BLPprid is (currently) only allowed for articles created since the summer. It does not deal with the backlog.--Scott Mac 14:22, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

I think the backlog is shrinking personally. I know a project I edit heavily has fixed probably a couple hundred articles in our scope. It just looks like it isn't because there was a very large number to begin with. But I do think we are making progress. -DJSasso (talk) 14:24, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Comment: Looking at the Arbcom case, [2] it seems to me that the verdict was "speedy deletion endorsed as compliant with the spirit of BLP, but it was a last resort, with community agreement to deal with the matter preferable" (my paraphrase). Having these things hang about indefinitely - sometimes for years- was certainly seen as unacceptable - and did breach the spirit of BLP. When I voluntarily ceased speedy deleting these things (prior to the case), it was also on the understanding that a community way of eliminating the backlog, in a reasonable time-frame, was preferable. I thus urged a moratorium on speedied to give any better means a chance. If it is evident, ten months later, that the other methods have failed to deliver, then regrettably we may need to end that moratorium. (Remember some of these articles have been tagged unreferenced for years, so it is evident that no one is about to fix them)! I'd urge caution though. Anything deleted should be recreated if someone offers to source it - and deleters should check that the article is definitely entirely unsourced and not wrongly tagged as such. We should also start with articles which have been tagged unsourced for longest.--Scott Mac 14:22, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

I believe a promise was made that within one year of the closing of WP:BLPRFC2, all unsourced biographies of living persons would be gone. Is that going to be the case? Probably not. I would hate to see mass deletions be necessary to get things moving again so we can move on to more important but less visible BLP issues, but I fear that might be what is necessary. I agree with all above. NW (Talk) 14:25, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Where? I searched BLPRFC2 for "year" and can't find anywhere it gained consensus. (If you are referring to this, I don't see 52-33 as a consensus of any sort.) T. Canens (talk) 14:35, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

← FYI: Template talk:Prod blp#Proposal to remove the newly created restriction. –xeno^talk 14:29, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

To put it in visual perspective, here is a graph of the backlog since January. It is pretty clear that progress has stalled, and more drastic measures are required. Those who were against deletion pledged that the backlog would be reduced to 20,000 by September 1, and they have not met that milestone. This is a problem that really can't wait any longer. The Wordsmith^Communicate 14:30, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

the top one, has absolutely no sources, would the ones with no sources be deleted under {{db-person}} or is there another reason they are on there, I'd delete the ones with no sources, 10 months is long time to find sources--Lerdthenerd (talk) 14:31, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Looking at that graph I wouldn't say we hit a wall, I would say we fixed the low hanging fruit. The trend is still trending down, just not as fast. I think the current process is working. I would also note it looks like the rate of change is still pretty clos eto the same as it was at the beginning. There is no plateau on that graph. -DJSasso (talk) 14:43, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

(E/C)please, please, delete, nominate for deletion, tag for deletion, whatever, start working on this problem of unsourced BLPs. The idea that a few 100 are being worked on/knocked out at a time is very noble, but would take years to work out. My head explodes trying to follow these discussion about discussions and process about process, ect, that is why I don't get more involved or "help out". What/where is the harm of nuking ALL 20k bios in one mass bomb drop?? If anybody/article is really that important/notable, they surely will "resurface" in the future. Anyways, good luck....--Threeafterthree (talk) 14:48, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

I have to concur...what is the problem with mass deleting all BLP's that have been left unsourced for a certain period of time, say 6 months? That would sure make this much more manageable. The Eskimo (talk) 15:20, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Alternative to speedy deletion There are 30k unreferenced BLPs. Set a hard deadline to eliminate the backlog (10, 15, 30 weeks?). Set a bot to BLPprod tag a number each week (starting with the oldest) 30k/weeks of deadline. That means we eliminate them all on a deadline, no speedy deletions, while allowing people to fix as many as possible. Other than the bot, no one needs tag any old BLPs. Each expired prod shall be manually checked before deletion to prevent the deletion of any BLP that is actually referenced.--Scott Mac 15:01, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

• Support. That'd work. Take the long deadline - 30 weeks - and work out how many per day would need to be tagged. It's because it's such a morass that people feel it's futile to do one or two. Elen of the Roads (talk) 15:17, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

  Indeed, 150 per day seems manageable. –xeno^talk 15:19, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

• Support, though I would prefer just ridding ourselves of them. I would suggest a shorter deadline, maybe 10 or 15 weeks. Otherwise, this is just going to drag on forever. The Wordsmith^Communicate 15:21, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
• Support - if this means something will be done, full speed ahead captain...--Threeafterthree (talk) 15:27, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
• Support. -- Magioladitis (talk) 16:36, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
• Support SEems to be a good middle of the road alternative thats serves our duty to BLP policy without disrupting things too much The Resident Anthropologist (talk) 18:56, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Speedy deletion is not an option for articles created before March 18th unless they contain contentious or negative unsourced information (or of course, unless they meet one of the established criteria for speedy deletion). The majority of the "backlog" are entirely uncontentious and should not be summarily deleted, according to policy as currently writtern. Thparkth (talk) 15:36, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

• Yes, but I think the point is that isn't working for us. So what now?--Scott Mac 15:38, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

• I just wanted to raise the point because there has been some invalid speedy tagging of non-contentious grandfathered BLPs (does this count as WikiLawyering yet?) as a result of this thread. In terms of your question, I'm not clear on why it's suddently urgent to delete inoffensive articles. Thparkth (talk) 15:40, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

• Ridding ourselves of this problem has been a priority for a while. The community had a chance to resolve it themselves, and they have failed to do so. Now, we seek stronger action to take care of a problem that nobody else is going to. If we don't, they will sit around for another four years. The Wordsmith^Communicate 15:44, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

• The community is ridding itself of the problem, remember as people are fixing them others are being found that were never tagged. So at the moment its a bit of a back and forth struggle. But your graph clearly show there has been a steady decline in the number of unsourced BLPs with no plateau. We have not hit a wall as you indicated above, we are steadily declining. -DJSasso (talk) 15:46, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
• Perhaps the community isn't all that concerned, in practice, about inoffensive articles "hanging around for another four years?" I don't have a strong opinion on this myself, but why push BLP policy further than the community wants to go, and further than legal expediency requires? Thparkth (talk) 15:53, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

• (edit conflict) Because like it or not, Wikipedia needs to have an ethical responsibility to its readers and those who are involuntarily covered in it. That responsibility, at the very least, should be able to indicate that we are willing to at least take a step towards being willing to follow our own policies. If we are not, are they worth the server space they are written on? NW (Talk) 16:02, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

• It seems to me that an argument on purely ethical grounds is one that really only works if it represents community consensus. Otherwise it's just a motivated minority scolding the majority for not caring enough. Thparkth (talk) 16:08, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

• (edit conflict) Does anyone know how many of the articles in this rather sizable backlog are too old to be BLP-prodded? It seems the most sensible option, first, is to BLP-prod all the articles in the backlog for which it's valid to do so, and see how much that takes out of the backlog. GiftigerWunsch [TALK] 15:51, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

The vast majority of them are too old--a lot of those articles have been tagged unsourced since before the creation deadline. You can see the breakdown by month-of-tagging here: [3] in the right column, but the tagging is often much more recent than the article creation, so it's more lopsided than that table would make it first appear. --j⚛e decker^talk 16:06, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Unreferenced BLPs

All articles

942

• Yes the table to the right shows the age distribution
• 23k is not a huge backlog: it's not even where the most problems are likely to be - completely unreferenced articles are generally stubby and non-contentious - the poorly reffed ones are a more likely breeding ground for problems.
• See the list at WP:BLP noticeboard for higher risk articles.

Rich Farmbrough, 15:57, 27 October 2010 (UTC).

Yet another deadline? I forget when we had the Badlydrawnjeff case. 2006, I think. The encyclopedia was five years old and the BLP problem was a tiny fraction of what it was then. Deadlines come and deadlines go, but there is no end in sight.

So, a significant date is coming up in 2011: the tenth anniversary of the founding of Wikipedia. Let's find when exactly in 2001 the encyclopedia was founded, and whatever day that is we say that every single BLP remaining on Wikipedia must be properly sourced, else it shall be summarily deleted without prejudice to the recreation of a properly sourced version.

And this time we have to mean it. The people who say they can clear the backlog in a realistic period must be held to their promise. No more extensions. Five years is a long enough time to sit on our hands and watch the BLP ignored.

And don't start another one of those bloody stupid votes. No more roadblocks, no more stalling, no more demands for special consensus to do what we should be doing anyway. Tasty monster (=TS ) 16:00, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

• Question:Why, oh, why, do we have a bunch of recent BLPs that are unreferenced and CAN be prodded with BLPprod? Anyone got a bot?--Scott Mac 16:07, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

What is this argument that we shouldn't delete the tagged articles because there are worse ones that are not tagged? That is the classic "other crap exists" argument. Our policy is clear: the tagged articles should not exist at all. If you know of worse articles, delete those too, don't use them as an excuse not to delete the others. And don't give me that "27k isn't a huge backlog" crap. If it wasn't a huge backlog we would have completely cleared it some time in the summer. But we didn't and it's still huge. Tasty monster (=TS ) 16:10, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Our policy is clear: the tagged articles should not exist at all - that is quite a drastic oversimplification of what the policy actually says. Thparkth (talk) 16:13, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

We have cleared 40k unsourced BLPs in 7 months. So yes 22k isn't a huge backlog. At the rate we are going it would appear these would be gone in 3.5 months. Which is well under the year it was expected to take to get rid of them all. -DJSasso (talk) 16:15, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

• Not again Let me recap some sanity here

  1) Unreferenced BLPs do not, themselves, cause problems.

  Previous surveys of unreferenced BLPs have not found that they have a substantially higher rate of problems than referenced BLPs.

  2) Sources in BLPs do not, themselves, prevent or mitigate problems.

  In order to actually meet V, an additional layer of scrutiny is required in that sources must 1. be reliable, and 2. actually support the statement(s) referenced. It is entirely obvious that that level of scrutiny does not currently exist in the vast majority of currently referenced BLPs, and that those who propose deletion of unreferenced BLPs have put forward no method to encourage, let alone demand, this actual level of harm-preventing and harm-reducing scrutiny.

  Given these two realities, whether we deleted every single unreferenced BLP in one day or in one year, the actual reduction in harm can be no more than minimal, and more probably will be nonexistent. The corresponding damage to the encyclopedic coverage of living individuals will almost certainly be higher than any potential reduction in harm. Thus, any effort to systematically reduce "unreferenced BLPs" without dealing with the additional gap between minimal referencing and actual harm reduction is a net disruption to the project, in that it causes harm to coverage with no corresponding reduction in harm to living people. Jclemens (talk) 16:30, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Exactly how I see it. But a target of sourcing say 100 articles per day is reasonable. If we try to ensure that between us we do so and monitor it on a notice board somewhere then we can do it within a certain period.♦ Dr. Blofeld 17:48, 27 October 2010 (UTC)\

And no one is proposing that no progress be undertaken. This entire conversation is predicated on the false assumption that we're not doing enough to solve the problem, when the evidence is clearly that the problem is diminishing at an appropriate rate. If we dismiss that concern, the appropriate reaction is "keep up the good work". Jclemens (talk) 17:59, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Agreed and lets not forget 30,000 articles have been sorted out which is a remarkable feat given that we are volunteers and the vast majority of those were likely not to the subject interest of the person who added the references.♦ Dr. Blofeld 19:42, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Many of the articles that I have examined are sourced via the External links rather than via in-line citations. These are worth saving. Racepacket (talk) 09:39, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

i object to the characterization that progress has "stalled". the rate of decline has decreased. how about another BLP cup? how many who want to summarily delete UBLP's have referenced? i say vote with weight for blp's referenced Accotink2 talk 23:47, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Of course let's solve the real problem, which is this guy

Collapsed conversation)

Let's all stop for a moment & think about just who insists that there is a crisis here, that people like Jclemens has not been working hard enough to fix this problem, & that a mass deletion is the only solution. Tony Sidaway has a habit of acting disruptively in situations where he disagrees with the status quo: Removing the FA tag without discussion from this article is just one example which comes to mind. (And one has to wonder why he routinely obscures his user name; could it be that people might respond differently to a post signed by Tony Sidaway than if it were signed by "TS" or "Tasty monster"?) Let's close this thread & spend our time instead working on articles. -- llywrch (talk) 21:13, 27 October 2010 (UTC) he's only the proximate source. Consider the original source of most of this BLP mania and you will discover why so much of it seems contrary to the norms and goals of wikipedia. Protonk (talk) 21:50, 27 October 2010 (UTC) You may have a point; but ISTR Siegenthaler later published an article, written after that affair came had blown over, where he confessed his surprise that Wikipedia responded faster to removing the problematic material than a professional news media organization had when faced with a similar situation. But even if I were to concede that you are right, does that still give Sidaway the right to rant that "the ball has been dropped" on this problem (although, according to comments from cooler heads in this thread below, it is being handled), that only an extreme solution such as mass deletion will solve matters, & anyone who opposes him on this are simply throwing up "more roadblocks", or "stalking", or making "demands for special consensus"? I hope everyone else would use far more temperate language & encourage the work to be done. Not declaim in black & white terms on the matter & degrade the integrity of anyone who might disagree with him all the while claiming (disingenuously in my opinion) "There doesn't need to be drama". All Sidaway has done has been to offend the people working on the problem, while acting as if he is the only person on Wikipedia to care about the reputation of those who happen to have a stub of an article about her/him. -- llywrch (talk) 23:32, 27 October 2010 (UTC) Oh I don't blame Siegenthaler. He got an abrupt and unasked for introduction to the internet and he responded immediately in a manner you would expect someone in his position to respond. I was referring to the website the Siegenthaler incident birthed, a site which (in a boomerang so strong from BADSITES it could give whiplash, wikipedia has extended incredible goodwill toward) exists only to bring down this place and embarras editors. But somehow we are taking editing pointers from them. Protonk (talk) 03:11, 28 October 2010 (UTC) Hello chaps, is there a point about this? In which case a user RFC would be in order. Oh hang on, you've never mentioned any of these problems to me before, so that wouldn't be in order. Or perhaps one of you could just remove the section. --TS 03:33, 28 October 2010 (UTC) It appears you have a remarkably poor memory, Sidaway. Once, long before many of the people here started editing, you were an Admin, & a clerk for the ArbCom -- but your behavior cost you all of that. Or maybe you don't think that counts because none of that involved filing an RFC. More recently, I've warned you about your disruptive ways. Don't get all sanctimonious here. When you encounter a situation you don't like, & you have the choice of engaging other people in a reasonable manner to create a consensus that would strengthen the community, or making a scene with outrageous behavior that alienates or drives people away in order to win the dispute, why is it you always go for the more disruptive of these two choices? -- llywrch (talk) 04:09, 28 October 2010 (UTC) I shall continue to ignore you until you have something substantive to say on any topic. --TS 04:13, 28 October 2010 (UTC) Why are we wasting time collapsing discussions instead of sourcing articles? Its absurd how much collapsing and reorganizing is going on. My pitchfork drive was similarly stunted.--Milowent • talkblp-r 15:40, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Deadline

Arbcom said that summary deletion of unreferenced BLPs were not outwith policy, but that a less chaotic manner was preferred and the community was urged to find one. The limited BLPprod was the solution, but it evidently will not eliminate the backlog as it stands - indeed it doesn't even address older unreferenced BLPs. We can propose a new means, like "prod the lot over an extended period", but it is not unrealistic to think it will result in months of talk and no action. I thus propose the following deadline:

We will work for a community means, with a hard deadline, of eliminating unreferenced BLPs. This effective community process should be agreed by 30th November 2010. If it has not been achieved, then it will not be unreasonable to conclude that the "less chaotic" means has failed, and thus that the only effective means of enforcing policy is the summary deletion of any unreferenced BLP by an administrator. We believe this to be in the spirit of the policy and of arbcom pronouncements, unless arbcom pronounce to the contrary

Administrators willing to join me in this please indicate here:

1. --Scott Mac 16:24, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
2. The Wordsmith^Communicate 21:19, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
3. Chase me ladies, I'm the Cavalry (talk) 21:21, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
4. Kevin (talk) 02:48, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Archiving ridiculous counter-proposal whose location made it look like everyone was !voting for it instead of the proposal above.

Counter-Proposal Any admin who volunteers for Scott's list, thus putting an ultimatum on the massive good work being done to source uBLPs, are essentially interposing a threat to do their bidding, and such threats being antithetical to the good spirit and work of the project, such admins should be made subject to administrator recall and indefinite bans. We believe this to be in the spirit of the policy and of arbcom pronouncements, unless arbcom pronounce to the contrary. Wikipedians willing to join me in this please indicate here: --Milowent • talkblp-r 05:46, 28 October 2010 (UTC) Er, how exactly would you implement that? --TS 05:49, 28 October 2010 (UTC) Me and Jimbo will run you out of town with flaming pitchforks.--Milowent • talkblp-r 05:51, 28 October 2010 (UTC) Good luck with that. --TS 06:00, 28 October 2010 (UTC) You do realise I am not an admin, right? Thank god. -DJSasso (talk) 12:36, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

• Oppose As has been shown above, the backlog has shrunk, is continuing to shrink, and there is no good reason for proceeding in a more drastic manner. Jclemens (talk) 16:34, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
  • The goals set by those who said "we can sort this?" have NOT been met.[4] and progress slows [5]--Scott Mac 16:39, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
    • Some goals, have not been met. So what? They were randomly choosen numbers. Progress is being made, and the chart you link to does not show progress is slowing, it shows the pace has been pretty much steady and unchanging other than a few minor ups and downs and hasn't slowed at all. -DJSasso (talk) 16:46, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
      • At the current rate of 2010, it would take well into 2013 to eliminate the backlog. There are many other problems besides this one, is it acceptable not to solve for 3-3.5 years. (And that's if the rate is kept up). Indeed the only reason we got this far was because of mass deletions at the beginning of this year.--Scott Mac 17:08, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Hang on, I don;t follow. Around 30,000 articles have been sourced since spring time? Why would sourcing another 23,000 take three years Scott?♦ Dr. Blofeld 17:38, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

If this gets implemented, I propose we throttle article creation for some interval to be determined. DS (talk) 16:35, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

That would be a massive negative impact on the project, it's an ever-growing encyclopaedia, after all. Not to mention technically infeasible without withdrawing the right of ordinary users to create articles... which wouldn't go down well with many, imo. GiftigerWunsch [TALK] 16:37, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Oppose mass deletion Unreferenced BLPs were 52,000 when I looked before the drive. Its gradually been reduced to 23,000, less than half. The VAST majority of the backlog are not contentious. Yes the process is slow and arduous and it would be easy to nuke the lot but you seem to be forgetting that a high percentage of our articles are those longer articles which are poorly sourced/lack reliable sources and where flase/potentially libellous claims may not be spotted by editors. Who are we kidding if by January 2011 we nuke all unreferenced BLPs and commend ourselves for a wonderful achieviement when several hundred thousands articles are poorly sourced and at least 90% of the articles on the website lacking? yes we should not have any unreferenced BLPs or unreferenced articles full stop but the fact is we have them. We are forgetting also that many articles withih the log are perfectly well written AND accurate and just need back up. To delete those in one heap with those which really do have issues and should probably be deleted would be criminal, especially when they may be useful to editors wishing to read about them.♦ Dr. Blofeld 16:47, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

The intention is not to mass-delete anything. The intention is to focus minds to find a "less chaotic" way. Are there other issues? Oh, yes. But if we can't address one, then what hope have we got?--Scott Mac 16:50, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

The only "less chaotic way" will arrive once the hard work of editors sees that backlog eliminated. Everything on here is down to hard work.♦ Dr. Blofeld 16:53, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

And if enough people aren't willing to do the work, or figure that someone else will do it for them eventually? Is it ethically responsible for us to sit back and just ignore our responsibilities to all of our articles, not just the ones we have time to deal with? NW (Talk) 17:13, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

If you deduct BLPs created since the start of the drive created during the summer you'll find that to date around 32,000 articles have been sourced and deleted if non notable and removed from the backlog, quite an achievement. This was done without any major publicity or scandal in the press outside wikipedia. The remaining 23,500 can be sourced/deleted in due course,as soon as possible preferably. As experience shows the majority which do have serious issues are mainly POV/self-promotional pages or are poorly written as opposed to containing contentious material. Yes it is frustrating how slow the backlog is going down, I guess not everybody is so concerned about them as some people on here. I've done my fair share of reducing the log but like many I can profess to not working anywhere as near hard enough on clearing it as I'd have liked.♦ Dr. Blofeld 17:29, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

• Oppose. The more time we spend on these discussions, the less time we have to deal with these in the most constructive manner, which is to source them where they are encyclopedic and sourceable, and get them deleted if not. The backlog is going down and as long as that's the case we should carry on and not set unreachable deadlines just to allow mass-deletion or to put pressure on those editors prepared to work to improve these articles. The reduction in the backlog has been a huge success. Presenting it as a failure is unfair on those editors that have been prepared to put large amounts of their own time into dealing with them in a way that benefits the encyclopedia the most.--Michig (talk) 17:43, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
  • I respect the work that has been done to address this, truly I do. On the other hand, we have to look at the stark reality here—we simply do not have enough active editors who are willing to work on the problem. So long as this is the case, then there is no reason to pretend that our existing methods are sufficient to bring the project to a necessary quality level. NW (Talk) 17:48, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
• Support Who are us peons to argue with arbcom sanctioned blind vandalism. They made their bed when they handed down that ridiculous pardon for the wanton bit abusing vandalism spree of Coffee/Kevin/Scott et al, so it's all good in the hood now. Go for it. Burn the mother fucking lot down already. Whoo yaahh. MickMacNee (talk) 18:12, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
• Oppose - the gravity of the problem simply does not justify the severity of the proposed solution. There is no real deadline to delete an uncontentious article. Thparkth (talk) 18:22, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
• Oppose this is another bite at the apple. If the existence of unreferenced BLPs aggravates you so, go reference them. Be bold and fix things. Last time round Uncle G was kind enough to do a cursory summary of the tens of thousands of unreferenced BLPs and determined that the vast majority were uncontroversial and not problematic. And frankly, the existence of a {{reflist}} template and a reference section does not make a BLP safe. Most of our high profile BLP problems came from BLPs which would not have been deleted under any sensible progress and which had references already! Existence isn't the problem. Protonk (talk) 19:49, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

At least 95% of articles with serious issues I've come across are those fuller articles which actually already contain some sources and are poorly written, contain potentially libellous claims (a Pakistani politician being the biggest whorehouse owner in southern Pakistan was one I can think of) , and often contain copyvios. Of all of the unreferenced BLPs I've sourced in my time an extreme few had any issues like copyright/libellous claims. The vast majority in fact have been accurate but like most article are in great need of expansion/sourcing.♦ Dr. Blofeld 22:13, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

• Opppose: Scott's proposal to simply delete unreferenced BLPs as proposed is poisonous.--Milowent • ^talkblp-r 20:03, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
• Oppose mass deleting old unreferenced BLPs - which is effectively what this proposal amounts to - would cause a huge amount of collateral damage for little or no benefit. The percentage of these articles which actually contain BLP violations is tiny, and I doubt it's significantly higher than it is for BLPs in general. Though there are 23,000 BLPs in the category, of the ~50,000 BLPs in it in January when this was last a major issue less than 15,000 are in it now. The reason the backlog looks as big as it does is that people have been industriously finding more old unsourced BLPs in the category, not that hardly any progress is being made. Hut 8.5 21:08, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
• Oppose apart from the wholly unwiki nature of this proposal; Many of these tags are wrong, some are out of date, some were wrong to start with. Deleting them without individual attention will mean a lot of mistakes. I put a lot of time into fixing this earlier on in the year, but have largely gone back to higher priority tasks - remember the old unreferenced BLPs are mostly uncontentious and there are much more effective ways to find vandalism and BLP violations. ϢereSpielChequers 21:10, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
• Stongest possible oppose - I have sourced thousands of uBLPs (mostly football players), and I have found extremely few articles with harmful BLP violations. As a community we have made enormous progress since February 2010 (a large portion of the existing backlog are articles tagged since February). BLPPROD appears to be working well to keep the growth of uBLPs at a minimum. Finally, as mentioned above many of the uBLPs are incorrectly tagged so speedy deletion would result in plenty of false positives getting deleted against policy. There is no crisis, and this is a totally unreasonable proposal. Jogurney (talk) 00:11, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
• Oppose. As usual, Scott seeks to create a poisonous and destructive atmosphere to work under, which is anathema to this projects aims and will harm this project far more surely than the existence of a couple thousand innocent, but unsourced, articles could ever do. He just needs to drop his threats and learn that he simply is one member of a community that has greater priorities and problems than to wholly dedicate itself to his zealotry. The backlog continues to decline, and the BLPPROD process is slowing the creation of new unsourced BLPs. Resolute 01:49, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
• Oppose. A) unsourced BLPs aren't clearly any worse than sourced BLPs when it comes to BLP issues. Or at least no one has, to my knowledge, shown they are. So we have a solution in search of a problem. B) things are improving at a reasonable clip. If all these are gone by 2013 I'll be thrilled. Hobit (talk) 15:01, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
• Oppose Noting that the excess over 20K represents BLPs which are, indeed, already subject to the BLPProd process agreed upon by broad consensus. I know of no reason for IAR to once again be invoked where a process was established by consensus. The older uBLP population is exceedingly diminished from where we started, and that speaks to the work done by many editors. The concept that a broad consensus should be so overturned is contrary to the fundamental bases of Wikipedia. Collect (talk) 20:46, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
• Oppose this good faith proposal. I was in favor of deadline when this all started 9 months or so ago but the problem is that old unsourced articles are continuously being found. Progress continues to be made in reducing the backlog one article at a time, please let's not give up yet. J04n(talk page) 19:24, 30 October 2010 (UTC)
• oppose my mind is focused and i object to the following:

  The intention is not to mass-delete anything. The intention is to focus minds to find a "less chaotic" way. Are there other issues? Oh, yes. But if we can't address one, then what hope have we got?

i was referencing blp's, but i will now cease blp sourcing, until the mass deletion "acting out" stops. cut your nose off to spite your face, see if i care. there are only 278,000 articles lacking sources, and 1976 delisted good articles to work on. Accotink2 talk 19:17, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

• Oppose per Milowent, as strongly as possible. We have made plenty of progress since this first became an issue; to be perfectly honest I've been impressed by how much we've progressed since then. There is absolutely no need whatsoever to begin a deletion spree - the numbers of unreferenced BLPs continue to go down. Deletion would only cause irreparable harm to the project at large. I do a lot of newpage patrol, and I rarely see an unreferenced BLP that couldn't stand deleting on sight as a blatant speedy case. I don't think the issue is nearly as bad as it's being made out to be. --Ser Amantio di Nicolao^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 02:55, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Are these really an issue?

I apologise if this point has been covered above, I haven't read the entire discussion, but the fact that these articles have been tagged seem to suggest that they're not obviously problematic: we can assume that most articles which are tagged with BLP unreferenced were probably done so by someone with a reasonable understanding of BLP policy, and who would have known to remove anything contentious, or G10 it if it's entirely contentious. So is there really such a rush to deal with these, or should we not just draw a bit more attention to the list, encourage others to help out adding references, etc., and just let it happen in its own time? GiftigerWunsch [TALK] 16:35, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

We can reasonably assume no such thing. Tagging those articles is the simplest of bot tasks; parse the entire category of BLPs, tag anything without ref tags present. Done. → ROUX ₪ 16:42, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Except if tagging results in deletion faster than the trash can be sorted from the treasures. Jclemens (talk) 17:01, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

I agree with Jclemens here; there's no reason to believe a lack of sourcing, marked by someone who knows how to use a BLPunreferenced template (why assume otherwise? WP:AGF should also include assuming that the articles are non-contentious unsourced BLPs unless there's reason to believe otherwise), and thus that mass-deletion is likely to cause more harm than good. What's the point in BLPunreferenced as a cleanup tag if the default position is that every article marked with one should be wiped? And if it's done by a bot, a bot won't understand the difference between a BLP and a non-BLP incorrectly tagged as one. I am in favour of a bot being used to blp-prod the ones for which a BLP prod is appropriate though. I also wonder if a noticable proportion of these are incorrectly tagged as unreferenced? GiftigerWunsch [TALK] 17:36, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

(ec) I've been actually working at sourcing these, perhaps my own experiences can serve as evidence. I've probably sourced around 1200 articles from the backlog, I need to update my stats.. Of those, a couple included nasty unsourced and unsourcable negative claims, there was also a hoax or two and a few dozen (at least) copyright problems, as a couple dozen (at least) promotional, non-notable self-bios. I was pretty shocked (and I'm sorry I don't have the diffs) by the couple attack pages. --j⚛e decker^talk 16:47, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

1200 articles at least is incredible. If ony we had more editors like you Joe.♦ Dr. Blofeld 17:00, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Agreed, Dr. B. So Joe, you'd say that of these you've seen, we're running at <0.5% attack, <0.5%hoax, 2-4% copyvios, and 2-3% purely promotional? Doing some quick math, that would mean that 92%, or 11 of 12, articles subject to deletion for being unreferenced would not be subject to the "big three" (G10, 11, 12) speedy deletion criteria. What percentage do you think would have been subject to other speedy criteria (A1, A7, etc.)? Jclemens (talk) 17:07, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

(ec) Yeah, that's about right--I'm working from memory, which is fickle, but certainly that's close to my experience. As to speedies: Very few other speedy flavors last to the "old end" of the unsourced article pool where I tend to work, maybe a few A7s but not many. I'd put the "non-speediable" fraction as higher than those 92%--neither of the hoaxes was obvious without research (quite well done, actually), the attacks were in articles that had other non-attack content, etc. The "new end" of the unsourced BLP pile might be different. --j⚛e decker^talk 17:30, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

That's excellent to hear, Joe. You are to be commended strongly for your work to handle the problem in such a thorough manner: Thank you for your hard work to "get it right". Jclemens (talk) 18:01, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks to both of you for the kind words. --j⚛e decker^talk 18:11, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Recall that we still have at about 10,000 biographies which we haven't classified them as blp or not blp in Category:Biography articles without living parameter. (We reduced them from 22k to 10k in 5 months). -- Magioladitis (talk) 17:04, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

This is an important point that should not be overlooked. The actual "backlog clearing" is 12,000 articles higher than the starting point and ending point would have indicated. Jclemens (talk) 17:08, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Not quite, the 12000 is all bios without living=yes or no, so includes both referenced ones and dead ones. As stated below, we have 6847 UBLPs on the list now, that weren't there in Feb. If you follow the numbers, there are probably 20-50 new UBLPs each day, unless someone (EPBR123, Rich, Yobot etc) goes on a spree of discovery and either converts a bunch of unref tags to BLPunref or similar. It has jumped by up to 300 on some days.The-Pope (talk) 17:15, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

The total is going down but not at a rate fast enough to achieve the original mission timeline. A faster reduction of referencing URBLP's is desirable. An extra 50+ editors would do the trick. Regards, SunCreator ^(talk) 21:51, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

So those who have a problem with the current rate should go recruit editors, rather than threatening to delete 92+% innocuous content wholesale. Jclemens (talk) 22:24, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

As an example of how not all of these tags are totally correct: Australian State Coach was in Category:Biography articles without living parameter, in my view a harmless, referenced article, and not particularly core to the BLP problem. ϢereSpielChequers 22:29, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

To add weight to Joe Decker's report above, I, too have been working with the URBLPR Project since earlier in the year. My personal count is not far behind Joe's and in that time I have found precisely 1 "delete on sight" article (immediately deleted), a few copy-vios, a few where contentious or spammy text just needed a removing (but the article was worth keeping) and a handful of articles which ended up being deleted by one process or another, mostly due to failing WP:GNG. Conclusion: yes, there probably will be a few (very few) really bad apples in the rump of the original backlist of UBLPs (and there may well be more in the articles tagged since this issue arose) but we are addressing the problem in a collaborative, non-chaotic, in-process manner, which is what we were tasked to do. In the process, every single one of the tagged UBLPs is being looked at thoughtfully, dusted off, and provided with at least one RS. My experience is that there are many more gems (or possible future gems) to be found in that backlog than there are problems which put Wikipedia at risk - and that's what makes the task interesting. Just over the last few days, the more interesting articles I have sourced have included articles on a national poet laureate, a human rights campaigner and the president of an international sports federation amongst others. In most cases the articles still need work (of course) but at least we can be sure that they are not contentious. Getting the flame throwers out to zap the backlog is not necessary.--Plad2 (talk) 06:31, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Are you part of the solution yet?

There seems to be a lot of "why haven't you fixed it yet" type of comment from some in the sections above. Well, some of us have been. There is a project WP:URBLP. I personally (with some help) have almost cleared the WP:AUSTRALIA list out, from over 400 2 months ago to under 20 today. We have a bot updating up to 730 lists every day with UBLPs by topic/project. But we have achieved a lot. We reduced the number of UBLPs not in a wikiproject to virtually zero, from well over 10,000. I've got a list of 45,528 UBLPs from Feb 7, and comparing it to the 23389 today, 16542 are on both lists - with 28,986 cleared! But, the "benefit" to the whole project, but the detriment of the task, almost 7000 new BLPs have been found and added - and that is net value - a lot more would have been identified and dealt with, so I would guess probably 35-40k unreferenced BLPs have been cleared this year.

I've been trying to sort out what is left to do - it's about 5400 sportspeople, 3100 musicians, 3800 other entertainers (actors etc), 2800 politicians, 5000 others specialised projects and 3000 by a regional (country/state/city etc) project only. Unless you get lucky and find a single reference that can do multiple BLPs, you can't really do more than 10-20 in a few hours. Maybe 20-50 if you know the topic and the sources well. So, it will take everyone's involvement. I've tried notifying the wikiprojects... with little return. There is a core of about 20 or so people who have probably done 80% of the 30,000 that have been cleared.

And if you go down the "speedy delete" route, what are you going to delete? All that have been tagged? Only those completely unreferenced? What about IMDB, or NFL, or offline, or incorrectly formatted links?

We have the lists, WP:CATSCAN and WP:URBLP all ready for people to start referencing. Why haven't you done your quota today yet? The-Pope (talk) 17:06, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Another great project to help add sources to unreferenced BLPs is WP:URBLPR. Ever wonder why the list of unreferenced BLPs by tag date has some months missing? That's because we ate them for lunch. This project tends to manage a few hundred a month with just a few editors, more hands are always welcome! --j⚛e decker^talk 17:33, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

• Comment: Here here! I haven't read this whole discussion, but any suggestion to mass delete or mass prod unreferenced BLPs would be unwarranted and wrong. I have sourced hundreds of BLPs since the BLP death parade earlier this year, most recently and primarily through the Wikipedia:Unreferenced BLP Rescue Project. We have sourced five months of backlogged unreferenced BLPs in the past few months--and its probably 10 or less editors actively working on that project. We have also found that it is EXTREMELY RARE to find "bad stuff" in unreferenced BLPs--that is what our actual experience shows, and it debunks the good-faith suppositions that unreferenced BLPs are shot up with defamatory materials. Its just not true. We could source all currently unreferenced BLPs in a reasonable time period if even 100 people instead of 10 worked on that project. Keep BLPPROD in place for new articles, but there is no need to institute drastic changes to delete the backlog. If you are worried about the backlog, join in the referencing effort and it will disappear.--Milowent • ^talkblp-r 20:00, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

• As I've pointed out elsewhere, it is possible to identify and fix almost all the BLP violations in these articles with relatively little effort. All you have to do is use Google or something else to search the unreferenced BLPs for key words such as "convicted", "murderer", "corruption" etc. Not many articles come up, and it won't take very long to check them and reference/remove any contentious claims as necessary. Hut 8.5 21:17, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Those are all good things to search for, but please don't just search within the articles tagged as uBLPs - if my experience with douchebag is anything to go by, our real BLP problems are rarely in the articles tagged as uBLPs. ϢereSpielChequers 22:14, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Is blindly tagging/deleting articles the answer?

I don't think it's the most sensible idea. I think we should expand BLP prod to all uBLPs, and I'm assuming that any tagged uBLP that has not been touched or sourced within, say, 6 months to 1 year of the initial tagging, can be pretty much uncontroversially deleted. However, there will be a lot of easily sourceable articles out there. We need users dedicated to this issue to go through a list of recently edited uBLPs, mark the ones that have some potential, and prod the rest. ("Potential" could be partially based on the number of Google hits, perhaps.) Those with sources that exist somewhere should be NOINDEX'd and moved to some special uBLP incubation process where the article has one additional week or month for users to add sources. Then, they can be deleted, as no one would seem to want to work on them. Does this sound reasonable? It's more work than bot tagging, yes, but we can't simply throw away content that hasn't even been human-checked. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 18:04, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

1. Incubators and userfying are bad ideas generally, but especially for UBLPs, bad stuff can sit unwatched because it isn't in mainspace and it loses the benefit of collaborative editing because people will actually take off categories that might have attracted editors interested in that subject.
2. You may assume that these thousands of articles can be uncontroversially deleted, but that was deeply controversial earlier this year and would be so again.
3. If people try to source them and prod the ones they can't source they can and do get a lot uncontroversially deleted. If people start prodding without trying to source them other people deprod them, and then if an editor subsequently wants to prod because they've tried and failed to source it they have to go to AFD.

ϢereSpielChequers 22:01, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

I'm thinking of a temporary incubation process: if the article has been moved out of mainspace but not edited after, say, one week, it'll be deleted. Anyone can choose to incubate an article they think has potential, but it isn't given any "special treatment" if it's not sourced quickly. The earlier controversy was due to a lack of clear policy on this issue, I think, and now there is some precedent and consensus to the status of uBLPs, I think we have a bit more leeway on the deletions (as the mass prodding by bot suggestion above evidences). I agree that we should look for sources before prodding, though, and a bot tagging doesn't help. But deprodding prodded articles takes time, too, and deprodding doesn't mean anything if no one adds sources even after an AfD. I'm searching for some sort of compromise that eliminates a lot of crap and saves some useful stuff, too, but we can't do anything like that without cooperative and dedicated users who will actually spend time looking for sources. Unfortunately, too many people are already blindly prodding articles (but at least it's not as bad as newbies at CSD). /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 02:23, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

I don't think anybody is suggesting blindly tagging or deleting articles. To tag them you have to check for references in the current revision. To delete them you have to check for references in every single revision. That isn't blind deletion. --TS 02:27, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Past experience of deletion sprees is that once unleashed such niceties are liable to be compromised and you start getting multiple prods or deletes per minute. Once an article has been deleted only other admins can tell if any of the hundred or so prior versions had references. ϢereSpielChequers 09:11, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

There is more than one tool in the toolbox.

One of the perennial problems with people who have administrator tools, that has to be fought, is that they forget that there are other tools in the toolbox other than the deletion tool. ☺ Here's a hint for you all:

I recently blanked, using an account that has no administrator tools, some 10,000 articles as part of the Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations/Darius Dhlomo. You can see from User:Moonriddengirl/CCI 'bot stalk report and the fact that there are 3,357 articles in Category:Articles tagged for CCI copyright problems (as I write this), not funnelling everything through the administrator corps, by making the problem tractable by people who have ordinary editing tools and by not involving any deletion processes (unless determined that they are the only way to solve the problem) has reviewed over 6,500 articles in just over a month. You have 22,515 articles? MediaWiki tells me that at the nice round figure of 6,000 articles per month, a slightly slower rate than the CCI cleanup (which involved quite a lot of sportspeople biographies too, you know), that lot could be eaten up by the regular editor corps within 3.7525 months. Don't underestimate the power of all of those teaspoons moving a mountain.

We've had no arbitration cases, and no big palavers. And the problem of copyright violation across thousands of articles is as much of a potential danger to the project as is the problem of false biographical information across thousands of articles. Indeed, we'd have been in very hot water if we'd sat back and done nothing once we knew that there was a large scale copyright problem. We stopped the publication of the copyright violations right off the bat. We formulated a procedure that anyone with an editing tool could use to address the problem. We even, as you can see, came up with a means for tracking who assumed the responsibility for each individual article.

So perhaps some imagination should be applied to the BLP problem, rather than a handful of administrators itching to use just one tool and funnel everything through the (comparatively small) administrator corps and our deletion and deletion review processes.

Neither AFD, nor Proposed Deletion, nor Deletion Review could handle an extra 6,000 articles per month. Wikipedia:Copyright problems certainly couldn't have. The editor corps at large, armed with its teaspoons, has handled such a volume of articles over the past month with comparatively very little fuss at all.

Uncle G (talk) 18:51, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

• Big. Thumbs. Up. --j⚛e decker^talk 19:50, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
• I must say, I was involved in the Darius incident for a little while, and that did spring to mind when I saw this discussion. GiftigerWunsch [TALK] 19:53, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
  • I just did a bunch of prodded ones, and as a non-expert referencer they were fairly easy, bar two obvious speedies.Rich Farmbrough, 20:29, 27 October 2010 (UTC).
    
• Worth considering. My issue would be that some of these articles may be downright libellous and written about non-notable people. What would happen to them? Once blanked, they probably stay that way...... I could live with this maybe. If we added {no index} it would mean that any that did stay that way wouldn't be found?--Scott Mac 22:02, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
  • If your concern is about libellous material in mainspace then uBLPs are not the best place to look. Remember that focussing on uBLPs means diverting editor time away from looking for libellous content in mainspace in order to trawl through stuff that by definition has already been screened by the tagger as not a {{G10}} candidate. ϢereSpielChequers 22:37, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
    • agreed; from what I see, all current ones are being caught by speedy--the new article patrollers are quite good at this. As for old ones, any undetected ones are likely to have been sourced, with either real or fake sources. DGG ( talk ) 00:02, 28 October 2010 (UTC) .
      • It occurs to me that it wouldn't be that hard, even to change Template:BLPunreferenced to blank the page a la the copyvio template. With some additions to the text of the template, it's quite possible we'd actually get the "many hands make light work" benefit that Uncle G has been getting in the Darius copyright case. I don't think that I entirely agree with Scott that the blanked pages would necessarily remain that way, and it would give editors the ability to actually see old revs when they went to put the article back together. Less BITEy than deletion for the editors who put out some of those articles, some of whom are likely newbies; more actual "push" to get the articles sourced. I haven't had time to really think it out, but... *shrug* Heck, I could even imagine doing a test with 1000 such articles, maybe converting BLPunsourced tags to BLPunsourcedBlank tags that have some "beta" text, and seeing if it really does get some sourcing happening. *ponders* --j⚛e decker^talk 00:38, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Answers below ⇓. Uncle G (talk) 18:25, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Ironically, "focussing on uBLPs means diverting editor time away from looking for libellous content in mainspace" (WereSpielChequers above) is exactly the argument I would advance for encouraging summary deletion. Once deleted, an unsourced BLP no longer represents a drain on finite resources that will undoubtedly wear out. Blanking also has its attractions and has much the same effect as deletion. --TS 05:16, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

• Volunteer resources are not so easily directed, if wikimedia simply employed editors it could choose to redeploy them this way. But we rely on volunteers and attract editors by allowing them to write about notable stuff that interests them. Deleting a load of articles to drive the relevant editors elsewhere is effective, just look at the growth of Wikia. But we don't know how to delete articles and direct editors elsewhere within Wikimedia. Blanking of the contributions of a banned copyright violater is very different to blanking or deletion of the contributions of thousands of goodfaith contributors, as nobody objects to losing the copyviolations. But nevertheless it has been done badly with far more lost than was necessary - in particular the categories were lost which reduces the chance of getting collaborative editing. The uBLP project has managed to resolve tens of thousands of unreferenced BLPs partly through working with hundreds of wikiProjects, and that approach relies on project tags and categories. ϢereSpielChequers 08:39, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
  • No categories have been "lost". Your argument here is founded on a basic error of fact. Uncle G (talk) 11:33, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
    • While I appreciate what you've done with DD's CCI, I do worry that a similar blanking process will make it more difficult to track and clear the uBLP backlog. I find it very difficult to sort through the DD CCI blanked articles (I developed a catscan that helps, but only a litte), while the uBLP backlog is well-sorted and it is easy to find the articles I can deal with best. Jogurney (talk) 15:57, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
      • Blanking the article wouldn't change either the category listings or the UBLP listings on other pages. More on this below ⇓. Uncle G (talk) 18:25, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Trial blanking

Joe Decker talks of a small trial run, of a thousand articles or so, to see whether we can indeed persuade people to wave those teaspoons around and start digging. Picking two months more or less at random, I suggest October 2008 and March 2009.

I've created drafts for Project:WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons/Mass blanking/How to help, Project:WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons/Mass blanking/Notice, and Project:WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons/Mass blanking/Task explanation, which I expect M. Decker et al. will be boldly editing. ☺ (I suspect that a small additional note on copyright violations and copies of external biographies is possibly in order on the how-to-help page, for example.) Such a trial also requires a 'bot discussion, as well as widespread advertisement and agreement that we try this.

Uncle G (talk) 00:12, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

There is still no real evidence of a problem for this to solve, and given 35-40,000 articles from the backlog have been sourced in some way since the end of January, I would say that the people "waving teaspoons" have certainly been digging. Resolute 15:39, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Alternate proposal

I'm not as active in the uBLP project now as I was a few months ago because I realised it was a distraction to more serious BLP stuff as I can find more troubling problems elsewhere, and I'm concerned that another series of RFCs and deletion sprees will be as damaging and distracting from more serious matters as the events earlier this year were. For example I've been trawling through mainspace for BLP violations involving the phrase "punched him" and though I'm finding quite a few they are rarely if ever in articles tagged as uBLPs. But there are some things that would make the current process a bit more rigorous.

One of the problems is that the definition of uBLP as opposed to refimproveBLP seems to vary per tagger, but is somewhat different to the criteria for a sticky prod, that's left us with a steady trickle of poorly referenced articles that are tagged as uBLP but don't meet the criteria for a sticky prod.

In the last RFC I didn't quite get consensus to broaden sticky prod by disregarding any links to Utube, MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn. If there are people who want to tighten the uBLP process I think it would be worth reviving that idea. Also we have Autopatrollers who are still creating uBLPs which are automatically getting passed New Page Patrol, I've deflagged three of them, but we need someone who can do database reports to find more Autopatrollers (and potentially admins) who haven't got this particular message.

So I'd like to make five changes:

1. Get a bot or regular database report of admins and Autopatrollers who've created articles since March this year that are currently tagged as uBLPs. Most of the time they will be mistags, vandalised articles and redirects turned into articles, but we do need to fix this loophole.
2. Broaden the sticky prod to disregard any links to Utube, MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn.
3. Implement the DE wiki system to prompt all creators of new articles for their source.
4. Disallow taggers from sticky prodding new articles without informing the author - if we can require people filing an ANI thread to inform any fellow editor they are complaining about we can require anyone prodding an article to inform the article's creator.
5. Create a one hour period of grace from when an article has been created to when it can be tagged with a sticky prod, this way hopefully a few more newbies will stay long enough to reference their article.

ϢereSpielChequers 21:47, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

• I agree with 4 and 5 most definitely. I think that would help things a lot. As for the humongous amount of discussion above, i'm surprised no one has invoked WP:NODEADLINE yet. I can understand View 4 from there, but there is also the point to be made that we should be going about this in the manner that will retain the most articles. Furthermore, trying to get everything done in the shortest amount of time humanly possible is not going to achieve that. We want the encyclopedia to be better, not just shrunken. So, everyone, try and take it slow. Yes, something should be implemented in order to speed up the reduction, as it does appear to be stagnating right now, but try and keep the speed reasonable, with as few deletions as possible. As I remember reducing one of those backlogged months a while back from a couple hundred to around ten. Those ten that were left were definitely non-notable. However, I was able to find good sources for the rest. We want to be able to keep that percentage of success and not raise our percentage of deletion wherever possible. Remember, improvement is a gradual process. If you try to speed it up too fast, you're going to lose a lot of good stuff in the process. Silverseren^C 21:59, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
• My comments:

  1, 3, 5) All fine.

  2) Disagree. PROD processes are supposed to be lightweight and clearcut. Once we've gone through and fixed all the unsourced, it's trivial to bot tag all articles that only have such links with {{BLPrefimprove}} and deal with them once we're ready to cross that bridge.

  4) Disagree. While I think it should be strongly encouraged and various automated scripts make it easy, it should not be mandated. Jclemens (talk) 22:22, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

  • Mine: 1 is worth doing--there will be a few found., 2 I'd be reluctant to do this except for u=tube, since some actually notable people seem to put their actual official web pages on the other sites . 3 OK as a prompt, not a requirement, since we often get good articles from the naïve people who do this 4 absolutely, it's a matter of basic fairness, that needs to be extended to everyone--I wonder why anyone would oppose this? 5 this needs to be thought over, because that one hour is the time to get them to source the articles. DGG ( talk ) 23:36, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
  • The thing I really, really like about (3) (and I'd make it a requirement, but automated to only require that the user type in *something*) is that it seems to me that it's so much less BITEy than any post-facto tagging. With a prompt (and I haven't used DE, so...) I'd imagine that you get an instant response when you create the article without giving any text in the source column, a "hey, you need to put something here." Compared to coming back later and finding that the article you've created has gone away (or even is tagged and heading that way), this seems a better time to engage the editor with the question. And heck, maybe they still have the source (web page, magazine, etc.) at hand that they were using to write the article from--in other words, it's more likely they'll actually have enough information to provide a reference at that moment. --j⚛e decker^talk 00:42, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
• Yes to 1, 2, 4, 5. Not sure what the "DE wiki system" in 3 is. But 1, 2, 4, and 5 will only help, not hurt, the project. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 02:28, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
• Some version or combination of these proposals would go a long way to actually addressing real issues in an efficient way. This nascent idea of blanking 22,000 uBLPs would blank the wheat (99.99%) along with the chaff (.01%), and would be aimed at a problem that no one can prove exists to any greater degree in uBLPs than sourced BLPs (and the evidence is to the contrary).--Milowent • ^talkblp-r 20:32, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Please note

Tony Sidaway has elected to bring a clarification request before the Arbitration Committee here and interested parties should make a concise, brief statement there. SirFozzie (talk) 22:42, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Citation needed

Until anyone actualy presents some robust evidence that unsourced bios cause more real problems that sourced ones with a p value of 0.05 or better can we end this moral panic? When it comes to important matters our actions should be evidence based. At the moment I'm seeing a lot of "we must do something-> this is something-> we must do it". This is not conductive to working out what we actualy should be doing.©Geni 22:46, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Well some of us are chipping in with evidence - but as some people were pointing out this spring, this is all about focussing on something that can easily be measured and taking attention away from more serious problems that are harder to measure. ϢereSpielChequers 23:04, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

I can best comment here by my experience in patrolling BLP Prod. I have found that 90% of the BLP Prods are sourceable, almost all of them without the least difficulty, generally right from Google News. Of those that are not, a few have turned out to be hoaxes (mostly from one particular individual), a few have been for people from culture or language areas where there are no conveniently available sources I can work with (and if expired, I delete giving the reason as both expired prod and failing WP:V), and the rest of them would be proddable or speediable on many other criteria, usually on the basis that what is claimed does not amount to notability (and if expired, I delete giving both reasons). Of the 90% initially unsourced but which I or others find sources, about 2/3 are potentially solid articles or stubs, and about 1/3 could perfectly well have been prodded on other reasons--again, usually that nothing shown amounts to notability--and when I see them as expired prods, I delete with that reason after checking the sources that nothing else appears.

I have seen no evidence that the unsourced BLPs among the current articles are any worse than the sourced ones, or any other sort of article. I doubt it is any different among the older ones, except that some of them will require print resources. Since checking these is always much slower, any accelerated procedure for handling them would be counter-productive--we would mainly be eliminating good sourceable articles. We inevitably do lose a good many sourceable articles anyway from error or carelessness in checking, and anything which would tend to increase the number would be wrong--we should rather be checking more carefully. I think there is a remedy, and most people here know what I am going to suggest -- BEFORE must be compulsory policy to the extent it applies to an article.

In addition, the suggestion by ϢereSpielChequers above mostly make sense, especially notification. A good many good faith creators of unsourced BLPs do source them if sufficiently reminded by personally tailored advice--and a number of others, when informed about the necessity, withdraw the articles. DGG ( talk ) 23:08, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Lots of substandard sources have been slapped on to lots of unwatched articles of non-notable people. And some folks pat themselves on the back over this. The fundamental problem is not "unsourced" BLPs; it's incredibly low standards that allow for a proliferation of articles that are unwatched and untended to, largely on people about whom there is next to no in depth information in high quality sources (you know, those "places with a reputation for fact checking and accuracy"). The extent of the problem remains vast, and many of the "sourced" articles have served only to obscure the real problem. What started as a minimum standard has come to be treated as the gold standard of inclusion.Bali ultimate (talk) 23:14, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

I agree with this. Underwatched articles are a bigger problem than unreferenced ones. Also because they are of people at the lower end of the notability scale, and thus the likelihood of even the watchers there are spotting a plausible untruth is lower. We need to deal with these articles. See my remarks here WP:TF. However, that doesn't mean unreferenced bios are not a problem. Our quality control relies only on someone actually checking want someone else wrote. The fact it's referenced makes it no more nor likely to be accurate - but it does make it easier to check. The easier it is to check, the more likely that someone will do it. However, unreferencing/referencing isn't the the only factor here - the number of people viewing the article is another. A libel on a prominent article (referenced or not) has more chance of being recognised as such than one on an article few are watching and fewer still know or care about.--Scott Mac 23:26, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

""sourced" articles have served only to obscure the real problem." No, the eagerness by some to delete without concern of notabilty, focussed our attention on sourcing, and in doing so obscured the real problem. Why hasn't the WolterBot cleanup list - which lists ALL of the cleanup tags - been regenerated yet? Why are we again focussing on something that by your own admission is not the "real problem". Bottom line is it would be great if all 400,000 (?) BLPs were all totally fact checked and BLP policy compliant. Focussing on 23,400 of them isn't really going to help that, is it?The-Pope (talk) 23:42, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Over the last year, I've regularly used Google to hunt through this category. I use[ http://www.google.co.uk/#sclient=psy&hl=en&q=site:en.wikipedia.org+%22does+not+cite%22+%22living+person%22&aq=f&aqi=g4g-o1&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=af213bbeb155c077 this] and then generally add in a keyword "criminal" "accused" "corrupt" "convicted" "affair" etc. I have regularly found articles (probably over 1in5 initially) that clearly violated the WP:BLP policy (in letter as well as spirit). I've removed hundreds of sections and deleted many articles - little of it controversially. Of course, that someone is "unsourced and negative" does not mean it is actually false, but I think (I hope) we are starting by saying the letter of the BLP policy is a given. I've not collected any statistic, but as a regularly BLP violation hunter, unreferenced BLPs are by far more likely to contain violations (hardly surprising since any negative statment in them is by definition unreferenced). I'm not sure if that helps, but it is offered anyway.--Scott Mac 23:20, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

I've been going wider looking through the whole of mainspace for words like faggot, douchebag and the N word. There's still a lot of stuff out there and some of it really malicious libel. But the worst stuff I come across is usually not in biographies. ϢereSpielChequers 00:00, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Do not mistake vandalism for libel. "douchebag" is unlikely to harm anyone's reputation as no reader is going to believe they are one. This is embarrassing, but not harmful for the subject. The words likely to be harmful (if untrue) are more likely to be "bankrupt, charged, accused, arrested, affair, corrupt, allegations - oh, and Kennedy assassination". Plausible untruths are the problem. "Nigger" is abusive and insulting, but it tends to reflect badly on the person posting it (or the website hosting it) not on the victim. Remember, if it is obviously false, then it is obviously false to the reader, and thus is isn't likely to give a false impression of the subject. I'm not saying abusive vandalism isn't a problem - but it is less likely to harm the innocent.--Scott Mac 02:56, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

I'm well aware of the difference between vandalism and libel. An unsourced allegation that someone called someone else a faggot or used the N word in a live TV broadcast can be plausible and very damaging to that person's career. Our Hugglers and bots are very effective at dealing with incidents where an article is replaced with "Faggot lol", what I'm picking up is more along the lines of "actually the real reason for x was that y called z a faggot during...". Much of what I remove is very plausible, I suspect that quite a few incidents are true, but I can't predict when I remove them which will be restored with a proper source and which won't. ϢereSpielChequers 08:56, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

• At Wikipedia:Unreferenced BLP Rescue Project, we have eliminated five months of tagged unreferenced BLPs since July and are continuing to do one month of tagged articles at a time. Very very few have contained problematic contentious BLP content, and I've seen nothing to indicate the occurrence of defamatory content is higher in these articles that in BLPs that do have references.--Milowent • ^talkblp-r 23:47, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
  • You've sourced five months worth of tagged BLPs in five months? Excellent! That's great news! What is the prognosis for the future? Do you think we'll reach the tenth anniversary deadline of having no more unsourced BLPs on Wikipedia? Please don't pretend that this is about defamation. It's about our basic commitment to verifiability, as underlines in the biographies of living persons policy.. --TS 01:39, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
    • The prognosis is good. I recall that prior to October 2009, the uBLP backlog was constantly growing (despite hundreds of articles being cleared from the backlog each month). We've cut the backlog by more than 50% since then (and when you consider the amount of articles added to the backlog during that span it's a remarkable feat). Through continued effort, it won't be long before all of the backlog will be BLPPRODable (which is essentially what the alarmists are trying to force upon us immediately). Jogurney (talk) 02:47, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
    • (ec)Your comment is belittling and wrong, TS. That small project of editors, only a part of all those working on uBLPs, has eliminated five months of backlog (uBLPs created before March 18, 2010) in three months. You have stated you have "absolutely no intention of ever sourcing an unsourced BLP."[6]. The way to fix this problem is through improving articles, that is what the project is all about. The backlog has been reduced. If you won't help, so be it, but belittling those doing it is annoying.--Milowent • ^talkblp-r 02:50, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
  • That's rather slow, give me a list of BLPs baseball, basketball, or american football articles and I'll get the references. Secret ^account 01:42, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
    • Hey Secret, Wikipedia:Unreferenced BLP Rescue Project doesn't work by subject, but Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons can steer you -- go to Wikipedia:URBLP#Tools to look for uBLPs by category of your expertise. Thanks for being willing to pitch in!--Milowent • ^talkblp-r 02:50, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
  • 400 Basketball uBLPs. 100 American football uBLPs. For other subjects see BLP by WikiProject.Regards, SunCreator ^(talk) 08:38, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Taking all of the above statements about progress on faith, it does sound to me like a deadline of January 15, 2011 (when Wikipedia will be ten years old) is achievable. This is excellent news. If you don't make it for any reason,there's always Doc and his volunteers. Before you moan that we're setting a harsh deadline, recall that the problem didn't appear in early 2010, it's been around for most of Wikipedia's existence. --TS 04:01, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

• I think that's the point exactly. It's a problem that should be fixed, yes, but it's one that has been around for a while (though it has clearly been steadily getting better). Trying to force it to be completed all at once in a short amount of time is not helping the issue, but making it more convoluted and difficult and will likely end with the loss of a lot of useful content. And can you please tone the sarcasm down? I don't know if you're doing it on purpose or not, but it's really grating. Silverseren^C 04:36, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Well it gradually got worse, then it got a bit better over summer. I'm not being sarcastic. I think the deadline is achievable and I hope all will take it seriously. I don't think Doc is joking either. --TS 04:39, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
• Who cares? WP:DEADLINE applies, regardless of any special date. The encyclopedia is a work in progress, and like any other cleanup project, the progress will slow as the "easy" problems are solved. If we eliminate half the backlog every few months, we'll be doing very well. Perfection is not achievable and should never be the goal--if we want to achieve perfection, we need to eliminate new contributions and intentionally stagnate the 'pedia so we can get on with turd polishing or whatever you want to call a fool's errand. The reason Wikipedia has succeeded is because the perfect is the enemy of the good, and while Brittanica may want to publish something perfect, we publish something adequate, fast, and responsive. Perfection is anathema to the very structure of Wikipedia. Jclemens (talk) 04:41, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
  • We have over 20 000 unsourced biographies of living persons--that's 20 000 articles that should not exist at all. In extending a deadline rather than just summarily deleting them, we're being generous. Please do not misunderstand. These articles must be sourced or die. An unsourced article about a living person is not adequate, it's far worse than no article at all. --TS 04:43, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
    • If you sourced articles for all the time you spent typing comment on this in the past day, we'd have probably 100 less articles on that list. But you've already said you refuse to ever source an unsourced BLP. How is this discussion constructive? This witch hunt is driving me crazy.--Milowent • ^talkblp-r 05:49, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
      • I think this has been a useful discussion. How exactly does throwing out wild accusations help it? I'm getting some distinctly personal vibes from some editors in this discussion. --TS 05:59, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
        • Probably because you have been "throwing out wild" ideas like "An unsourced article about a living person is not adequate, it's far worse than no article at all." That is patently at odds with what (I would think) most of us believe. If you really think that, then go and buy a subscription to a "completed" encyclopedia. Most of us think that either through laziness, a change in the expectations of the site or oversight, there are a lot of good, worthwhile, controversy free but unreferenced articles out there. Hence we are trying to a) identify them and b) reference, redirect or delete them. The-Pope (talk) 12:35, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
          • That just won't do. What I say about the damage caused by unsourced BLPs is congruent with and substantially encapsulates both the BLP polict and tge position set forth inWikipedia:Summary motion regarding biographies of living people deletions. As regards BLPs, we do not have the luxury of retaining a potentially damaging stub about a living person indefinitely. --TS 12:54, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
            • That isn't true, what we don't have is the luxury of retaining a damaging stub about a living person indefinitely. Potential has nothing to do with it. As has been shown most of these, if not all of these have no damaging information on them. You are trying to use scare tactics which simply aren't accurate. -DJSasso (talk) 12:59, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
              • I can't argue with people who refuse to read the Committee's motion. This is a foundational principle of our BLP, it's not up for discussion. --TS 13:05, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
        • Do you think that the Project would be better off not having 82 tagged as unreferenced articles that we have on world Heads of state? Not all of these are minor footballers, soap opera stars, smalltown politicans or one hit wonders. If anyone does start to reference those 82, I'd be interested to know how many true BLP violations are contained in them. The-Pope (talk) 12:40, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
          • The onus is on the person claiming a BLP article complies with all of our policies. Do not try to reverse the onus. It won't do. --TS 12:54, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
            • You might want to read through some of the deletion guidelines. The onus is also on the person wanting to delete an article to do a good faith search for sources. -DJSasso (talk) 12:59, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
              • No. In the case of unsourced BLPs it has been established in 2007 and 2010 that the onus and all of the onus is on the person seeking to restore. An admin merely needs to observe that the BLP is unsourced and to be of the opinion that it is damaging. Due diligence can wait until the restoration discussion. --TS 13:07, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
                • You might want to read through those discussions again then, because both of them make it quite clear that sourcing them is preferable to deleting them. Which means there is a good faith obligation on the person wanting to delete them to do a search for a source before doing so. -DJSasso (talk) 13:10, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
                  • It is precisely this kind of denial of the facts, on my user talk page, that led to my request for clarification. Next time you see somebody delete an unsourced BLP, just try restoring it with the argument that the deleter did not show that he had made a good faith search for sources. See what happens to your bit. --TS 13:13, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
                    • Nothing because as my proof of them not doing one would be to add a source. Secondly, thats why its called AGF. I will have assumed they made that good faith search so wouldn't undo another admin because I would assume an admin would have known to make the good faith action that the community clearly has said they want people to make. -DJSasso (talk) 13:16, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
                      • Well obviously if somebody has deleted an article you don't get to add a source without restoring, and I think you've recognised that the onus really would be on you. But this is a bit inside baseball (I was just drawn into this because so many people seemed astonished by my elucidation of our BLP and its implications). I love Uncle G's idea. Why don't we get together behind that suggestion? --TS 13:29, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
                        • I've done no such thing. What I have clearly said is that an admin should know better than to delete an article for lack of sources without trying to find a source themself first. If they do then they should not be an admin. -DJSasso (talk) 13:35, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
                          • Well you admitted you would source a BLP if you restored it, accepting the onus (although you might not realise that if you restored it in the absence of an active consensus to do so you would be wheel warring). --TS 13:38, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
                            • Wrong on both counts, I would do it because sources are the ideal, not because I felt I had the onus. Secondly any speedy deleted or proded article can be undone at anytime by another admin. And wheel warring only begins on the 3rd action. ie Admin A deletes, Admin B restores, Admin A deletes again. Same idea/process as BRD. Admin A was bold. Admin B reverted. Then its time to discuss. Only Afd requires going to DRV. -DJSasso (talk) 13:42, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
                              • Okay, I don't think this is productive and although I don't think you've understood how the BLP works. Nobody is to undo a BLP deletion without an active consensus to do so, but I'm repeating myself. Let's get behind Uncle G's blanking proposal. --TS 13:47, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
                                • Have you read WP:BLP? It only requires consensus when leaving the contentious material on the article. If you have sourced it, removed it, otherwise fixed it, or there was no contentious material to begin with you are in the clear. -DJSasso (talk) 13:51, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Djsasso, see the section about Georg Russ and the onus problem, which is basic BLP for beginners. --TS 14:03, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

• • • • • • • TS said above: "The onus is on the person claiming a BLP article complies with all of our policies. Do not try to reverse the onus. It won't do." No-one is reversing the onus. The onus is on everyone and no-one. I can walk away from the project and never touch another BLP. The only onus I feel is when I start to edit an article, I'll scan it (quickly) for any blantant signs of vandalism or outlandish claims. Your feelings of "it is our duty to uphold the Arbcomm's true intentions" by deleting UBLPs without questioning IF they are notable or IF sources can be found is at odds with all bar a few editors/admins. If you are just playing bad cop to get us minions running around fixing the problems instead of doing other stuff, then well done, mission accomplished. If you can seriously say that the project is better off deleting 82 articles on Heads of state (plus who knows what in the other 23000) because they are unreferenced, then I think the project would be better off without you. No one is saying keep the bad ones. No one is saying we're done, move onto something else. We're about half way there. The last 10-20% will be the hardest, as they won't have easy to find online sources. But we'll get there, eventually. The-Pope (talk) 14:08, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

TS, to be blunt, you have no idea what you are talking about. ArbCom has no power to create policy, so frankly, the 2007 decision you like to point to is both worthless and meaningless. WP:BLP is the policy we follow, as has been set by both the Foundation and consensus of editors. Nowhere in that policy does it say that an admin requires to build a consensus to undo a mistake made by another admin. In fact, the first BLP RFC made it crystal clear that the community opposes any sort of indiscriminate deletion, a fact that both you and the current ArbCom should keep in mind. If you can convince the Foundation to overrule that consensus, then you can proceed with your plan. Otherwise, you need to build a new consensus that replaces that one. I wish you lots of luck there. Resolute 04:44, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

George Russ and the onus argument

I don't know what the "onus" argument is supposed to show. If a BLP has no direct quotes, challenged material, or contentious material, then it can satisfy our sourcing policies without having any sources at all. I have seen at least two people above write that they have looked through many unsourced BLPs and found that the vast majority have no policy issues. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:15, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

• "Georg Russ is heir to the dukedom of Borogravia." Okay, no issues, huh? --TS 13:31, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
  • And to extend this a bit: "Georg Russ is heir to the dukedom of Borogravia. {{fact}}" Is that what you mean by challenged material? --TS 13:36, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
    • If you find negative or contentious material, then it is up to each and every editor to a) source it b) delete it or c) tag it. Which one you do depends on how "bad" it is. I'm not sure what your example is trying to prove. Please explain. The-Pope (talk) 13:44, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
      • It just so happens that Georg's brother, Stefan is heir to the dukedom. This is a simple statement, it's challengeable so it should have been sourced. It doesn't matter whether it was tagged. In this fictitious case it was a BLP with serious implications (in this instance, indirect implications for a third party). That's why we don't want these things hanging around unsourced. --TS 13:51, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
        • Right so you fix it when you find it? I am still not seeing what your issue is? Has nothing to do with the article being sourced or unsourced. And has been repeated over and over in this discussion by a number of people is that in reality people are finding very very few issues on these unsourced pages. So again, what are you trying to prove? Some hypothetical situation that doesn't exist in reality? -DJSasso (talk) 14:06, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
        • I still don't get it either. There are fact errors throughout the wiki. They are a completely different issue to sourcing. Are you saying that articles that could have fact errors in completely unreferenced articles deserve deletion, but articles with fact errors in partially sources articles don't. Does not make any sense. The-Pope (talk) 14:08, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
          • Well the article basically comprises two statements: "Georg Russ is heir to the dukedom of Borogravia" and "He was born in Fredonia in 1968." They're both unsourced, seemingly innocuous statements. There is no sourcing. You look at it and you find nothing wrong with it. You don't know that Georg Russ is the younger son and that he was born in Borogravia but is now the general of a secessionist army trying to set up the free city state of Fredonia based on an agreement between King Stefan I and the Holy Roman Emperor in 1726. 1968 isn't the year of Georg's birth, but the year of a crushing defeat of the Borogravians by the neighboring state of Laputa. So the stupid thing hangs around for years, an unsourced seemingly innocuous BLP. That's why the onus is on those who want to keep a BLP to prove that it complies with all our policies. Don't worry about it being a hypothetical case, it's just a fictitious example to explain the rationale behind our approach to deletion of unsourced BLPs, and why they're regarded as a bad thing. --TS 14:14, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
            • I find no evidence that uBLPs are a greater source of potentially contentious statements. I've reviewed (sourced, proposed deletion, edited) thousands of uBLPs in the past few years, and only a handful could possibly fit your example. Let's continue working and quit scare-mongering. Jogurney (talk) 14:22, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
            • More importantly, Tony, how does an ostensibly offline source (that is, inaccessible to single-click verification) help the matter any? Or a paywall site, for that matter? It might make it drop off the radar, but the issue is with inaccurate or missing references, and truly malicious vandals are far more likely to use the former than the latter. Your entire argument that this needs to be some sort of special priority fails on that basis: you're preventing no appreciable harm. Jclemens (talk) 14:25, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
            • Ok... but what about Stefan's article, that has a single source to the very reliable and highly regarded Geeks guide to Borogravia (freely available in all good book stores and every library in the western world), which references his relationship to Georg, properly formated with {{cite book}} and everything! It has no other tags on it at all, but it sits there forever with the single sinister line of "Stefan was responsible for the the defeat of Fredonia by the Romans". No one has even bothered to stick a {{cn}} tag on it! But it's still there.. defaming Stefan to everyone who reads the article. But because the previous line in the article is referenced, you are fine with keeping the article, but you want to delete the Georg article with a similar fact error, because it has no refs??? Doesn't this just blow a bloody big hole in your entire argument? Sourced or unsourced articles can still have fact errors. Enough of this, I'm off to assign project tags to UBLPs. And, no I've never read a Borogravia book in my life - and I'm not going to start anytime soon. The-Pope (talk) 14:54, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
              • I rather think the Stefanites need to lean ho to use AfD in that case. Rich Farmbrough, 15:43, 28 October 2010 (UTC).
                

Your argument here is silly, TS, and serves only to obfuscate the issue. A factual error is not prima facie evidence of a BLP violation. And indeed, a factual error can actually be sourced. Take Taylor Hall for instance. He was born in Calgary, Alberta: [7] [8]. And yet, I can find a reliable source that says he was born in Kingston, Ontario instead! [9]. I can thus prove that a sourced article can be just as erronious as your ficticious unsourced one. For your rationale to be consistent and logical, it would state that if Hall's article said he was born in Kingston, it is a BLP violation and needs to be deleted. Doubly so since Hall's article would be the more dangerous one then - Russ's article would have an automatic question of accuracy because of the lack of sources. Hall's article would be assumed correct since the Kingston birthplace error would be cited to a reliable source. Resolute 04:59, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Idea

Instead of wasting time here about the trivial details, maybe people could prehaps go and source an article or two? Crazy, I know, but it might just work. Lugnuts (talk) 10:29, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

• It might be wise to take on board the fact that some other editors do not consider the continued existence, over a period of possibly several years, of bad biographies that haven't been touched or rectified, to be "trivial details". There are perspectives other than one's own in this discussion, and it's important to recognize why people are passionate about this.

  Quite a lot of people making the "But attacking just the unsourced biographies is a wild goose chase." argument have, for example, failed to recognize that the easiest way to make that argument go away, and get people focussing on the bad biographical content as a whole, rather than the easy-to-recognize-but-false-congruent of it, is to rapidly address the concerns of the "But we have untouched biographies hanging around for years that no-one has reviwed!" crowd by rapidly doing something simple and reversible that doesn't involve administrator tools and administrator processes — such as, indeed, mass blanking them. Then the argument of "But we're potentially publishing libel that no-one has looked at for years!" loses its foundation, since we're obviously no longer publishing it until it's reviewed, and we can start to focus on the real problem. Uncle G (talk) 11:33, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

  I just love this idea of immediate blanking; it would completely address my concerns and wouldn't require actual deletion. Is it also possible to make them unindexed, so that properly compliant search engines would not catalog the pages? --TS 11:58, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

  Not at present. Though I doubt a blank article would trend very highly in search results. –xeno^talk 12:40, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

  • I think that approach would be the best way of handling the interest that some have in dealing with unreferenced biographies, for the reasons you've explained, and as demonstrated with the Darius Dhlomo copyright issue. Personally I think the focus on unreferenced biographies is pretty well misplaced. Negative content in completely unsourced BLPs, on a website Anyone Can Edit, has very limited credibility. On the other hand, the introduction of even a single source for part of the content, without checking all of it, raises the credibility of all the claims made, now or in future, because of ambiguity about sourcing and generally making the article look more serious. By and large, the worst problems are in low-notability, few-watchers BLPs with a couple of sources making the entirety of the BLP seem plausible, and making it less likely casual readers will question claims and casual editors verify them. Anyway, I think your approach is a helpful one, much better than deletion because it enables a helpful template to be presented to passersby, and non-admins to review and source without asking for restoration, not knowing whether it's worth asking. Rd232 ^talk 12:06, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
    • Okay, you think that poorly sourcing is more damaging than not sourcing. So the logical corollary of this is that we should go around removing sources from BLP stubs. This can't be right. No, having a poor source is indeed a problem, but it doesn't mean unsourced BLPs aren't damaging. I think you underestimate the credibility of stuff on the web. Politicians and academics have openly admitted to sourcing stuff from Wikipedia. Unsourced and poorly sourced BLPs are both damaging, but the former are much easier to identify. --TS 12:12, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
      • • No, the logical corollary is not to emphasise the minimal sourcing of completely unsourced BLPs, which is what this emphasis on completely unsourced BLPs as opposed to the much larger category of poorly sourced BLPs has a tendency to do. Apart from anything else, even if the effort itself isn't actively causing problems (by adding sourcing for some trivial stuff, leaving other stuff untouched but now more credible because the article has some sourcing), the recurring meta-debate about it distorts the nature of the problem and thereby disrupts thinking about ways to tackle the broader problem. This is one reason I would support mass blanking of unsourced BLPs - it's something that might reasonably get consensus, and then would tackle this part of the problem which has such undue prominence, thereby making possible more thinking about the wider issue (eg, off the top of my head, noindexing all BLPs that haven't reached a certain sourcing standard, and/or having a Big Do Not Trust Unsourced Stuff Warning Template on all such articles). Rd232 ^talk 13:37, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
          • Let's drop the meta-argument because we seem to have substantial agreement on blanking. --TS 13:42, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
            • We have substatial agreement on blanking only if you wilfully choose to ignore those who have opposed it. Resolute 15:28, 30 October 2010 (UTC)
      • Actually, I think it means that the presence or absence of sources is entirely unrelated to the question of whether the BLP is damaging. There's no evidence I have seen that unsourced BLPs are more likely to be damaging than ones that contain at least one source. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:17, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
        • We're agreed on the need for reliable sources, that's what our verifiability policy is about. The fact that poor sources are also contrary to that policy is a bit "other crap exists", really. Both are damaging and contrary to policy--it's just a matter of relative ease of identification. --TS 13:21, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
          • But there is no policy (either WP:V or WP:BLP) that unilaterally requires sources. So simply "having no sources" is not itself a policy violation. And that makes sense: adding a single source without any attention to the quality of the source does not improve the article. What the "source every BLP" campaign achieves is that lots of BLPs get a single source that may or may not relate to any material in the article. In my personal opinion, that's not an improvement. It's an example of "something must be done, and this is something". I do favor fixing problematic BLPS, like every sane person, but I don't favor spending lots of effort on a project that doesn't actually address the problem.
          • What would address the problem: a workflow for editors to manually review every BLP article for problematic material. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:28, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
• I'm opposed to the blanking too. If you find a problematic article, fix it. If it can't be fixed, send it to AfD. Things are getting sourced or deleted (via speedy, AfD, etc.) and it is _still_ the case that no one can show these articles are causing a disproportionate amount of problems! Hobit (talk) 15:06, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Another alternative suggestion

Of the 23,000 articles currently tagged as unreferenced BLPs over 5,000 have been tagged as uBLPs since the sticky prod was introduced, I suspect most are older articles found as part of the ongoing project to find and tag old unreferenced BLPs. But if you can get a listing produced of the ones that were not just tagged but also created since March the 18th then you have a prospect list where you are likely to find a significant proportion of articles are already eligible for a sticky prod (I suspect you'll also find a load of poorly sourced and poorly tagged ones that need a self published tag or refimproveBLP). Creating and trawling through such a list and sticky prodding the eligible ones is already allowed, you might even find a few that merit deletion for other reasons. ϢereSpielChequers 09:30, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

• Name-calling on the Administrator's Noticeboard isn't a wise thing to be doing. I've edited it out for you. Uncle G (talk) 11:33, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
  • You also changed the indentaton style of lots of edits here[10]. Any reason why you impose t~his style on everyone else's edits? Fram (talk) 11:58, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
    • Any effort to clean up the rather hairy formatting on this page is welcome. --TS 12:01, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
      • some people are calling for mass deletions, is the problem that big? I'd start with the older ones first and if the problem doesnt go away start on the newer ones but I'm opposed to drastic solutions unless there is consensus--Lerdthenerd (talk) 12:08, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
        • There are people working on the oldest unreferenced BLPs - 2007 has recently been cleared, others target particular subjects that they care about or have access to reference material for. But the sticky prod was created to make it easier for editors to delete new totally unsourced BLPs, and though there are hundreds of articles that get stickyprodded every month I'm pretty sure that there are some articles that are eligible for sticky prods but have not yet been prodded. ϢereSpielChequers 13:34, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Re to Uncle G and anyone I offended. Happy to apologise to anyone who was offended by my use of the word deletionist. In my defence I would point out that I didn't single out anyone in particular as being a deletionist, I had thought that there were people who self identified as deletionist (I've even in the past described myself as one of the most deletionist members of the WP:Article Rescue Squadron). But if people don't think that term should be used in polite company I shall henceforth endeavour to comply. ϢereSpielChequers 13:44, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
• Yay, three years since Badlydrawnjeff and the backlog from that year was finally cleared just recently. Progress. Slow, but progress just the same. --TS 14:01, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Don't want to burst your bubble but 2007 tags have been popping in and out of existence for a while. There's a September one there now. Rich Farmbrough, 15:46, 28 October 2010 (UTC).
    
• I agree with your proposal. The backlog certainly contains hundreds, probably thousands, of BLPPROD-eligible articles. Jogurney (talk) 14:14, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

• I'm not so sure, I looked through a lot of April or May 2010 UBLPs and there weren't that many that were BLPPROD eligible - most were much older articles, that were just tagged this year. I'd be surprised if there was over a 1000 - maybe a a few from Sept/Oct have slipped through the net. Is there a bot/database/AWB/toolserver tool that can analyse a cat/list for article creation date to automate the search?

The other option that has been raised before is moving the BLPPROD date backwards. The issue with BLPPRODing old articles is that there is generally 3 outcomes from a BLPPROD:

1. the original article creator references it.
2. the BLPPROD patrolling administrator references it (DGG, Phil B, etc)
3. it gets deleted.

I don't see many "normal" editors referencing BLPPRODs. Increasing the number of "old" BLPRODS might find that most article creators are long gone from the site - and they have probably already been notified by DASHBot or LaraBot about their UBLP anyway (and obviously ignored the notice). So the burden ends up with the admins, which isn't where it should be. The-Pope (talk) 15:06, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Actually of the 5,000 articles currently tagged as uBLP from the last few months I'd be surprised if there were more than 500 that currently met the criteria for a sticky prod and didn't currently have a sticky prod tag. But clearly there are editors who are concerned at the size of the backlog and want to push things forward without actually referencing any articles themselves, and this sort of report would give them an opportunity to do just that. ϢereSpielChequers 15:37, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Create better tools

In the first BLP RFC, I made note of the need to better identify problematic articles and fix them. Greater use of Wolterbot's ability to alert projects has allowed WP:HOCKEY, as one example, to reduce its list of unsourced BLPs within our scope from 371 at the start, to 15 today. When you account for the ongoing identification and tagging of articles throughout this time, our project has met with at least a 97% success rate in clearing our share of the backlog. It is amazing what one can accomplish with better tools.

I posted a longish rant at Tony Sidaway's talk page about the fallacy that an unsourced article is in danger (and consequently that a sourced one is safe), but the meat of my argument to him was that continuing to develop better tools will allow us to continually protect articles in harm's way.

The existence or lack of sourcing is not the real problem

Any one of us can source an article right up to FA standard. All it takes is one person to slip a defamatory statement through that RC patrol misses, and we've ultimately failed the do no harm goal. So I have to ask why we are so focused on the wrong issue? Many of our uBLPs are harmless. Some of our sourced BLPs are not. Battling over the existence of unsourced articles is distracting us from the real goal: Ensuring that we catch and eliminate problematic statements in articles. Rich Farmbrough recently compiled a list of unsourced articles with certain keywords that could be a concern. We have bots that check and revert vandalism and check for copyvios. Clearly we have the people with the capability to build tools that can identify problematic statements. Why are we fighting over this nonsense when we could be leveraging the talents of these people to build the tools that will help us ensure that all articles - whether they have zero, one or 100 citations are protected from the insertion of problematic content? When we turn our focus to the real issue, we can begin to build the real solution. Resolute 17:11, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

The reality of blanking a biography of a living person

There have been some questions about blanking raised above. I made the point that we've already blanked some biographies of living sportspeople for human review of the prose, as part of the aforementioned CCI case. So we can see what the reality of such blanking would be. Let's take an example:

• Claudia van Thiel is a CCI-blanked biography of a living person.

  Categories and cleanup listings

  It's locatable through all of the same categories that it was locatable before, including Category:Living people and Category:Dutch volleyball players. It's still listed on the cleanup lists at Wikipedia:WikiProject Persondata/List of biographies/17 and Wikipedia:Database reports/Possibly unreferenced biographies of living people. The blanking just blanked the article. It didn't take it off the cleanup lists, to-do lists, database reports, and whatnot that it was listed on; and I made a best effort (gived the limitations of MediaWiki) attempt to retain all of the categories, in their current sort orderings, so that people who wanted to scan through various categories of interest could do so.

  What the search engines see

  Yes, the search engines still find the article if one looks for "Claudia van Thiel". But, as you can see, neither Google Web's cache nor Yahoo!'s cache contain any of the suspect prose. Nor, too, does Bing's extended preview. Wikipedia, the search engines, and the various dynamic Wikipedia mirrors are now not (re-)publishing and repeating the suspect content.

  What the Wikipedia re-users know

  People putting this article into book form, be it someone using the book creation tool here or Icon Group International, don't run the risk of fixing a copyright violation into print.

  What ordinary editors see

  The article's edit history is not hidden from all bar administrators, as it would have been by deletion. It is, rather, still accessible to any editor, or indeed to any reader. Restoring the prose, once it has been determined to be free of copyright violation is a simple matter of undoing the 'bot's edit (with an appropriate edit summary noting that the check has been done), which anyone, even an editor without an account, can do. Anyone can be part of the review process; and non-administrators are not disfranchised enacting the solutions or barred from access to the article content in order to check it out. The people with the teaspoons can help.

It seems to me that a lot of the back-and-forth on this issue, including the flap earlier this year, has hinged on administrators getting it into their heads to go on a spree with their deletion tools. I suggest that if we choose one of the other tools in the toolbox we can eliminate the concerns of the people who rightly think that they are shut out by such a process, eliminate the concerns of the people who think that AFD/Proposed Deletion/Deletion Review simply won't scale to 6000 articles per month, whilst at the same time addressing the concerns of the people who take the view that we should start from the position of suspect content being wiped and then reviewed for reinstatement.

I agree that "biography that cites no sources" is not synonymous with "bad biography". However, those who make that argument should realize that if you go down this route, you can alleviate the pressure from those who would see the former category gone as a proxy, or at least as a low-hanging-fruit first pass, for addressing the latter category. If the "biographes with no sources" become "blanked pages with a notice and some categories", then you can rightly point out that the problem of untouched unreviewed and potentially very problematic content therein has gone, whilst at the same time not treading on the toes of the ordinary editors with their teaspoons, working on the UBLP wikiprojects and elsewhere, who want to quietly, systematically, unhurriedly, and thoroughly, review all of the biographies and restore, fix, mercilessly improve, rewrite completely, or — yes — nominate for deletion, as appropriate.

The CCI cleanup is an experiment. We'd never done CCI cleanup that way before. I'd say that it has met with a fair amount of success. Certainly we know that such things can be done, if agreed upon, and advertised in advance. We also know what a BLP blanking would look like, and what its effects would be. We, thirdly, know that we don't get arbitration cases or desysoppings out of it if done carefully. People feel included in the process, included in the solution, and empowered to muck in to use their tools to help. We even had the same compromises to make, between those who favoured mass deletion right now and those who didn't want the baby thrown out with the bathwater.

And we don't have factionalism, block voting, arguments, name-calling, and bad feeling at 10,000 Wikipedia:Copyright problems/Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Wikipedia:Proposed deletion/Wikipedia:Deletion review listings. We've even had people who have not only reviewed and undone the blankings, but greatly improved the articles at the same time. Would you look at that! ☺

Uncle G (talk) 18:25, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

• Thank you for the detailed explanation. I agree with what you've said, but one possible enhancement is to not blank the stub templates - I believe DD's CCI blanking removed these - such as "template:argentina-footy-bio-stub" since they provide categories and help editors sort through the backlogs. Best regards. Jogurney (talk) 19:03, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Claudia van Thiel is still in Category:Dutch sportspeople stubs, notice. Uncle G (talk) 19:40, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
    • Thank you. I didn't realize the categories from the template were kept. That's great news. Jogurney (talk) 20:46, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
• Thanks for this. I was already behind this approach; I hope this helps persuade others. Rd232 ^talk 19:18, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

This is a really workable solution to the problem of visibility of content about living people where sourcing is total or has been challenged. I commend it to the community and thank Uncle G for his timely and very agreeable intervention. Tasty monster (=TS ) 20:15, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

• I like that this removes material now, whilst making it very easy for any editor to restore it later. If we can get this agreed, I can live with it as a compromise. However, let me think this through - supposing a really bad (libellous) BLP among these (and there's bound to be a least a few among 26,000). It gets blanked. Anyone googling the name will find the blanked bio and may well look in the history. Now, that certainly an improvement on the libels being visible on the face of the article - and the scrapers don't get it. However, how long will that blanked bad bio then hang about? The blanking will remove the urgency to review or remove the article, so we may end up with several thousand blanked bios hanging about for many, many, years. Is there any answer to that? (This is genuinely a question - I do see the consensus building potential in this proposal - I like it, but I wondering whether we can solve this aspect?)--Scott Mac 21:33, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Really obvious bad crap dies, you just talk to an admin and he deletes it, or if you're an admin you delete it yourself and anybody who restores without consensus is toast. Sorry about the threat, chaps, but this is what it's about: not causing harm to real people for the sake of our nice encyclopedia. --TS 21:37, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Given the efforts of the people working on biographies with zero sources now, I'm not convinced that that's a significant likelihood. Give people a category to empty, and they do work on emptying it. ☺

    Consider this a compromise between two positions, with give and take on both sides. The people who want the content gone right now are prepared to live with the possibility of blanked articles hanging around for a while. The people who work on cleanup are prepared to live with a cultural change in what is expected of editors, to a hard minimum of at least one source for any biography anywhere whenever the page was created, occurring more swiftly than they can complete the cleanup effort, but don't lose access to the edit histories and content, that don't yet meet that minimum, for working on and bringing up to that standard, as would happen with outright deletion.

    As I said, I actually don't think it particularly likely that people will be asking "What do we do with all of these blank articles?" five years from now. Looking at the graphs and the guesstimates, it does not seem that anyone is predicting that the cleanup effort will take that long. Uncle G (talk) 22:34, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

• Uh, wait a sec... I don't see any evidence (and certainly no consensus) in this discussion that there is a problem that blanking will solve. In fact, there's a broad majority of editors commenting above who are opposing deletion/blanking and proposing other alternatives that hone in on problem articles. The evidence cited above shows that a mass blanking would remove 99.99% good content for the sake of .01% bad. If that is our goal, we should blank every article on wikipedia, because that's how indiscriminate blanking would be--and some departed editors probably think Wikipedia should do just that, that its a failed project. But here, no special uBLP problem has been proven to exist. I'm not saying this proposal can't be noodled on, but its putting the cart before the horse to suggest it would solve a problem that actually exists. I understand that Scott and TS both believe it exists, and I understand that both pledge never to source an unsourced BLP, but the solution doesn't need to serve to help them keep their pledge.--Milowent • ^talkblp-r 21:47, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

  Milowent, you and I tend to agree on most everything about unsourced BLPs, I respect the heck out of your work at the BLP Rescue Squad, and even feel in debt to you for your work there. So maybe I'm in a better position to explain why I'm leaning to support the blanking proposal. Like you, I think that the vast majority of the concern about the amount of problems in unsourced BLPs is not justified by evidence about libel claims and the like. Like you, I oppose mass deletion, I don't want to lose content, I don't want to bite that many editors. So, I have to think you're wondering, why the heck would I consider supporting a blanking proposal that removes mostly good content from the easy view of the public eye? Two reasons.

  • First, unsourced BLPs, even though 99+% of them are perfectly fine articles (far more than I would have guessed when I started doing sourcing) are still a perception problem, not just here in the editors cabal, but sources do (I believe) affect how the general public views our articles.
  • Second, that perception problem is a threat to all that good content. Yes, there is no consensus, and probably never will be a consensus for mass deletion, but honestly, if we can get those things sourced we'll have worked past (even if we've "given in to") the concerns that they are a problem. I won't have to wonder why someone can ask "what's the problem with nuking 20K articles?", a comment which sent me screaming and pulling my hair out.

  So... perception and the threat of deletion are the problems I think blanking might solve--does blanking solve them? I think so, I look at Uncle G's results and I see articles getting unblanked and looked at and edited at a ferocious and enviable rate. As such, it's my guess that any blanking would be a very, very temporary thing in practice. Maybe that's too optimistic? I dunno. But I do respect your thoughts, and I hope you'll let me know where I've fallen off the path.  :) --j⚛e decker^talk 00:38, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

• Response to Joe: I don't know that the public perceives a problem special to uBLPs on wikipedia. Few remember the specifics of Seigenthaler, and that was five years ago. People probably remember Colbert and the elephant more than that. I think a more targeted solution than mass blanking would be better, see my new comment under the 2 cents subsection below. A program like that could change people's misperceptions, if they exist, knowing that flagged terms are being investigated--if a small subset of the 20,000 had to blanked because a bot identified them as potentially problematic, that's something I could picture making sense. I always respect your opinions as well, and there is no one path! You've sourced over 1000 uBLPs and that deserves a medal.--Milowent • ^talkblp-r 04:12, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Milowent: I probably wouldn't have managed that total (or kept up enthusiasm) without the BLP Rescue Squad, so you (and the rest of our team, too) can take some of that credit as well. I'll reply to the targeted solution at 2 cents (I support that "too"), but I think you are correct to say that I have no evidence to support my concern that the public sees unreferenced articles as "less than". That is my feeling, I really love the confidence I get from seeing sources on an article, but I don't have evidence. --j⚛e decker^talk 15:20, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

• The issue here is that the solution presupposes that all of these articles, or even a noticeable minority, are problematic, which is a significant fallacy. I would like to see focus put on utilizing tools that can help us identify problematic articles for better correction. There is no doubt that having some kind of sourcing on all BLPs is a necessary goal, but at this point I have not been convinced that nuclear solutions like this are warranted. Sourcing efforts continue, and it strikes me that we should be encouraging that work by seeking ways to focus it at this point. Resolute 00:00, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
  • No. The fallacy here is saying on the one hand that we don't currently have the tools to identify problematic articles, whilst on the other hand claiming that we know how many articles are problematic. It's compounded by a second fallacy of erroneously thinking that blanking is the desired permanent end state, when quite clearly (as can be seen by the 6,500-some articles already taken out of that state at CCI, for starters) it isn't. You're also making the error of conflating "nuclear solution" with "getting a lot of people to work on this in a way that we demonstrably have done with a whole load of articles that also involved a large number of biographies of living people". The actual "nuclear solution", I remind you, is administrators going on sprees with the deletion tool once again. Uncle G (talk) 00:29, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
    • I don't think I have said I know how many problematic articles we have. I have said that I believe it is a pretty insignificant number, especially as compared to what those wishing to create a panic are assuming. I want to find a way to identify the true size of the problem, however, and that is why I am asking Beta/Delta the questions that I am below. Blanking is preferable to deletion, but based on my experience, it is still a case of burning down the forest to remove one potentially rotten tree. I'd rather we worked to find and remove that rotten tree without so much collateral damage. That said, I do respect your attempts to find ways that are less damaging than the truly extremist viewpoint. Resolute 14:10, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
• I've read all of the above in this section and I must say Uncle G makes a pretty solid argument. That said, before we take action I'd really like to know on what basis people are claiming that these articles are problematic. Joe Decker makes the perception argument. I think there has been more external notice of our deletion sprees than unsourced BLPs, but if there really is an external perception problem I'd like to see evidence of it. Otherwise I've asked many many times why we are trying to take extreme measures to solve a problem no one can document _is_ a problem. I know Scott and others just see it so plainly as a problem that it doesn't need justification. But can someone even provide an evidence-based argument that sourced BLPs are less likely to have WP:BLP problems than unsourced ones? I really dislike taking extreme action (and yes, the blanking is extreme though certainly less so than deleting) without a sound reason for doing so. And frankly I've yet to see one. Hobit (talk) 03:18, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

I have found no such evidence in working with the new BLPs. The BLPs that are actually serious problems are in 3 classes: a few undetected obvious G10 speedies--which are almost immediately removed when identified, some articles purporting to have sources where the sources do not support the accusations--which need actual checking to see if there are really some reliable sources that do support the material, and a quite large number of articles with sources that do support the material, but are very disproportionate--which need editing or AfD discussions. Nobody has actually examined all the BLPs, but my guess is that if we did a proper fact-checking on all BLPs, we would find perhaps 1 in 100 that need urgent work, mainly from the 3rd class. The extensive discussion here concentrates attention and work on material that does not warrant any special effort, when there is so much real work to be done. My hypothesis from the start of this thread a year ago has been that we are focussing on the easy-to-identify but not actually harmful material because the articles that really need work need so much work that we do not know how to deal with it; we're acting like the traditional drunk under the lamp-post. DGG ( talk ) 03:44, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

I agree with you that I don't have evidence for the external perception argument-that's a gut feeling, yeah, you are right to want evidence for it. Internally--well, I keep on thinking there's some risk of mass deletion, and the idea of getting many hands on deck to source articles and avoid that seems very appealing to me, which is also a gut feeling, I guess, but probably a little better documented.  :) --j⚛e decker^talk 15:24, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

• The big difference between this task and the CCI task is that everyone agreed that the existence of copyright violations is not acceptable, and hence had to go. This time around, not everyone agrees that the existence of unreferenced biographies of living people is on it's own a bad thing, or a symptom of a "work-in-progress" encyclopedia. In the CCI case, everyone agreed that the cost of blanking any false-positives was outweighed by the blanking of the true infringements. This time around, the cost of blanking of non-contentious, non-negative, or incorrectly tagged articles isn't as clear.

  Also, Uncle G, how quickly have the blanked articles returned? Do you have a count per day, or week? Currently we are referencing about 40-70 per day - 1200-2100 per month. I looked at the spread of "unreffed since XXX" cats and estimated that to make some people happy, we'd have to bump that up to about 4000-5000 per month. Given what Betacommand did this morning, it might be even more to clear out October 2010 alone! I think the effort that is required to source an article is much greater than the effort to rewrite. I admit I didn't help out in the CCI case, so I don't know, but to me it's the searching that takes time, not the editing. So I'd like to see more people simply involved in sourcing - we have all the tracking in place. You can do it by topic or join in on the monthly tasks for a more random selection. Maybe it will need a trial blanking of a month's worth, to see how quickly they are recovered/deleted or do they just sit there, being ignored? Maybe we need to alert the whole site through the watchlist notices? The-Pope (talk) 07:05, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

  • That is an excellent question. In my experience with the CCI-blanking (a few dozen articles), a very large percentage of the articles consisted of 1 to 3 lines of text contributed by DD (some no longer had any of his contributions). It took relatively little time to check this text against external websites to determine if there were copyvios (so many of the articles were of the "Joe Schmo is a retired football player. He played for Fooland at the 1974 FIFA World Cup." variety). It is unreasonable to think it will be so easy to deal with blanked uBLPs, but I also don't think it will be more difficult than the current process. Jogurney (talk) 13:03, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
    • Jogurney: As far as the difficulty of sourcing vs. CCI, I think that remains to be seen, but it's my gut that more than a half, maybe more like 2/3rds to 3/4s (but I'm just pulling this out of my hat) of the articles I source show relatively reliable sourcing available with a single Gnews archive search, first page of results. There are certainly times where sourcing can be relatively quick, but I don't know how that will play out over a good chunk of articles, which is what appeals to me about a trial.--j⚛e decker^talk 15:15, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
  • The Pope: Indeed--I think I agree, and that many if not all do, that the actual in-article "problem" of an unsourced BLP is not of the same magnitude by a lot as a potential copyright infringement--we're comparing very rare cases of libel vs. relatively common (in the CCI case) actual violations in the text. One way that I would suggest handling this case differently than the CCI case, as a result, would be to throttle or phase the entire blanking effort. In other words, unlike the Darius case where all ten thousand or so were blanked at once, I can imagine here we'd do 1K at a time or something. This will generate some unknown level of AfD activity based on notability, and I that's another reason we might need to throttle in any case. And yeah, we'd want a trial in any case, to look at how quickly articles got sourced, whether they got sourced well, potential AfD/etc. impact, and so on. --j⚛e decker^talk 15:15, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
    • I'm sort of open to a trial run - the good thing is that we do/will have 6 months that WP:URBLPR have cleared (well 5 have been done, one will be done soon) to use as a comparison of the "standard way" of clearing the lists. As a minimum, we could pick the oldest month - March 2008 with 331 articles. For a bit more of a challenge, we could pick say March or April 2009, 500-600 articles in each. To be bold, we could clear all of 2008 - about 1600 excluding Dec which is the URBLPR's current task. We could compare the time to clean, how many people get involved etc of the blanking vs WP:URBLPR, not to criticise URBLPR in any way, (you've done a great job... didn't even know you existed until a few days ago... URBLP and URBLPR should really merge) but to see if blanking gets a higher profile and hence more attention.The-Pope (talk) 15:44, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
      • Yeah, I like the idea of leveraging a month and the free tracking and visibility it provides. The only thing that concerns me about the smallest of those three suggestions is that at 331 articles, it's might be hard to tell how many folks are coming to stuff via "finding a blanked article" vs. those of us who'd likely search through the directory for blanked articles trying to fix things. I'm guessing that my big hope for something like this would be we'd get a fair bit of help from the former group, and I think that would be easier to smell with a few more articles, where those of us who are already sourcing maniacs won't be drowning out the signal. On the other hand, I do worry about all sorts of unintended consequences (some of the blanking lasting too long, AfD process overload from notability challenges, and whatever I haven't thought of yet), so ... Yeah, not sure precisely the right size. (And I didn't hear anything I read as criticizing URBLPR, btw, no worries.) Cheers! --j⚛e decker^talk 15:58, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
        • I think we know what we can do - with the we being the 20-50 people who've been around the URBLP(R) projects - between 40-70 pages per day (combined), spiking up to over a hundred if you find a lot of similar ones, but not much more, at least not for a sustained time period. I would think that this process would be best tested by keeping us out of the un-blanking task. Advertise it like they did for the CCI task, and see who steps up to the plate. Regardless of the method, the only solution is to get 100s of editors involved, not just the few who are involved now. I've been watching the project based lists, and for any project to drop by more than 4 or 5 articles in a day (other than the jumbo music/sport/actor/politician ones) is very rare - and probably more to do with URBLPR than anyone else. Maybe it's because not many people know about the lists, or the UBLP issue... but of the >700 actively tracked lists, most days only 90-120 have any movement at all. If we can go from 20-30 people on average, each doing 2 or 3 a day to 300 people doing the same, then we have a chance that we can clear the backlog before the end of 2011. If it's the same 30 people, well blanked or not blanked, it's going to be done at 40-70 articles a day.The-Pope (talk) 16:18, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
  • The figures for the CCI category de-population over the past month and a handful of days are above ⇑. Also above ⇑ are my suggestions for two BLP months, coming to just under 1,000 articles together, the figure that Joe Decker said would give a good sample size, that are also not in the same year. Uncle G (talk) 13:34, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Get real, be responsible

Unsourced BLPs really shouldn't be tolerated, period. "Living people" need to be respected as fellow human beings, and there shouldn't be articles about them in an encyclopedia if what's said in those articles can't be backed up by reliable and trustworthy sources. If there really should be an article about the person, someone will surely create one and source it.

Drama, cabal BS, and deletionism/inclusionism are just silliness that is internal to WP. Potential harm to actual people who don't deserve it is beyond WP. This isn't all that many articles, and cleaning the slate completely will allow you to stand firm when it comes to demanding sources for the next batch.

This is one of the main reasons I stopped wanting to call myself a member of this community. I'll happily take the tools back temporarily and chip in if the workload seems to much. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 20:56, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

If indiscriminate destruction of articles that are overwhelmingly not dangerous is your idea of responsibility, then please remind me to oppose your candidacy at any future RfA to get said tools back. Resolute 23:36, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

"what's said in those articles can't be backed up by reliable and trustworthy sources". No one has said that they can't be backed up with sourced, it's just that they haven't been gotten to yet. We've all been steadily working through the backlog and it has been going down, seen from the many charts floating around on this discussion page. We shouldn't be deleting all of these articles, but getting more editors to focus on sourcing them. Then we'd be done and have a lot of better content to boot. Silverseren^C 04:01, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Please present some robust evidence that unsourced bios cause more real problems that sourced ones with a p value of 0.05 or better.©Geni 21:12, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

You've said this before. What's the point of the question? Are you suggesting that you think we can remove sources from our biographies because they don't help? We don't need a p value to persuade us to implement basic policy such as verifiability. That's why it's called policy. --TS 21:15, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

I'm saying if you are going to suggest an action as serious as mass deletion you had better be able to back your reasoning with evidence. Robust evidence that unsourced bios cause more real problems that sourced ones with a p value of 0.05 or better is a reasonable minium standard.©Geni 21:25, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

The reasoning for deleting unsourced BLPs is simple and it has nothing to do with a misplaced obsession with p values. Wikipedia must be verifiable and that applies particularly to BLPs that can do harm. An unsourced biography can therefore be deleted because it is contrary to our most basic policies. Mass deletion of a large number of BLPs is a possibility if this serious problem is not resolved within a reasonable time. --TS 21:32, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Right. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 23:11, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

So you're saying that this article, which looked like this until I sourced it yesterday, should have been deleted? I didn't change any of the content when I sourced it, I just added the references onto the end of the sentences that were already there. You need to prove that a majority of these unsourced BLPs have contentious information, because from what those of us that actually work on sourcing BLPs have seen, it is not very common to find an unsourced BLP that has defamatory information on it. You seem to be under the apprehension that all unsourced BLPs inherently have contentious or defamatory information on them about their subjects, when that is clearly not true. Silverseren^C 21:40, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

So you can't produce an evidence based justification for your position.©Geni 22:19, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

The only time you hear about BLP issues becoming a problem is when the victim complains (ask Jimbo, he generally has to be the one responding to the angry emails). Some of the victims won't even know that they are victims, but might not have gotten that job they wanted, etc. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 23:12, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

So your position is that it is not even possible to measure?©Geni 23:48, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

I don't know what SB Johnny's position is, but there is much confidential information underlying the pressing need to adequately source or delete unsourced or poorly sourced BLP articles. It's confidential for obvious reasons.

Wikipedia does routinely fix problems in articles in response to emailed complaints from their subjects. I've done it confidentially myself; others have done far, far more work than I on this but are equally unsung. It's easy to forget that deleting all poorly sourced or unsourced articles about living people would annoy their editors, and lose a small amount of our content, but keeping them hanging around does damage to their subjects, who unlike us do not live in a bubble where "harm" is measured in frustration at losing some work but in actual damage to reputation. There is an imbalance there, but the BLP seeks to redress it by restating the basic principles of Wikipedia as imperatives. --TS 23:56, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

You seem to have ignored the comment I made above. Silverseren^C 00:45, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

It's quite possible that I've missed a lot of comments on this rather chaotic discussion. As I've been restricting myself to elucidations of basic policy for some time and don't expect the discussion on this page to arrive at consensus for a change of policy, I think I'll leave it there except to note Uncle G's interesting description of the mass blanking used to deal with a recent massive copyright issue involving a similar order of magnitude of articles, and to suggest that the recent proposal of Doc glasgow (or whatever he calls himself these days) is worth looking at. --TS 00:49, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Nope. Consensus rules here, not ultimata, last I looked. We are working on removing any problematic BLPs, but they are a drop in the bucket compared with other unreferenced categories, many of which are genuinely more of a problem. With well over 60% of the unreferenced BLPs already having been dealt with, and almost all which are actually problems appear to be dealt with (perhaps 5% of the now 23K BLPs listed as unreferenced actually may have problems - or about 1.2K total) while there are likely more than 200K unreferenced articles on WP -- where much more harm may be being caused to readers. But I guess ultimata are fun. Collect (talk) 21:39, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Yup, but the consensus really needs to move. And no, I don't think the other categories can possibly be more problematic. People matter. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 23:11, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Well said, Collect. If the same editors/admins who stir the pot here would put 50% of that effort into clearing the uBLP backlog the project would be much better served. Jogurney (talk) 23:45, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Consensus only applies on Wikipedia when it is based on policy. I have here elucidated some of our most basic policies so that nobody will be under the illusion that a consensus to keep unsourced BLPs indefinitely (in the unlikely event that such a consensus were to form) could trump Wikipedia policy.

Could we change policy by consensus to permit completely unverifiable BLPs to be retained indefinitely? Yes, but we'd need such a very very good reason that it's incredibly unlikely.

Consensus to perform such a special-case change could still, in principle, form. If we should by some happy chance discover unsourced BLPs to be immeasurably superior to their sourced brethren and yet incapable of improvement by sourcing, this would justify the retention of these uniquely virtuous, reality-defying items. In short, the verifiability principle isn't going to be ignored just to keep some unsourced BLPs around. They must be sourced within a reasonable period or they will die a deserved death. --TS 23:45, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Would you please show me the policy that says unsourced BLPs "must be sourced within a reasonable period"? Further, please show the policy that says articles not sourced in your time period should be indiscriminately deleted. Certainly any article that you are convinced fails WP:V should be PRODed or AFDed, and I would encourage you to do so. Nobody will ever question the removal of an article that has been investigated and found wanting. Consensus, however, is overwhelmingly against indiscriminately deleting articles because you don't like them. Resolute 04:33, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

By the way, TS, consensus is policy. We can create or change any policy via consensus, and only the foundation itself has the right to overrule that. Resolute 04:33, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Our policy is that BLPs must be sourced, period. Nothing about reasonable periods. And we'd need a very strong consensus (which we don't have) to overturn the BLP and the verifiability policy. Give up, it's a waste of time. --TS 19:18, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

The policy doesn't say that. It says that BLP article content must be verifiable and that 'challenged or likely to be challenged must be attributed to a reliable, published source using an inline citation'. This assumes some common sense in deciding what is 'challenged or likely to be challenged'. We're working through these and doing exactly what the policy states - we could use more editors doing the same. --Michig (talk) 19:48, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

All statements in a BLP are liable to challenge. "John Smith is an Olympic marathon runner." says who? Indeed commonsense is required. An unsourced BLP containing absolutely no challengable statements would be an A7 speedy. It follows that all unsourced BLPs contain statements requiring challenge, which must be either sourced or removed. Quod erat demonstrandum. --TS 20:10, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

That's your interpretation, which you're welcome to, but it isn't what the policy says.--Michig (talk) 20:20, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

More accurately, the policy says that contentious unsourced material should be removed, not simply that which could be "challenged". "John Smith is an Olympic marathon runner" would warrant a {{fact}} tag, nothing more. Resolute 21:30, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

I was about to say to Mr TS that if he really believes that the policy means what he claims it says, then isn't he editing against policy by NOT sourcing any of those articles himself? But I then checked his contributions and he's actually referenced 2, no make that 4 articles! Well done Tony! I see you've also found a bunch of untagged UBLPs - nice finds, they all probably fit perfectly in Scott's "high risk, low watched" category. Can I ask you, however, to also check for WikiProject allocations? The first few I checked all only had the WPBio project and no taskforces/work groups or WikiProjects listed. Without any projects, they'll be dropped into the 23000 article bucket and won't be looked at again by anyone for ages. With a WikiProject tag, they have the chance of being in a smaller bucket that might get attacked sooner. Thanks for helping out, Tony. The-Pope (talk) 23:08, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

The statement "John Smith is an Olympic marathon runner" must be sourced or removed. Tagging unsupported statements in a BLP is a dangerous thing to do, and should not generally be done. The Pope, your reasoning is a little skewed and your presentation is patronising. Tagging unsourced BLPs is not against policy. Address the argument, not the person. Unsourced BLPs will be sourced or they will die. It's a bit pointless arguing that this is only an "interpretation" of policy when that is exactly what is happening. --TS 23:33, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

As you are the loudest voice from the "source or die" camp, and until today had apparently shown no interest in the first part of the statement, I was pleasantly surprised to see you had decided to help out.(I haven't looked at your contribs before, only based on comments attributed to you on this page) I'd call it cheeky, not patronising! and back to your "challengeable" definition, the definition of contentious has been contentious since the first BLPRFC this year... I don't think we'll ever get total agreement, which is why I haven't bothered arguing thx point, and just tried to help out with the sourcing.The-Pope (talk) 00:22, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

My 2 Cents

I've been keeping a record of the number of unreferenced BLPs since 2010-02-20. Exact numbers can be tracked at tools:~betacommand/reports/unref_blp_count.log. From those numbers I generated a graph File:Unreferenced BLP count graph since 2010-02-20.gif I also keep a listing of all BLPs that are affected by a wikiproject, those can be found at tools:~betacommand/reports/unref_blp. If any wikiproject would like to be added to that list just let me know. ΔT _{^{The only constant}} 20:42, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

• Very nice to have exact numbers. I know this includes articles tagged as uBLPs since 2010-02-20 (about 6,000 at least) but it does show that progress is being made. More editors sourcing could speed up the process greatly.--Milowent • ^talkblp-r 20:56, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

• Since you are potentially one who could answer this: how hard would it be to write a script/bot that scans articles for the existence of certain keywords and do not have ref tags at the end of the sentence? Specifically, is there a way we can identify how many articles have unreferenced and potentially contentious statements? Thanks, Resolute 23:51, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

• Depends on exactly what you need done, checking for articles to see:

• If they contain specific statements: Easy
• If an article uses <ref>'s: Easy
• If a given statement is sourced: next to impossible (splitting an article into sentences via bot is not possible reliably)
• If a particular paragraph contains a specific statement & <ref>'s: Fairly easily done but such a bot would be significantly slower, than options one and two.

Any other questions? ΔT _{^{The only constant}} 00:20, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, this is good to know. Ultimately, I am trying to focus on the real problem, which is the existence of unsourced contentious statements, which exist regardless of whether an article has zero, one or a thousand references. It seems that existing articles/edits would be hard to parse in the way that I was hoping. How about future edits? Something along the lines of what the anti-vandal bots do: If an edit (or series of edits by one editor) is made to any article that contains a potentially contentious word and lacks a <ref> tag, a bot adds it to a list that we could monitor - and that that point we can immediately source or remove the content. Resolute 13:43, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

• Resolute brings up an idea perhaps similar to one I had: Could we run through all unreferenced BLPs currently identified, and identify all which contain any specific statements and words from a list we would create (e.g., arrest, murder, sex, rape, criminal, etc., make a laundry list based on editor experience)? This would give us a subset of Potentially Problematic UBLPs, and we can create a workgroup to focus on that bunch in the backlog. Everyone is saying that 99 out of 100 uBLPs do not contain problematic content (though we want them all to be sourced), so mass blanking seems a way overbroad solution. If there has to be any blanking, it should be done only to articles where there is at least some basis to worry.--Milowent • ^talkblp-r 03:57, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

• Rich Farmbrough has actually already done this on the BLP Noticeboard. Resolute 13:43, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

  I support doing something like this, and would help. I don't think that keyword searches are going to pull up all potential libel issues, and this doesn't touch the irritating self-promotional bios that we see a fair bit of and so on, so I support it in a view of sort of "another good tool of many tools that could help build a better cyc." Will head over to Rich's effort and read more there. --j⚛e decker^talk 15:28, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

I think that is useful but it rather misses the point. The unique problem with unsourced BLPs isn't so much that some of them might contain nasty statements that are unverified (the same is true of all BLPs and it's a serious problem) but that they're completely unsourced (to the best of our knowledge) they're completely unverified, and thus absolutely none of their content can be trusted. Such articles must be righted very soon or they will die. --TS 00:05, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

What makes you think sourced BLPs are verrified? Have you read our general disclaimer.©Geni 03:22, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Indeed. It is just as easy to slip a questionable statement into a FA as it is an unsourced stub. Resolute 04:21, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Spiking up

Beta command has just tagged more than 260 new UBLPs, so the number to go will spike up today. The scary thing is he seems to be working alphabetically... and he's only up to Anne. As he's posted here, could he please explain how he's finding the new UBLPs (what is the search criteria, and is there any way he can predict how many could be found in total. Any discussions about target numbers must be abandoned until we know what's out there.

I've only looked at a couple of articles, but 1 had an IMDb link, the other an external link to a borderline fan site/reliable site. We need to all agree on what really is unsourced before we move forwards too. The-Pope (talk) 05:46, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

The total only went up by 16, but it turned what should have been a >250 reduction (one of the best days ever) into a slight increase. Sort of destroys your motivation to bring the numbers down when you realise that the 260 that he did in 4 hours will take 2-5 days to clear away. Oh well, lets keep digging and finding more.

My comments about references vs external links is probably summed up in a couple of examples. Should this article be classified as BLP unsourced? It has a perfectly acceptable source, but it's labelled as an external link. It will take 30 seconds to cut and paste into the article, put <ref> </ref> around it and add {{Reflist}} to the end, but have we really improved the article? Sticking a {{no footnotes}} on it is the other option. How many of these are in the 23000? Of course I know that lots of external links are to self-published and unreliable sources. But some aren't. Would the encyclopedia be better off blanking the article until someone does move, format and label the ref better? i don't think it is. The-Pope (talk) 06:50, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Many of the articles being tagged have sources that are not marked with a ref tag. --j⚛e decker^talk 07:02, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

I would say most of the backlog is like this, I just move them into the article as I find them. This is why bot like adding of the unsourced tags is part of the problem. -DJSasso (talk) 11:57, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

I agree that many of the tagged articles in the backlog have a reference in an external link, not sure it is most of them, but its a significant number. Sometimes you see articles where references have been added since it was tagged, usually by an inexperienced editor who was notified about it needing sources, but doesn't remove tag.--Milowent • ^talkblp-r 12:51, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

• Note, Ive been tagging articles that dont have <ref> tags, no references sections (or any section that could be used as a reference/note section). Just because an article includes a external link does not mean that it is a reference. I picked a random sample of 5000 articles that are in CAT:Living people and not in CAT:BLP, I picked them alphabetically using page title, and approximately 25% of them dont have references or they are in a non-standard format. Im going to be reviewing add tagging as needed. ΔT _{^{The only constant}} 12:09, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

But also, just because a link is in an external link section, doesn't mean its not a valid reference. -DJSasso (talk) 12:27, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Agreed, but a script can't be smart enough to identify that. All it can do is tag and let the humans decide. If that script was ran on articles related to the hockey project, we'd have quite a list, and a fairly simple gnomish task of turning the HHOF ELs into references on many of them. Other sport projects especially would face the same task. Resolute 13:58, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Which is why a script shouldn't be doing it. -DJSasso (talk) 14:11, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

And just because an article includes a external link does not mean that it isn't suitable as a reference. If you think like an ordinary editor who barely knows WP:V let alone WP:CITE or what a UBLP is, then they'd look at the BLP unsourced tag and the IMDB/sporting database/faculty link etc and think that you must be blind! {{No footnotes}}, {{BLP IMDB refimprove}} are so much more informative for inexperienced editors. The only ones that I would agree with totally ignoring are facebook/myspace/personal sites, although adding a {{Primary sources}} tag makes it even clearer.The-Pope (talk) 12:36, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

This does not surprise me in the least. I can tell you as a regular editor in the ice hockey project that we have a great many unreferenced articles in our project scope that have not yet been tagged as such. Assuming that is true across most projects with biographical articles, Scott and his fellow crusaders would probably completely freak if they realized how big our unidentified backlog really is. In our project, many would appear like this: Dana Tyrell. Completely harmless, and with a database ref as an EL. (and, as of last night, significantly expanded). Resolute 13:55, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Technically not, for the purposes of BLPunsourced, external links can count as sources. The EL on that page has been verified as a RS at FAC many many times, so all that needed to be done on that page is fix it to identify that it is actually a reference (ie to teams played for etc) and all is good. It would have been incorrect to tag that page. As betacommand is finding out on his AN thread. -DJSasso (talk) 14:08, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

True enough. That would then become a case of simply using the correct template, rather than BLPunsourced. Resolute 14:16, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Yes, BLP sources is the correct tag for articles which are verified by external links because while they lack inline citations, many ELs are sources which verify the information in the article. Jogurney (talk) 15:06, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Just an update, -287 today, the 10th best day since the list started being tracked in Feb. Almost to 23000 now.The-Pope (talk) 06:41, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

In case anyone cares about actual data

Keep in mind, this includes the new ones tagged. We're not very far behind our targets. Even with increased tagging efforts, the net number is still falling consistently. If the hundreds of people that participate in these drama-discussions set out to actually help with the tagging/sourcing efforts, that line would be going down even faster. I've personally reviewed many hundreds of unsourced BLPs, sourcing where I could, AfDing where I couldn't, and most of all, making sure there wasn't anything controversial or libelous and unsourced. How many have you reviewed? Gigs (talk) 16:19, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Well put. It's trivially easy to offer criticism, but it requires actual work to fix a problem. If someone isn't willing to do the work, then they ought to shut up & find something else to do. -- llywrch (talk) 00:38, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Sitenotice

We're currently engaged in a campaign to source unsourced BLPs. We broadly agree that the backlog is going down, but not quickly enough. That's because not enough people know about the issue, there are many people who would like to help, so why not put a sitenotice (for registered users) on this ? I had already suggested this following the January drama and when we elaborated BLP prod, so now may be the time to do it. What we need is a good, consensual landing page, which (1) explains the problem (2) explains what editors can do to help. Cenarium (talk) 22:52, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

A much cleaner version of what's on WP:URBLP might be a place to start. In fact we could just clean up and focus that page and use it. This is a volunteer project... deadlines and ultimatums shouldn't even be on the table. Instead I agree 100% that we should leverage the volunteer nature of the site to solve this problem. Gigs (talk) 00:18, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

WP:URBLP is significantly cleaner and more streamlined now, and written for a more general audience. Gigs (talk) 03:02, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

A suggestion on how to reduce the back log...

Here's my suggestion, not as an arbitrator (we dealt with this in January as arbs, and while the problem has lessened, it's still there), but as a fellow editor. Looking at the WikiCup and the honoring of those who do the most Featured (X)/GA/DYK (and thus, honoring those who do the most to improve the encyclopedia's content), let's create a competition.. starting, say, December 1, and running through Feb 1, 2011 (three months). The top 10 editors who add references to bring articles up to basic Wiki standards get special one-of-a-kind barnstars or banners (I'm thinking the Bronze BLP Barnstar for 10th through 6th, the Silver BLP for 5, 4, 3, the Gold BLP Barnstar for #2, and the Platinum BLP Cup for the top editor who brings them up). Harness Wiki-editors basic competitiveness and creativity while we make sure that we never get in this state again, where the threats of mass deletions are considered necessary by some administrators. I will participate, either as a judge or as a plain participant, although I certainly do not have any designs on winning one of the prizes myself. I also posted this to the ArbCom Clarification page. SirFozzie (talk) 05:44, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

If you want to make this an ongoing thing, you could have every BLP checked at least once a year and signed off on. I wonder how long it would take for every BLP to be checked every year and how many editors would be needed? Though that is getting ahead of things somewhat. It might be better to trust the recent changes system and watchlist systems to pick up changes, but it would be nice to have some way of making sure every BLP (sourced or not) gets a signed review every year (or what-ever period is workable). Carcharoth (talk) 06:04, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Good idea, but will it really work? The time taken to count/track and check if the referencing is acceptable could be spent doing more referencing - and I think it's harder to determine who referenced 1000s of articles than it is to count a few DYKs and FA/GA nominations. Those most interested in doing the referencing are probably here for the good of the encyclopedia, not for awards or badges. Okip tried to get one going at the beginning of the year, but I don't think it got very far. I proposed awarding the prizes to WikiProjects - and make them more "wikistantial" - things like their articles featured more frequently on the main page or similar. But that penalises the project who've done the work already - Spain, Sweden, Australia, Opera, Cricket, Ice Hockey, Metal etc have all basically cleared their substantial backlogs (or in cricket's case never let a backlog grow). And how do you compare say MilHist with 200 (very disappointing effort by them, IMHO, I thought they were the "best" project out there) against Canada with 950, India with >600 or Japan with about 450.The-Pope (talk) 06:30, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

MILHIST have 200?? Drop them a note and see if they can do something about that. In fact, drop notes off to all the WikiProjects with more than 100 not dealt with. And check to see which WikiProjects are maybe not very active. Carcharoth (talk) 06:53, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

I think it will help. And you'd be surprised about WikiCup: The top pointscorers that I can see from the WikiCup page have submitted something like 79 Good Articles in a Two Month period.. I'm not saying we can hit that level, but doing basic expansion of an article and sourcing it properly takes much less time then building a full fledged GA. I do agree that with Carcharoth that some kind of yearly, semi-yearly or quarterly review of BLP's would be a good bonus.. I remember from the discussions at the beginning of this year, there was an obscene amount of unreferenced, unwatched BLP's. I don't think it's being excessively paranoid to refer to those as land mines. If someone sneaks vandalism into an article and it passes through recent change patrol.. it's therer. Not many people may view it in the months it sits there.. but guess what.. all those people will be told something untrue, that could possibly be defamatory (in the sense that it has the ability to cause someone harm in real life). Anything we can do to reduce that would honestly be very welcome here. SirFozzie (talk) 06:56, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

(reply to Carcharoth) You mean a notice like this in Sept or this in May? There numbers have only recently dropped under 200 to 180. The-Pope (talk) 07:35, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

The top 100 Projects

As of 30 Oct, here is the top 100 projects, task forces, or other cat based groups that User:DASHBot is tracking. I'll update the full list at Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons/WikiProjects soon. As a guide, overall, the total has dropped 10.5% since 1 Sept, so anything below that is a project that is either below average, or has had new articles added to it in that time.

1. Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/Sports and games/Unreferenced BLPs: 3586 UBLPs, a 16.3% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
2. Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/Politics and government/Unreferenced BLPs: 2721 UBLPs, a 10.1% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
3. Wikipedia:WikiProject Musicians/Unreferenced BLPs: 2652 UBLPs, a 1.1% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
4. Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/Arts and entertainment/Unreferenced BLPs: 2633 UBLPs, a 9.8% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
5. Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/Science and academia/Unreferenced BLPs: 1381 UBLPs, a 7.9% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
6. Wikipedia:WikiProject Football/Unreferenced BLPs/Full list: 1329 UBLPs, a 17.6% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
7. Wikipedia:WikiProject Actors and Filmmakers/Unreferenced BLPs: 1329 UBLPs, a 5.1% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
8. Wikipedia:WikiProject Canada/Unreferenced BLPs: 958 UBLPs, a 8.0% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
9. Wikipedia:WikiProject Journalism/Unreferenced BLPs: 911 UBLPs, a 13.6% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
10. Wikipedia:WikiProject India/DashBot Unreferenced BLPs: 604 UBLPs, a 4.9% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
11. Wikipedia:WikiProject Olympics/Unreferenced BLPs: 496 UBLPs, a 22.3% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
12. Wikipedia:WikiProject France/Unreferenced BLPs: 489 UBLPs, a 13.5% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
13. Wikipedia:WikiProject Literature/Unreferenced BLPs: 486 UBLPs, a 11.6% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
14. Wikipedia:WikiProject Japan/Unreferenced BLPs: 450 UBLPs, a 10.0% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
15. Wikipedia:WikiProject Politics/Unreferenced BLPs: 435 UBLPs, a 8.0% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
16. Wikipedia:WikiProject Basketball/Unreferenced BLPs: 406 UBLPs, a 19.9% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
17. Wikipedia:WikiProject Germany/Unreferenced BLPs: 398 UBLPs, a 10.4% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
18. Wikipedia:WikiProject Business/Unreferenced BLPs: 386 UBLPs, a 12.5% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
19. Wikipedia:WikiProject Ireland/Unreferenced BLPs: 382 UBLPs, a 7.5% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
20. Wikipedia:WikiProject Latin America/Unreferenced BLPs: 379 UBLPs, a 9.8% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
21. Wikipedia:WikiProject China/Unreferenced BLPs: 373 UBLPs, a 7.9% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
22. Wikipedia:WikiProject Mexico/Unreferenced BLPs: 322 UBLPs, a 4.5% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
23. Wikipedia:Tambayan Philippines/Unreferenced BLPs: 309 UBLPs, a 5.8% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
24. Wikipedia:WikiProject College football/Unreferenced BLPs: 306 UBLPs, a 7.8% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
25. Wikipedia:WikiProject Africa/Unreferenced BLPs: 303 UBLPs, a 29.9% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
26. Wikipedia:WikiProject Visual arts/Unreferenced BLPs: 276 UBLPs, a 3.2% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
27. Wikipedia:WikiProject Italy/Unreferenced BLPs: 275 UBLPs, a 6.5% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
28. Wikipedia:WikiProject Brazil/Unreferenced BLPs: 258 UBLPs, a 8.8% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
29. Wikipedia:WikiProject Gaelic games/Unreferenced BLPs: 249 UBLPs, a 8.5% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
30. Wikipedia:WikiProject Pakistan/Unreferenced BLPs: 241 UBLPs, a 9.4% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
31. Wikipedia:WikiProject Classical music/Unreferenced BLPs: 234 UBLPs, a 3.3% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
32. Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/Military biography/Unreferenced BLPs: 231 UBLPs, a 9.1% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
33. Wikipedia:WikiProject Poland/Unreferenced BLPs: 226 UBLPs, a 3.0% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
34. Wikipedia:WikiProject Chicago/Unreferenced BLPs: 220 UBLPs, a 7.2% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
35. Wikipedia:WikiProject Beauty Pageants/Unreferenced BLPs: 206 UBLPs, a 15.6% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
36. Wikipedia:WikiProject Canadian football/Unreferenced BLPs: 187 UBLPs, a 3.1% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
37. Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Unreferenced BLPs: 180 UBLPs, a 12.6% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
38. Wikipedia:WikiProject Caribbean/Unreferenced BLPs: 170 UBLPs, a 18.3% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
39. Wikipedia:WikiProject Ohio/Unreferenced BLPs: 166 UBLPs, a 7.3% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
40. Wikipedia:WikiProject California/Unreferenced BLPs: 165 UBLPs, a 6.8% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
41. Wikipedia:WikiProject Anime and manga/Unreferenced BLPs: 162 UBLPs, a 1.8% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
42. Wikipedia:WikiProject Texas/Unreferenced BLPs: 157 UBLPs, a 11.8% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
43. Wikipedia:WikiProject National Football League/Unreferenced BLPs: 157 UBLPs, a 7.1% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
44. Wikipedia:WikiProject Netherlands/Unreferenced BLPs: 157 UBLPs, a 8.2% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
45. Wikipedia:WikiProject Law/Unreferenced BLPs: 156 UBLPs, a 12.4% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
46. Wikipedia:WikiProject Comedy/Unreferenced BLPs: 142 UBLPs, a 8.4% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
47. Wikipedia:WikiProject Christianity/Unreferenced BLPs: 140 UBLPs, a 1.4% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
48. Wikipedia:WikiProject Boxing/Unreferenced BLPs: 138 UBLPs, a 13.8% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
49. Wikipedia:WikiProject Korea/Unreferenced BLPs: 138 UBLPs, a 16.9% increase since 1 Sept 2010
50. Wikipedia:WikiProject Russia/Unreferenced BLPs: 137 UBLPs, a 5.5% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
51. Wikipedia:WikiProject Economics/Unreferenced BLPs: 129 UBLPs, a 11.6% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
52. Wikipedia:WikiProject Finland/Unreferenced BLPs: 127 UBLPs, a 5.9% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
53. Wikipedia:WikiProject Portugal/Unreferenced BLPs: 125 UBLPs, a 6.0% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
54. Wikipedia:WikiProject Philosophy/Unreferenced BLPs: 124 UBLPs, a 7.5% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
55. Wikipedia:WikiProject New Zealand/Unreferenced BLPs: 123 UBLPs, a 16.9% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
56. Wikipedia:WikiProject Pennsylvania/Unreferenced BLPs: 123 UBLPs, a 11.5% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
57. Wikipedia:WikiProject Serbia/Unreferenced BLPs: 122 UBLPs, a 10.3% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
58. Wikipedia:WikiProject Israel/Unreferenced BLPs: 119 UBLPs, a 4.0% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
59. Wikipedia:WikiProject Radio/Unreferenced BLPs: 117 UBLPs, a 10.0% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
60. Wikipedia:WikiProject Turkey/Unreferenced BLPs: 117 UBLPs, a 7.1% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
61. Wikipedia:WikiProject Motorsport/Unreferenced BLPs: 117 UBLPs, a 10.0% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
62. Wikipedia:WikiProject Guitarists/Unreferenced BLPs: 116 UBLPs, a 4.5% increase since 1 Sept 2010
63. Wikipedia:WikiProject Belgium/Unreferenced BLPs: 113 UBLPs, a 9.6% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
64. Wikipedia:WikiProject Greece/Unreferenced BLPs: 112 UBLPs, a 11.1% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
65. Wikipedia:WikiProject Baseball/Unreferenced BLPs: 109 UBLPs, a 22.1% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
66. Wikipedia:WikiProject University of Oxford/Unreferenced BLPs: 107 UBLPs, a 15.7% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
67. Wikipedia:WikiProject Puerto Rico/Unreferenced BLPs: 105 UBLPs, a 7.1% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
68. Wikipedia:WikiProject Thailand/Unreferenced BLPs: 104 UBLPs, a 37.7% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
69. Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/Royalty/Unreferenced BLPs: 99 UBLPs, a 13.2% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
70. Wikipedia:WikiProject American football/Unreferenced BLPs: 99 UBLPs, a 6.6% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
71. Wikipedia:WikiProject Scotland/Unreferenced BLPs: 99 UBLPs, a 8.3% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
72. Wikipedia:WikiProject Taiwan/Unreferenced BLPs: 99 UBLPs, a 1.0% increase since 1 Sept 2010
73. Wikipedia:WikiProject Rugby union/DASHBot Unreferenced BLPs: 98 UBLPs, a 22.8% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
74. Wikipedia:WikiProject American Open Wheel Racing/Unreferenced BLPs: 98 UBLPs, a 6.7% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
75. Wikipedia:WikiProject Fiji/Unreferenced BLPs: 98 UBLPs, a 6.7% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
76. Wikipedia:WikiProject Iran/Unreferenced BLPs: 98 UBLPs, a 7.5% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
77. Wikipedia:WikiProject Jazz/Unreferenced BLPs: 98 UBLPs, a 53.1% increase since 1 Sept 2010
78. Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Unreferenced BLPs: 97 UBLPs, a 11.0% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
79. Wikipedia:WikiProject Computing/Unreferenced BLPs: 97 UBLPs, a 5.8% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
80. Wikipedia:WikiProject Tennis/Unreferenced BLPs: 96 UBLPs, a 6.8% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
81. Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/Announcers unreferenced BLPs: 95 UBLPs, a 18.1% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
82. Wikipedia:WikiProject Dance/Unreferenced BLPs: 94 UBLPs, a 6.0% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
83. Wikipedia:WikiProject Illinois/Unreferenced BLPs: 93 UBLPs, a 7.9% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
84. Wikipedia:WikiProject Judaism/Unreferenced BLPs: 93 UBLPs, a 4.1% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
85. Wikipedia:WikiProject College Basketball/Unreferenced BLPs: 91 UBLPs, a 47.1% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
86. Wikipedia:WikiProject Comics/Unreferenced BLPs: 90 UBLPs, a 4.3% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
87. Wikipedia:WikiProject Volleyball/Unreferenced BLPs: 90 UBLPs, a 8.2% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
88. Wikipedia:WikiProject Sports/Field Hockey unreferenced BLPs: 87 UBLPs, a 11.2% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
89. Wikipedia:WikiProject Skiing and Snowboarding/Unreferenced BLPs: 87 UBLPs, a 13.0% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
90. Wikipedia:WikiProject Hip hop/Unreferenced BLPs: 86 UBLPs, a 4.4% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
91. Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games/Unreferenced BLPs: 85 UBLPs, a 18.3% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
92. Wikipedia:WikiProject Egypt/Unreferenced BLPs: 84 UBLPs, a 12.5% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
93. Wikipedia:WikiProject Norway/Unreferenced BLPs: 83 UBLPs, a 51.5% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
94. Wikipedia:WikiProject Central America/Unreferenced BLPs: 82 UBLPs, a 4.7% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
95. Wikipedia:WikiProject Sri Lanka/Unreferenced BLPs: 84 UBLPs, a 162.5% increase since 1 Sept 2010
96. Wikipedia:WikiProject Albania/Unreferenced BLPs: 81 UBLPs, a 24.3% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
97. Wikipedia:WikiProject Sports/Handball unreferenced BLPs: 79 UBLPs, a 13.2% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
98. Wikipedia:WikiProject Rock music/Unreferenced BLPs: 78 UBLPs, a 1.3% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
99. Wikipedia:WikiProject Saudi Arabia/Unreferenced BLPs: 78 UBLPs, a 2.5% decrease since 1 Sept 2010
100. Wikipedia:WikiProject Sports/Archery unreferenced BLPs: 78 UBLPs, a 9.3% decrease since 1 Sept 2010

So that is 100 with more than 78. There are 38 more above 50, 67 more above 25, 134 more with more than 10 and 256 with 1-10. A further 137 are being tracked, but are empty at the moment. The-Pope (talk) 08:19, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Consider notability at same time?

I've been looking through the unsourced BLPs by project listings (which are very useful) and I've sourced one and intend to source others as well, but I was unsure about notability. What I would tend to do is source the ones that I think are notable, but what should I do with the others where I am unsure? Leave them? Tag for notability? The effort in sourcing is not zero, so I'm reluctant to source articles before it is clear if they would be kept, and I'm sure others feel the same. Essentially, when in sourcing mode, I don't want to have to constantly consider notability, though maybe that is a necessary part of the process. Equally, I don't want to skip over articles where I'm not sure about notability. So what is the best approach in such cases? Carcharoth (talk) 06:00, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

If you think the notability is not even claimed, then CSD:A7 is still available. If it is barely there at all, the PROD it. If it could be, but isn't your area of expertese, AfD is there, assuming you've done a WP:BEFORE check, which it sounds like you have. In Oct I reduced Australia's count from over 200 to the current 12, with about 4 or 5 of them waiting for PROD or AfD. 16 of the 190 that are no longer UBLPs have been deleted, a couple more redirected to bands/shows etc. So about 10% removal, the rest referenced. Some I referenced and nominated for deletion - like you say, references and notability don't always align - you might struggle to reference a notable person, but have heaps for a non-notable one - notability isn't shouldn't be a Googlehits based decision.The-Pope (talk) 06:30, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

What I'm saying is that I don't think it is a good approach to leave ones that you are uncertain about alone without referencing them, but taking the time to reference them might be wasted effort. I suppose, though, it is not wasted effort, because even if it is later deleted, you've ensured that it is OK while it is still there. Carcharoth (talk) 06:55, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Personally I would reference the articles anyway, since any nomination for deletion would likely require a reasonable search for references first. I have seen articles which I referenced even though they had notability issues nominated for deletion afterwards by other people. Bernie DeCastro is at AfD at the moment, for instance, and it contains several claims that need referenced to stay in the article. Hut 8.5 15:30, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

i note at the BioCup [11] there were points for deletions too. there is BLP Prod. Accotink2 talk 18:38, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

On the issue of tags

I have handled a number of OTRS tickets from people upset about the maintenance tags on articles about them. Waiting for the non-existent deadline is not a great way of proceeding here, I support the idea of sitenotice and other initiatives to source or remove unsourced bios. A significant number seem to me, as an OTRS volunteer, to be WP:COATRACKs on which to hang some form of agenda. I admire the Wikipedians who try hard to source these, but sometimes you just change an ill-sourced unbalanced biography into a well-sourced unbalanced biography. Let's not forget the option of merging and redirecting to articles that have more context and where these controversies can be discussed without giving the impression that Jim Blah is a senator known only for some teapot tempest. Guy (Help!) 09:54, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

But as I've just seen, an editor who claims to be the subject of a UBLP legally threatened me that I was defaming him by taking the unreferenced article to AfD! So the publicity hungry BLPs out there might see that the blanking idea is also a very bad thing! We can't win either way, sometimes.The-Pope (talk) 10:38, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

In my experience the promotional or vanity BLPs are going to far outnumber anything coatracky. Gigs (talk) 19:23, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

The problem with your example, Guy, is that we never hear from people who have no issues with their biographical articles; no one ever submits OTRS tickets who aren't upset with the article about them. And one can be upset about a given article for many reasons, some of which are due to shortcomings in being able to research a given person's life. Many biographies are unbalanced because the information available is unbalanced & incomplete; the easiest sources to find are news reports, like it or not. I sincerely hope that in every case of an OTRS ticket involving a person unhappy about her/his article, the volunteer suggests to that person that, when appropriate, they put their CV/resume online. That would help with more articles than you might suspect. -- llywrch (talk) 04:28, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

I agree with llywrch. The OTRS requests will feature problematic stuff, and that is what OTRS is for. A useful statistic for OTRS to track is how long the problematic material was present before someone complained about it. From my experience of checking the science biographies (physics, chemistry, biology, geology) listed as unsourced BLPs by project, a large number seem to be stubs of borderline notable US or European professors. Most have a small internet footprint (mostly their faculty and related pages) and usually a reasonable publication history. My personal standards for such people is to look to see if they have been presented with any major awards, or have published leading textbooks on a subject, or held senior positions at their institution, or within science administration. I wasn't going to spend hours sourcing stubby articles that have no real potential. That will be the problem once the low-hanging fruit (obviously notable BLPs) have been sourced. How do you motivate people to work on sourcing articles that maybe shouldn't really be here anyway? I still think the queue needs analysing further, to include: (i) age of article; (ii) number of non-bot editors who have edited it; (iii) article where large chunks have been added or removed; (iv) articles that have CorenBot or other copyvio flags in the history; (v) articles created by SPAs and redlinked accounts (i.e. drive-by accounts here only to create the article); and so on. That will help focus things a lot faster. Carcharoth (talk) 12:34, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

A statistical prediction

I've been playing around with the data, and attempted to use a linear regression to predict when the backlog might be cleared. The best correlation coefficient (R²) I could get was 0.91 (1.0 would be a perfect fit). An exponential equation fit far better, with an R² of 0.95. This supports the conclusion that the low-hanging fruit has been eliminated, the rest of them will take longer, and the backlog is decreasing at a decreasing rate. This also suggests that the backlog won't be cleared anytime soon, unfortunately. The Wordsmith^Communicate 03:51, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

Yup, I buy that entirely. What I don't see is 1) how it poses a particular problem, 2) how it can be corrected in a manner which doesn't harm the encyclopedia, or 3) given 1 and 2, any reasonable expectation that changing the curve is somehow a good idea. Jclemens (talk) 04:48, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

But like any financial planner has to say... past performance is no guarantee of future returns. The work done at WP:URBLPR tends to indicate that even in the random samples that are the older months (which, given they've been tagged for a long time would indicate that they may be hard to source) there are still plenty of "low hanging fruit" to be easily sourced. To me it is entirely a function of how many bodies are working on the problem. Editor tiredness and demotivation probably explains the dropoff more than difficulty of referencing. And that is directly able to be influences by many things, such as advertising, threats, bonuses, incentives etc. If you were to trend the just the last couple of weeks, say, you'd get a very different curve. You can basically split up the remaining 23000 into 5000 sports, 5000 art/film/entertainment, 5000 political, 3000 music and 5000 other. In each of those areas, my guess would be that there are probably 70-90% which are easily referencable by a google search. 10-20% will be definitely notable, but will take more than a simple search to find the refs, (offline sources etc) and 10-20% will be deletable. It just takes time and effort to do it.The-Pope (talk) 06:16, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

What would you expect? There are still some "low-hanging fruits" (like the first mayor of Moscow) but a great deal of UBLPs are in the WTF?PROD! category. They shouldn't be here in the first place. This pile of worthless stubs on usually non-notable people is quite discouraging (and so is the time required to complete an AFD petition). So your highly sophisticated model should level off at a certain minimum floor of articles that no one wants to touch... the real question is, will this floor level stay in the long term, or will it rise, and at what rate? East of Borschov 07:27, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

It only takes 20 seconds to do a "longterm unreferenced BLP with no significant coverage in independent reliable sources" PROD using Twinkle! It's the 2-5 minutes checking that there is no significant coverage in reliable sources that takes the time. The-Pope (talk) 07:47, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

There is another factor at work other than sourcing efforts. The rate at which the backlog is being cleared would be a lot higher if more unreferenced BLPs weren't being tagged. The supply of untagged unreferenced BLPs is finite, and presumably at some point we will run out of articles to tag. Hut 8.5 13:08, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

Good point - each of the upwards or flat sections on the graph are more to do with new articles being found than a slow down in clearing the backlog. The scary thing is it can take someone scanning for UBLPs a couple of hours to add a couple of hundred new tags... and that takes days to reference, or even just check if they are actual UBLPs. The-Pope (talk) 13:18, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

I don't think we can do curve fitting on this number alone. I could do 400 or 500 a day if I devoted the entire day to it. If you wanted to make a meaningful comment on "low-hanging fruit", you'd need to compare the number of editor hours going into it vs the rate. Otherwise, you can't really draw any conclusions about the relative difficulty. Gigs (talk) 17:47, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

Low hanging fruit implies that people are working on the easiest articles to source and will eventually slow down as they move onto more difficult ones. The reality is very different. Some people are working from the oldest articles, another team is picking on particular months, neither of those processes could be considered to be targeting low hanging fruit. Perhaps some of the wikiprojects are clearing their own backlogs and stopping, and obviously general editing resolves a certain proportion rather than an absolute number so that element will slow as the numbers fall, but one of the biggest parts of the process has been trawling through these and project tagging them - a huge amount of work that converted a lot of high hanging fruit into lower hanging fruit. Also the graph is of little use as it omits the flow of newly identified uBLPs. ϢereSpielChequers 01:20, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

• As The Pope said above, it takes only 20 seconds to to place a prod, but it take somewhere between 2 and 20 minutes to do a prod carefully, with a screening check that there actually are not sources for WP:V and also at least some case for WP:N. The criterion for BLP as for everything else is unsourceable, and a proposed deletion saying no sources (or not enough sources) currently in the article is not enough reason for deletion, either at prod or AfD. Of course, not everything needs to be checked exhaustively -- how hard to try depends on the likely notability and the probability of finding sources for the particular subject. (Not the probability of yourself finding sources--for sources in languages or tolled databases or printed books that you cannot handle, someone else can.) I do not know anyone who is capable of properly checking 400 a day. I probably know how to look for sources in most things as well as almost anyone here, but at best, I can do 15 or 20 an hour, and I can not work at that speed for more than 1 or 2 hours a day. 30 or 40 a day is a more likely quota for the experienced & very dedicated; I'd suggest 10 for beginners. DGG ( talk ) 14:43, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
  • yes, the experience at BLP cup was 100 to 200 per month. the decline of referencing is probably the decrease in motivation in the face of "mind focusing", and "progress has stalled". i for one attest to it: this chore has dropped off my to do list. Accotink2 talk 23:18, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Tranches: a new way to patrol BLPs

Please visit the page below and consider adopting one of the 100 lists of 5000 BLPs by putting your signature at the end of the corresponding line.

The idea is to get every single edit to a known BLP patrolled, even the articles that are not otherwise watched.

To patrol recent changes to the articles, click on the "related changes" link for your chosen list. Diffs can be inspected in the usual way; it's not unlike a normal watchlist. Start at the bottom and work your way up.

The lists will be refreshed regularly to account for changes in the content of the living persons category.

• User:Tony Sidaway/Living people/tranches

--TS 00:21, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

Did you know.... that referencing BLP articles might be eligible for did you know?

As a way of publicizing the drive and encouraging people to participate, I have suggested that currently unreferenced BLP articles that are fully referenced by editors and have an interesting hook should eligible for WP:DYK. It was discussed here and now again here, and seems to be getting a positive response. If editors here have opinions for or against, please free to weigh in there. --Slp1 (talk) 01:09, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

BLP articles lacking sources

For anyone interested here is the month by month count of partially sourced BLPs. The current count stands at 38,000+ and is rising.

{{BLP articles lacking sources progress}}

Mattg82 (talk) 01:53, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Noting also that the rise is from increased scrutiny of BLPs, showing adding of them to the list, and does not mean Dr. Who has added them in the past. Collect (talk) 13:08, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Category talk:BLP articles proposed for deletion

Anyone up for adopting a letter? It means checking out a handful of articles every few days, tops. Most can either be quickly sourced or speedied. Rich Farmbrough, 20:05, 21 November 2010 (UTC).

BLP mass blanking has begun

Click this button.

Reference this BLP.

User:The Wordsmith has begun mass blanking unsourced BLPs. I don't necessarily oppose this. It's better than deletion. This is sure to be a controversial move, however. Gigs (talk) 14:52, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

• Obviously needs some more discussion and planning, to avoid things like this, which would be easy to prevent. Looks to me like not enough thought has gone into this. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 14:58, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
  • If we put nobots in the blanking template, will that prevent things like that? Gigs (talk) 15:02, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
  • I don't get it. This looks referenced to me.Cracked acorns (talk) 15:03, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
    • Come help us out at WP:Mistagged BLP cleanup so that happens less. Gigs (talk) 15:06, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
  • It is a stunt. Just ignore him. Source the BLPS and maybe they will get tired of the pointless grandstanding. We all know that most editors could source these BLPs but the wordsmith can blank at least 30 BLPs in the time it takes for you to source one. The Wordsmith isn't so much contributing to wikipedia as jumping onto a bandwagon don't encourage him. Polargeo (talk) 15:04, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
    • Nevermind. Should followed the links. Cracked acorns (talk) 15:05, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
      • (edit conflict) No, bots only check for the actual regex (or similar) "\{\{(no|nobots)..." in the page's wikicode, so the template would have to be on the page, rather than on a template transcluded on the page. However, including the nobots template would work. Alternatively the {{Blanked unsourced BLP}} template could be written to make the page appear blank, but leave the content there, similar to some of the copyright templates (e.g. by ending with an unclosed open comment (<!-- tag). Cracked acorns: that would be down to an error on Wordsmith's part, not actually properly checking the articles and just tagging those which have {{BLP unsourced}} (again, an indication that this needs more discussion, since if it's just all pages tagged with Template:BLP unsourced that are getting blanked, a much quicker easier way to accomplish this would be to redirect Template:BLP unsourced to Template:Blanked unsourced BLP, and make Template:Blanked unsourced BLP blank the page automatically). All that said, I don't personally support these actions, but they would be preferable to what The Wordsmith appears to be doing. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 15:12, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
        • Yes, that's an excellent idea. Gigs (talk) 15:16, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
          • FYI I don't think that method works any more. Copyvio uses <div id="copyvio" style="display:none;"> --Errant [tmorton166] ^(chat!) 15:55, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
            • Yup, I was right. I updated the template with the div syntax --Errant [tmorton166] ^(chat!) 15:59, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
• I've been an advocate of deleting them, but this clever compromise (devised by UncleG) has some mileage. It doesn't interfere with the sourcing effort at all, and allows any editor to sort the article. Obviously, it needs some tweeking here and there, but BOLD action is often the way to get balls rolling.--Scott Mac 15:08, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
• Agree with blanking - Blanking rather than deleting is the right way to go with this. It complies with the rules requiring sourcing for BLP's, and meanwhile enables editors to find references without having to also re-create the entire article from nothing. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:33, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
• While I was aware of this suggestion, I have not participated in the discussions around it so haven't seen what was decided about how this blanking would proceed if done en masse. I have a couple very serious potential concerns about this and would like to read the discussions to see if they have been considered and addressed. If someone would be so kind as to point me in the direction of said discussions, it would be appreciated. Resolute 15:34, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
  • Well, there's Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Unsourced biographies of living persons/Unsourced biographies of living persons, as you know, although I don't see anything there about this. There's nothing at Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Blanked unsourced BLP. So I'm as in the dark as you are. ☺ My original draft notice and template are dormant and unused at Special:PrefixIndex/Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons/Mass blanking. Uncle G (talk) 15:46, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
• A suggestion from my side is that it would be cool to consider the interwikis in your blanking process and/or to explain on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons what it means for the editors trying to get these BLP sourced. I had two blanked BLP in my 400+ BLP watchlist blanked today; which I can cope with, but if I get too many, I won't handle... I also plan XMas holidays. How much time do I have before the article is deleted? --Anneyh (talk) 15:41, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
  • I think the point is that the article won't be deleted (in the medium term anyway). It just stays blank until someone has time to source it (or decides it needs deleted or redirected for other reasons).--Scott Mac 15:50, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
  • It was only a draft, and the editors involved here haven't run with it, but I'm guessing that Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons/Mass blanking/How to help should probably give some clue as to what to do next. There's a good reason that one prepares before embarking upon such an exercise, setting up the explanations and how-tos first, as well as performing tests to get the kinks out. I notice that they're re-learning the long comment issue. ☺ Uncle G (talk) 15:57, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
• Agree with blanking. It's a reasonable compromise. I don't like it completely (because I don't drink the "unreferenced-BLPs-are-the-end-of-the-world" Kool-Aid) but well, that's what compromises are for, and it's infinitely better than deletion. Interested editors can recover the info to work on easily without admin intervention, and complies with BLP without needing novel policies/BLPPRODs or similar tricks. --Cyclopia^talk 15:47, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
• Oppose big time how this is being done. Unlike the CCI blanking, the Cats are gone, so you can't use WP:CATSCAN to find them. There are still over 3000 blanked articles in the CCI pile, so what makes you think that this will speed up anything? What list is he using? WP:URBLPR has done a great job in the past month cleaning out the UBLPs from 2008, a bit of help would be better than this sort of stunt. We've upped the rate of net UBLP removal from about 1200 per month to over 2000 last month - and that was still with more than a 1000 new ones added (700 in the Nov 2010 cat, about 300 added to other months by converting BLP sources or unref to BLP unref, without changing the date. This has to stop now until there is proper discussion, planning and agreement on how it is to be done. The-Pope (talk) 16:06, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
• Disagree with blanking there has been some discussion of this idea and I thought that if it got consensus to go ahead at least the categories and interwiki links were going to be left. Aside from the extra work this puts on people trying to resolve the problem, this risks slowing down the referencing project as it now means that those who are working through categories won't see these articles. For starters the death anomalies process won't pick them up because it looks for people who are in the category living people, and have an interwiki link to an article where they are in a deceased category. So though the mass blanking is well intentioned it is at best counterproductive. Blanking of contentious content is another matter and I do quite a bit of that myself, but as far as I can see this is just blanking old unsourced BLPs in an almost botlike manner. ϢereSpielChequers 16:11, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
• I think a brief pause and a little more discussion would be good here, For the most part I'm picking up that opposition is not outright. WereSpielChequers, The-Pope can ask what safeguards you'd like to see? Is there a way you could live with this? What if categories and interwiki links were left on the article? Is there anything else that would make this more palatable to you? Let's see if we can't work out some common ground? What if we put them all in a "banked BLP category" as well, for ease of navigation? Maybe we could run a trial with the longest unreferenced ones and wee how it works?--Scott Mac 16:17, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
  • I don't like this on principle as prioritising our efforts on unreferenced BLPs means distracting our attention from contentious BLP material which I would prefer us to be prioritising. But if there is consensus to do something here, then providing the cats and Interwiki links were left, and each one was looked at individually to see if it really was an uncontentious unsourced BLP; I could live with a trial where we did say 500 for a couple of months and compared the result with a 500 strong control sample to see how many were referenced as a result of this. Better still why not trial this on 500 from the popular culture categories where I suspect the fans or publicity agents write many of the bios? Again we need to leave the cats as it would be silly to fail to add an obituary reference because of the blanking, but blanking might be the key to getting more of the editors in the the film and arts and entertainment categories to use reliable sources. ϢereSpielChequers 16:40, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

• We, being the 30 or so of us actually doing the referencing, are just getting sick of the stunts being pulled almost ever month, mostly by people who aren't helping in any other way. Unlike the CCI case, we don't know that there is actually is a problem. We don't know what happens to the articles once they get unblanked/referenced etc, as "TS's global BLP watchlist" idea hasn't really taken off. It's showboating and stuntpulling and nothing else. A bloody great big picture of Jimbo on the top of every page saying "please help out at WP:URBLP" would be infinitely more effective - as I said above, there are 1000s of CCI blanked articles still blanked 2 months later. Watching that they don't get unblanked by an IP without actually referencing will be a task in itself. The numbers are dropping. If EPBR123 and the new AWB rules didn't keep finding new old UBLPs then the progress would be more impressive. But I've cleaned out 400 WP:AUST UBLPs myself in Oct, did over 300 WP:OLYMPICs in Nov and the 2008 cats WILL be done by WP:URBLPR before Christmas. So, unless the blanking is accompanied by a cry for help and good, clear instructions on how to help, this is just another delaying function. Waiting or more people doing the referencing is the ONLY solution to this problem.The-Pope (talk) 16:43, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

• Meh, I really hate this vigilante justice that happens with BLPs. I agree with Polargeo. At Wikipedia:Unreferenced BLP Rescue we have sourced almost 9 months of the BLP backlog in just a few months, that's the actual work needed to improve this "problem", and does far more actual good than these dramas. In sourcing 1000s of unreferenced BLPs we have found that those with bad content are very rare--applying a blanking sledgehammer to a job that deserves individual care and effort doesn't help. BLPs with sources are just as likely to have bad content as uBLPs, so blanking is not solving anything, and we should be blanking every BLP if it did really help. I implore everyone, including The Wordsmith, to try to source a few uBLPs daily, if only a few hundred editors did that the backlog would be gone in a month! (As it is, the backlog has gone from ~60,000 to 20,352 so far this year--even including about 4,500 new ones that have been added since BLP-PROD was adopted in March.)--Milowent • ^talkblp-r 16:20, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
• Comment While I still think there's a good idea at the core of this (as I said when UncleG brought up the idea), I would have liked to see a focused trial of this on a few hundred to a thousand entries to see if it, y'know, worked, at present, I'm unaware if this effort is aimed at 20,000 entries or 200. I'd expect a small trial to find problems like a couple mentioned above -- the robot tagging, the category things. But the point of the trial from my point of view also extends to whether this blanking will do what I hoped it to. At best, I can imagine that the blank tagging will increase the amount of eyes that come to adding sources (or marking-as-CV/marking-as-hoax/PRODing/AfDing where appropriate) unsourced BLPs. That has always been my hope, but I've never had a strong belief about whether or not it would be true--the point of the trial, for me, was to find out. And then proceed forward at a pace, *if the idea worked*. It's not clear to me if this current effort will give us the clear answers that a focused trial would. --j⚛e decker^talk 16:36, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

  Request: As a result of the above, I'd be a lot more on-board if (1) the effort could be, for the moment, limited to 1000 articles or fewer, with (1a) a plan to look at the results after a week or two has passed to see to what extent this has "helped" put new eyes working on article triage (2) the articles remained in the category hierarchy so that existing efforts to triage (source or delete) unsourced BLPs can continue their efforts, and (3) a solution can be implemented for the robot tagging issue this is triggering, as well as other issues that will no doubt come up in a trial situation. --j⚛e decker^talk 16:47, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

  Retaining the categories on the blanked articles is absolutely imperative to the clean-up process - anyone who has invested any serious effort in clearing the backlog will attest to this. --Jezebel'sPonyo^{bons mots} 16:53, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

  Absolutely. --j⚛e decker^talk 17:17, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

According to the BLP motion that certain arbitrators voted for, in whose name this is apparently being done, you can only oppose this blanking spree, is if it has been done in a "chaotic" manner. Well, with no prior discussion, no proper plan, no real integration with the existing cleanup efforts, and with obvious mistakes being made, that all adds up to a recipe for chaos if you ask me. P.S. Vote or die people. MickMacNee (talk) 16:38, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Merely blanking seems entirely unhelpful. Participate in a constructive effort instead, please. Happily the blanked articles appear in Category:Blanked unreferenced BLPs, so it is not hard to Undo the blanking. Unfortunately some have been edited since by TexasAndroid, regarding long comments for short pages, so simple "Undo" won't work for those. Must Undo quickly, then, to avoid the additional wasting of editors' efforts. I restored the articles that Wordsmith's blanked on December 1, so far, and am partway through undoing the November 30 blankings. --doncram (talk) 16:45, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Given how soundly the community rejected the actions of the original deletionists, I hold the original ArbCom motion as having been superseded by the community. As such, mass blanking done without the support of the community should be held as being disruptive and treated appropriately. This is an action that can get the support, I think, but obviously needs to be fleshed out on how it is handled, when and how. This seems to be something that an RFC would resolve fairly easily, if Wordsmith and his allies are actually interested in doing things properly. Resolute 18:11, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

• (edit conflict)Strongly disagree with the blanking of uncontentious material. This is not building an encyclopedia, it is tearing one down. The backlog is being reduced daily, with there now being less than 500 from before 2009. —J04n(talk page) 16:52, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
• Big time oppose Where was this ever discussed and agreed upon. While it was suggested, it was never agreed on as far as I can see. Needs to stop immediately. -DJSasso (talk) 16:54, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
• Oppose. If those who object to these BLPs existing should have learned anything by now, it's that taking these sort of actions without first reaching consensus is a very bad idea. This is not going to help get these articles fixed, and is just increasing the drama here. Of course there will be editors who support this, just like there were editors who wanted them all deleted - it's no excuse. This is disruptive and should stop immediately. --Michig (talk) 17:13, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
• Oppose WP is not a TV reality show where such gets high ratings. Collect (talk) 18:03, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
• I'm completely opposed to this, last month was the best month for reducing the unreferenced backlog for 6 months with the backlog being reduced by 2425 despite over 750 additional ones being found during the month. When substantial progress is being made this is not the time to start blanking or deleting - the existing referencing projects such as Wikipedia:Unreferenced BLP Rescue are doing a great job already. Davewild (talk) 18:41, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
• Agree with blanking, with the proviso that categories and interwikis be left intact and while remaining agnostic about the method (template vs. manual, etc). This action is a reasonable compromise in my view. Those who are sourcing unreferenced BLPs will no longer have their sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, threatening them if they don't work fast enough; those concerned about any unverified BLP information being publicly viewable and crawl-able will no longer have their sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, threatening the 'pedia with potential false BLP information. I feel that it's better that information of unknown reliability be blanked temporarily until it can be checked than that information of unknown reliability be displayed and potentially cause harm for an uncertain amount of time. Blanking seems a win-win to me, with easily-retrievable previous contents that can be restored as articles are sourced, and I guess I don't quite understand why the BLP sourcers are so vehemently against the idea. keɪɑtɪk flʌfi (talk) 18:52, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
• Agree with blanking per Cyclopia and others. --JN466 20:52, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
• Good grief, please blank them! Weird shit in BLPs on WP really wouldn't be much of an issue if it weren't often the case that (a) google tends to rank WP pages highly, and (b) some people just go ahead and look things up on Wikipedia rather than googling. Blanking the ones that are unsourced (and hence very unreliable) is not only common courtesy to our fellow human beings, but also a responsible thing to do considering how central WP has become for people who are trying to look something up. And yes: I do indeed think that people who oppose this on some principle or another are both discourteous and irresponsible. Living persons should not be used as pawns in wikipolitical games. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 21:27, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

"Blanking the ones that are unsourced (and hence very unreliable)": Efforts to source UBLPs over the past year has provided evidence that they are not any more likely to contain scandalous or improper contentious content than BLPs with sourcing--the vast majority are benign. This has been discussed a lot previously. The principle on which I oppose blanking is that it won't actually help solve the problem of problematic BLPs. The UBLP backlog is being whacked down every day--please consider sourcing a few UBLPs today, see Wikipedia:Unreferenced BLP Rescue and Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons.--Milowent • ^talkblp-r 22:45, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

See, I just sourced one. Easy pickin's abound.--Milowent • ^talkblp-r 22:59, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Here's another one. It got blanked, unblanked, substantially reblanked by Wordsmith, yet within a few minutes time I was able to determine the article was accurate and source almost all of it. I even added stuff.--Milowent • ^talkblp-r 05:30, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Compromises

The idea of blanking (suggested by UncleG) was a compromises between those who wanted deletion, and those who wanted no limits on the time for these to be referenced. Now, we can carry on this discussion in a partisan manner between the folk who are interested in rescuing these things and the folk who just want them removed. If we do that, we'll either end up with stalemate again, or one side "winning". Alternatively, we could pause the blankings, and say "OK, is there a way to do this that doesn't impinge on those wishing to rescue". Blanking already allows any user to source and restore without an admin, but I'm also hearing that our restoration task folk people have other concerns - removal of categories, interwikis etc. Can we actually start listening to each other, and see if there's a way of doing this with minimal collateral to the other initiatives. Yes, I know some folk don't see the need for it at all, and that's also a discussion to be had - on which we know there's no agreement, but can I ask "if blanking were to occur, what are the least disruptive conditions, that would be least distasteful, to those attempting to rescue these articles?" --Scott Mac 16:50, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

If the blanking is done through the transclusion method, then it seriously reduces the fait accompli factor in my mind, since it can be undone with a single edit. As well, this method should preserve existing categorizations so as to not break catscan, and we can make it preserve the categorization as an unreferenced BLP as well. I think it's an excellent advertisement for the URBLP project, and a way to get us past the "30 or so" people working on the backlog. Gigs (talk) 17:03, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

To clarify: We redirect {{unreferenced BLP}} to the blanking template, which now includes code to suppress the display of the rest of the article, while leaving the text intact. This won't confuse bots into adding tags like the manual blanking has done, since the article is still there, just hidden from view. Gigs (talk) 17:07, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Blanking does only one thing - removes a possibly contentious, possibly innocent, article from view. It does it at one time, and doesn't do anything to stop future or past vandalism. It doesn't help speedup the referencing of the article, and may actually slow it down. The referencing activities that are being done by "one side" of this discussion are checking, reading, removing vandalism, but probably not watchlisting, so anything can still happen in the future. The CCI list still has over 3000 blanked articles over 2 months after blanking. These are obviously not highly viewed, highly watched articles. Most UBLPs from 2008 probably fall into the similar level of interest.

If we want to actually solve the problem, and not just hide it, then we need more people referencing. It is that simple. Nothing else will remove the issue for good. We can then move to finding better ways to ensure that referenced articles are improved, and not vandalised. If we need stunts like this, or the one you pulled in Jan, to raise the profile and get people involved, then maybe its a good thing. But we haven't really tried any for of mass advertising to help out. I was only partially joking when I said we needed a big colour banner of Jimbo saying "please help WP:URBLPR".The-Pope (talk) 17:05, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

The-pope, these blanked pages will all become a big banner that says please help WP:URBLP. It will be a great way to get more people involved. Gigs (talk) 17:07, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

And as we've seen with the CCI blanking, that means nothing, as >3000 articles are still ugly black boxes two months after blanking. The banner must be on every page, not just the possibly unvisited article pages. The watchlist message is the sort of idea that I like.The-Pope (talk) 16:17, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Go voice your support of it then so we can put the edit protected request in. Gigs (talk) 16:23, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

• If I could propose something that doesn't involve drastic brinksmanship, why don't we just expand BLPPROD to unreferenced BLP articles prior to the original starting date at a reasonable rate (20-50/day)? Jclemens (talk) 17:09, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
  • I really don't like that jclemens. The blanking template is an opportunity to voluntarily advertise the need for people to help out with URBLP. It's not under the gun and it has no deadline. I would strongly prefer mass blanking to a forced schedule, no matter how slow it is. Gigs (talk) 17:21, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Blanking hardly seems helpful at all. It is forcing this discussion, this drama, not the most important use of many editors' editing time right now, relative to more important devleopment of wikipedia. It is disrespectful of other editors, it is disrupting other efforts. There's no way that hiding the cumulative involvement of URBLP editors in tagging and in otherewise refining the articles is helpful. The first step in fixing any one of these articles is to undo the blanking. So, let's just undo any mindless blanking, as the first step, as soon as it occurs. There should be no compromising with this, just undo the stupid blankings. --doncram (talk) 17:10, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

• • No, this is a collaborative project, so we need to work together here. If you dig your heals in all that will happen is mass deletions will restart. We need to look for something else. Some people would prefer nothing be done, others would nuke the lot tomorrow - so let's talk.--Scott Mac 17:16, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

The mass blanking mindlessly blanked articles that did have sources. For example, this article on Robert Fulghum, which had 3 sources given in an external links section which i think were sources for the article. And there was at least one inline external link, just not enclosed by <ref> </ref> tags. So what if the ref formatting is not perfect. The first step to fix, is to undo the stupid blanking. --doncram (talk) 17:42, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

And I will block any admin who resorts to mass deletion as a solution without community support to do so. So, now that the threats are out of the way, lets actually discuss whether blanking is beneficial, and if so, how we do it, what articles qualify, what material we don't want to remove as part of the blanking (i.e.: interwiki and categories), and how we are going to inform edtiors and projects that blanking has occurred within their scope. Resolute 18:24, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Re Scott's comment "Some people would prefer nothing be done". If there are such people they are conspicuous by their silence, this is really a debate between those who are steadily working through the backlog and those who want to make a bonfire of it. Deletionists are free to take part in the process already, if you don't want to do any sourcing yourself, just go through some of the backlog looking for ones that don't meet our inclusion criteria, check the talkpage and history and if appropriate prod them. I think you'll find them a very small minority, and those that meet the speedy deletion criteria even rarer, but existing policies do allow judicious pruning. I've prodded a number of these articles, always after checking the history and with the exception of one that was created by an IP several years ago, I inform the authors, I do occasionally get chided for BLPprodding articles that would be easily sourced, but I don't recall anyone criticising one of my prods. There are of course many thousands that would cease to meet our inclusion criteria if we tightened the rules re sportspeople, beauty pageant winners and actors, but that is a separate issue and better resolved by an RFC than by trying to prod articles that others will then deprod. ϢereSpielChequers 10:00, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Compromise - Broaden BLPprod to some poorly sourced articles

Clearly some editors are unhappy with the speed with which we are reducing the uBLP backlog. One problem in the process is that every month we get a fresh batch of new uBLPs because the definition of uBLP does not match the criteria for a sticky prod. If we were to tweak the BLPprod process we could reduce this fairly easily. I suggest we resolve some of the ambiguities re poorly sourced BLPs by broadening sticky prod to new UBLPs "sourced" from Myspace, Utube, LinkdIn and Facebook. We didn't quite get consensus for that in the last RFC. But perhaps we could get consensus for it now? This would open up several hundred existing articles to sticky prods, so I would suggest that this be done in batches over a couple of months. But it would almost close the door to new uBLPs - currently the door is ajar. ϢereSpielChequers 17:49, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

• Support because this is less controversial than it sounds. Right now sticky prods are rejected if there are any links to sites like myspace, that could even plausibly be considered a source, even if it doesn't support the text in the article. Most people would still consider such articles completely unreferenced. As well, a sticky prod can't be removed by the simple addition of such links, so we have a double standard where sticky prods can't be applied to articles that have sources so poor that a sticky prod could not be removed. This isn't a sweeping change, it's a small change that would make sticky prods work in a more expected manner. Gigs (talk) 17:57, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
  • I'd be more willing to accept the opposite. That we can remove blpunsourced from articles that are sourced from such places. I myself would normally prod/afd such articles, but I wouldn't ever considered them unsourced. Just poorly sourced. -DJSasso (talk) 18:14, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
• Oppose "Poorly sourced" is a magnet for argument at the very least - and might be overused quite easily in an effort to remove non-contentious BLPs. Collect (talk) 18:03, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
• Oppose on multiple fronts. First, lets not put uBLP into the middle of this blanking debate. Second, "Poorly sourced" has many possible definitions, and not all of them necessitate deletion. The idea merits discussion, but I think we should wait on this a bit. Resolute 18:07, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
  • Actually it's very specifically defined, and fully hashed out from the previous discussion on sticky prod.
    • The current requirement to remove a properly applied sticky prod is: "the biography contains a reliable source that supports at least one statement made about the person in the article"
    • The current requirement to apply a sticky prod properly is "completely unsourced", which basically requires no external links that could plausibly be considered a source
  • This proposal would merely harmonize the application criterion to be the same as the removal criterion. It's not about requiring every claim in the article to have a source. Just a single reliable source for a single claim. Gigs (talk) 18:09, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
    • Fair enough. I would still rather this did not get squashed into the middle of the blanking debate, however. One thing at a time! Resolute 18:16, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
      • The blanking debate is specific to uBLPs, I'm suggesting this compromise as an alternative for those who are not happy with progress - so in my view it belongs here. I may not get consensus for this compromise, but please don't rule out compromises that don't involve blanking. ϢereSpielChequers 18:38, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
• Fully support this proposal. —J04n(talk page) 18:13, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
• Oppose We should be doing the opposite, removing the unsourced tag from articles sourced to less than reliable sources because they are sourced. Just not properly sourced. This is an issue for prod or afd. Not BLP prod. -DJSasso (talk) 18:17, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
• Needs some clarifying. Youtube sourcing could include sourcing to, as an example, a reliable documentary, and for a lot of people, their MySpace page is their official website, sometimes with considerable information there, albeit from a primary source - including these would be no different to including articles containing only primary sources. I think this would be problematic - the proposal is ok for a lot of articles that it would cover, but there would be cases where it would be too simplistic.--Michig (talk) 18:24, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
  • If adopted, I assume we would use the wording about one claim about the person being sourced to one reliable source, not mention any particular site by name. Gigs (talk) 18:45, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
    • My proposal was that we simply broaden sticky prod to new UBLPs "sourced" from Myspace, Utube, LinkdIn and Facebook. That would still be a brightline test suitable for New Page Patrol. Requiring a reliable source has been discussed before but got less support because it isn't such a clear simple choice for the newpage patroller to understand. I appreciate that the vast majority of these links will genuinely be to the subjects webpage, but as these are selfpublished sites we have no ready way to confirm that. ϢereSpielChequers 00:18, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
      • By 'Utube' do you mean 'YouTube'? If so, it should be noted that UK TV companies such as the BBC and Channel 4 make their programmes (or parts of them) available via YouTube, and if a person receives coverage in such a programme, this may be a good indication of notability, and a link to it on YouTube may be a valid source, if not an ideal one. --Michig (talk) 08:51, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
        • Sorry yes I do mean YouTube. I don't doubt that the vast majority of this info is OK, but unless someone can come up with a straightforward way to tell whether a Youtube posting is legit or not it remains a self published site where anyone could create an attack page and then use it to source an attack page here. I can't say I've yet encountered that happening - the youtube stuff I've seen tends more to the overly promotional than the negative, but it does seem to me a genuine possibility, whereas stuff sourced from the BBC, Channel 4 or even a university Bio strikes me as safe as I assume some vetting is conducted. ϢereSpielChequers 09:06, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
• Oppose Poorly sourced is a different problem than unsourced. By all means, tag things as poorly sourced, but let's fix all the unsourced things first, since neither of them are indicative of actual harm, which triggers a more urgent process that doesn't distinguish. Jclemens (talk) 18:31, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Cease-fire

Some people have started using this template, others have started reverting them, may I suggest that both desist until we have consensus on a way forward? That shouldn't stop anyone reverting and referencing one of these blanked articles, but it should focus our attention on getting consensus for action rather than just the Dwamah. ϢereSpielChequers 17:09, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Doing this en-masse

I definitely agree. There's no reason to manually apply this template to articles. We can hide every BLP with a single edit to the unreferenced BLP template. Manual application is just creating a mess that will need to be cleaned up later. Gigs (talk) 17:11, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Agree with WSC. I think if this is going to go forward, though, I'd like to see a limited trial, which means that Gigs' template trick won't work (I think?) --j⚛e decker^talk 17:14, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Correct. The template is all or nothing. Manual blanking though is causing a lot of bot-type edits to correct various "problems" with the blanked articles. Gigs (talk) 17:19, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Understood, yeah. --j⚛e decker^talk 17:22, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, well, poorly thought out mass actions tend to have unintended consequences. No further blanking should happen until this is discussed. Resolute 18:04, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

The problem with blanking by bot or by changing the uBLP template is that many some of these UBLP templates are now wrong, some were wrong to start with others have been referenced by a newbie who is waiting for someone to come-by and reconsider the template. If the admins who applied these templates were checking the article and the history then I see how you can argue that they are within policy as they have taken a judgement re that article. But mass blanking without considering the article lays us wide open to vandalism - all the vandals need do is add a uBLP template to a bunch of articles and the article is effectively gone. ϢereSpielChequers 17:59, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

I and others have put in enormous effort over at WP:Mistagged BLP cleanup. The tags are far more accurate than they used to be. Could use more help over there as always though. Gigs (talk) 18:11, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Apologies, I was basing my "many were wrong" comment on the situation earlier in the year when I went through very large numbers of uBLPs. If things have now improved that is reassuring and I've amended that to some. But I still think there will be mistakes especially where the article was not a BLP or the sources don't involve links - offline sources for example. Also I still don't see how this could be done without opening the process up to vandalism by uBLP tagging. ϢereSpielChequers 18:32, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

I believe the list we are working from uses the existence of ref tags as one criterion so we are catching ones with only offline sources as well. What we aren't catching right now are ones that are using only ELs as sources without proper ref tags or a reference section. We did have a larger list of unref tagged BLPs with any external links at all, but it had a much higher false positive rate. Gigs (talk) 18:41, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

We do have to be careful about doing a CCI-style blanking based on nothing more than the existence of a BLP unsourced tag on the page. I've seen plenty of editors slap these tags on articles that were recently referenced until a vandal cleared them out (if the editor only checked the article history, it would have been obvious) and even more slap the tags on articles with plenty of external links or poorly formatted in-line citations which clearly verified the pertinent information in the article. If these articles are to be blanked, we are wasting everyone's time. Jogurney (talk) 18:58, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

If the blanking is done through the template, then it's exactly the same amount of effort to remove the incorrect template, whether it does blanking or not. Gigs (talk) 20:52, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

My concern isn't over whether the template does the blanking or the templater does the blanking by editing out the content. My concern is over whether this is done in a considered way as the template says "and an administrator believed that this action was appropriate". Which to my mind means an admin has looked at that article and its history, dealt with incorrect tags and vandalised articles and made a considered decision. Simply changing the {{unreferencedBLP}} template to blank all current and future articles tagged with it would mean "someone has decided to blank this page as an unreferenced Biography of a Living Person". We should not state that an admin has done something that we allow any stray IP or newbie to do, nor imply that a decision is thoughtful and considered when it is actually botlike. Nor in my view should we implement a system that makes life easier for vandals. ϢereSpielChequers 09:31, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

• There is another template made for the same purpose, that was created the day the arbitration case was filed. It's Template:Unsourced BLP flagged. In that template you don't blank the articles; instead, the content is collapsed so that the users can just de-collapse it if they want to see the unreferenced content, instead of having to go through the edit history of the specific article. HeyMid (contribs) 17:25, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

about the stunt and Wordsmith

I'm curious: is Wordsmith, the puller of the stunt, an editor who has been helping regarding unreferenced BLPs, or is Wordsmith just an non-helping outsider? I myself was involved constructively, i think, a while back, but have not been involved recently. I am just wondering if more discussion of the unhelpful nature of the stunt-pulling would be helpful, to quicken the negative response to be given to Wordsmith in the future or to dissuade and/or block future stunt-pullers. --doncram (talk) 18:19, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

My first experience with Wordsmith was very positive since he organized a 500 uBLP article sourcing pledge that many editors signed up for. As a group, we sourced several thousand uBLPs in a two-month period following the last serious round of panic-mongering about the backlog (in February 2010). I'm not sure why Wordsmith engaged in such an action with dicsussing it here first, but the concept is worthwhile if executed properly. Unfortunately, the execution of it was extremely poor. Jogurney (talk) 18:54, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

The thing is, I did discuss it here. If you look above, you'll see an announcement of my intent in the section marked Deadline. The idea was that if the community didn't come up with a new process to handle the problem, mass deletions would resume on 30 November. The deadline came and went, with no discussion or progress happening on finding a new way to deal with these BLPs, so I kept my promise. Arbcom directed us to keep future efforts "less chaotic", and blanking the articles is far less chaotic than deleting them outright would be. The solution I enacted was imperfect, yes, but I firmly believe that I am acting in the best interests of Wikipedia, as set forth by the Foundation and the Arbitration Committee. At least now the community is discussing it and coming up with a compromise that will (hopefully) show our responsibility to our BLP subjects while being done in an orderly manner. The Wordsmith^Communicate 19:41, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

The discussion above did not reach any consensus for such action. I think the idea of doing something similar to the CCI-blanking had a good level of support (I even could see it helping), but a well-designed process would be needed. This was simply irresponsible. Jogurney (talk) 22:25, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Unilaterally setting a deadline and saying you will enforce it is not discussion. That is called making a statement. Discussion is a two way street. You acted in a very chaotic way which was completely opposite that which the arbitration committee suggested. And that is not even counting the fact that your statement of intent was almost completely rejected above in that discussion. -DJSasso (talk) 19:46, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Actually, Scott set the deadline and I supported it. I declared my intent to solve the problem on November 30th, so nobody should be surprised that when the deadline passed I carried out my promise. If the community wanted to avoid that, they knew exactly how. There was even an arbcom Request for Clarification on the matter, in which I asked Arbcom to issue an injunction (which I would obey) if they felt it was wrong. The did not do so. Instead, they seemed to put some weight behind the blanking proposal, which is indeed less chaotic than deletion, and allows any ordinary user to source and restore the articles. Yes, I was bold (and quite possibly reckless), but at least I did something about it. Tking no action is not an option. That said, now that the community is discussing the problem, and will hopefully find a compromise we can live with, I have stopped blanking for the moment. The Wordsmith^Communicate 20:02, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

The problem is that you assume no action is being taken. 3175 articles were sourced and removed from the BLPunsourced lists in the last month alone. That is action being taken. It might not be as fast as you personally would like it, but it is action being taken. Instead your actions have done nothing but waste peoples time with another useless debate, when theirs and your time would be better spent actually sourcing the articles. At the rate they are being sources by only a few editors this mess will be gone relatively fast, imagine how much faster they would be gone if people stopped creating rediculous situations like this. -DJSasso (talk) 20:12, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

After each of these major discussions, there is an increase in the number of people working on the backlog. This corresponds to a significant reduction in the size of the backlog. Perhaps some good will come of this in that more articles will be sourced in less time. The Wordsmith^Communicate 20:29, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Wordsmith, given the strong opposition to that deadline in the discussion above, I am surprised you went ahead with it. Contrary to what you suggest, I don't believe anyone would have reasonably expected you to start blanking articles after that deadline, as it looks like there is a strong consensus against the deadline. Anyone happening on that discussion would almost certainly interpret the deadline as a rejected proposal. You really should have made it clear that you intended to go with that deadline despite the strong consensus against it. That would have at least generated more discussion on the issue. Calathan (talk) 20:22, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

That was never really a proposal, but rather a statement of intent. Consensus cannot override BLP or Arbcom/Foundation decree. I never released any statement indicating that I had changed my mind, so I kept my promise to our BLP subjects (most of which were probably never even asked if they wanted an article in the first place. Now we're discussing it and finding a reasonable solution. I acknowledge that I may face consequences, but it is worth it if this helps the project. The Wordsmith^Communicate 20:29, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

That deadline section certainly did not achieve any kind of consensus support. Rather, I would suggest that a majority opposed such a deadline. As such, your actions were unilateral, without support and therefore disruptive. I suggested it above, but if you want to actually be productive, start an RFC where we can discuss how we would implement such a process if it is desired. If it is not desired, then you will simply have to live with the community's efforts. And bear this in mind: if you resume without consensus support, I will block you. Resolute 20:34, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Quoting User:Scott_MacDonald, "I thus propose the following deadline:". I don't see any way to interpret that as a statement of intent rather than as a proposal for discussion. Calathan (talk) 20:42, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Exactly, the wording there indicates it was a proposal. A proposal that was soundly rejected. To then go and try to implement it is against consensus and highly disruptive and probably pointy as well. Arbcom has no jurisdiction on BLPs as their jurisdiction does not extend to article content. As such the community most definitely can override them. -DJSasso (talk) 22:14, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Jogurney above mentions his first experience with Wordsmith being positive, from his organizing the 500 uBLP article sourcing pledge drive. I do recall that from early 2010 but i did not then perceive that was very effective, like it was a good try but was not actually making a very big contribution to the URBLP effort. I thought other efforts such as addressing the IMDB ones (which i was involved in) and creating the WikiProject-specific reports to get many Wikiprojects involved, and categorizing and wikiproject tagging articles, were much more important. I have in particular thought that the most productive efforts would be to keep working individually with individual wikiprojects, opening discussions at their Talk pages and keeping on following up and encouraging them to keep at the URBLPs in their area. I tried some of that. Anyhow, there's no way i would now agree that the particular effort by Wordsmith mentioned should be given credit for our (all of us Wikipedia editors) having "sourced several thousand uBLPs in a two-month period following the last serious round of panic-mongering about the backlog (in February 2010)." Not sure if u meant to give him credit for that. My initial question, whether Wordsmith has actually substantially helped in URBLP work, or is it just contributing disruption, still stands.

I don't happen to think this stunt is leading to any good discussion or good recruitment for future efforts. It rubs me the wrong way, making me feel like removing BLP tags willy-nilly or making up fake references perhaps, or otherwise to disrupt in the other direction, from whatever Wordsmith is trying to force. That would disrupt the ongoing good efforts by many others however. I don't like the imposition, the foisting upon the community, of one editor's deadline. Who the heck is Wordsmith to do that. Maybe Wordsmith is a good editor with many good contributions, and maybe i did have a previous good impression that i am not recalling right now, having not been involved in this area for some time, but right now i am just getting a bad impression. The problem is not URBLPs, the problem is this one editor's disruption, is my impression right now. --doncram (talk) 21:44, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

• Totally oppose. The way to get articles improved is to make the problems evident. If I see a blanked BLP page, i do not know if I am likely to be able to help the matter, and I will likely pass over it--I am not taking personal responsibility for sourcing every sourceable article. . If I see one with an unsourced tag, then I will be able to see immediately whether or not it's in a field of endeavor I am likely to help, and try to work on it. This is especially true because there are many unsourced BLPs where the subject is on the face of it so notable, that it should be evident there is no difficulty sourcing, and then of course I & I hope most people seeing it wlll quickly do so. But if hidden, neither I nor anyone else will notice.

Additionally, the blanking was totally inappropriate without explicit prior consensus. The way to apply WP:BOLD is not to be reckless about it. Just as we do not use unapproved bots, we ought not do undiscussed mass edits. I believe even arb com has commented on their inappropriateness--and it was in the context of BLP, if I remember correctly. As for the pages themselves, it is true that some of them ought to be removed--generally because what the sources show does not amount to notability. I've speedied a few myself, and deleted prods on a number of others. One at a time, after considering them. In the meantime, I have deleted considerably more BLP articles, that did have sources but obviously did not meet WP:N or even Speedy A7. Also one at a time, considering each of them. I understand that after a good deal of this work, one is likely to get somewhat impatient. I can thus forgive people who expressed their impatience, but not to approve of what they did in expressing it. I hope there will be no need for a preventative block to prevent recurrence of this disruption. DGG ( talk ) 22:26, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Short Pages lists

I do not have a strong opinion one way or the other about the blankings. But I would ask that please, please, please, if something like this resumes, to please add some sort of hidden comment to the article to bring it's "blanked" length up over 200 characters or so. The pages done earlier today were flooding out the Short Pages reports. If this is done to thousands, it'll totally flood out those reports. I added a "Long Comment" template to several dozen before running out of steam this morning. Please do not let an effort for one purpose disrupt a totally unrelated faction of the project. If the "blank" pages are left at 200+ characters they will be well beyond the point where the short pages reports tend to reach. - TexasAndroid (talk) 20:14, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

In the future, if this is resumed, we'll probably use an "open tag" to blank the articles, rather than actually removing the content. This will prevent that kind of problem from happening. Gigs (talk) 20:47, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

TexasAndroid, your edits complicated undoing the blankings. While there may not be an actual prohibition against Wordsmith or another editor blanking articles, it is also allowable for other editors to undo those blankings. I and others undid all the blankings that Wordsmith had done, which is the first step in fixing the articles, i.e. undoing the further damage done which obscured all information about the subject biographies. Your intervening just made the unblanking harder for the ones you got to, because those ones could no longer be undone by simple Undo. If this comes up in the future, please advise me and others in some announcement so that we can simply undo all the blankings more efficiently. I do agree that the blanking campaign was a disruptive stunt, causing turmoil in the short pages work that you do, as well as causing other unhelpful disruption. --doncram (talk) 21:07, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but what you request means that I take sides in this, something I prefer not to do. I had no way of knowing that this was a "stunt" as you call it. In my mind it looked similar to the recent mass-blankings done for a certain copyvio case. In that situation, I did know what was going on, and expressed my thoughts on the Short Pages situation on the set-up discussion page in time to get bits added to the blankings to avoid the problem. The precedent is set that mass blanking can be used to deal with certain extreme situations, and I'm aware of the festering unsourced bio situation, so it was not a stretch for me to AGF and assume that this thing was some sort of approved solution that had just overlooked the Short Pages reports. Not many people care about them, and I'm used to picking up after people with them. But to ask me to assume the worst of what looked to be a legitimate effort to deal with a bad problem, is not something I'm of the mindset to do. It wasn't until they vanished off the short pages reports that I started wondering what was going on, and found my way here to comment. <shrug> - TexasAndroid (talk) 21:32, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Proposed watchlist notice

Your comment is requested on my proposed watchlist notice Gigs (talk) 20:24, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Compromise proposal: stubification

After sleeping on this whole discussion I think stubification may be an acceptable compromise on both sides. Leaving a bare bones sentence or three with no contentious material, just enough for someone who comes across the page to get a feel for who the person is and ideally improve the article. I would of course leave (noncontentious) categories and interwikilinks, I'm ambivalent about infoboxes, they can stay or go. —J04n(talk page) 13:58, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

That is no better than blanking, it blows up the article to nothing to solve a problem which for the majority of cases has been shown to not exist. The solution to this problem is for people who are so concerned about it to start helping with sourcing instead of coming up with new and improved ways of damaging the articles. -DJSasso (talk) 14:05, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

I prefer mass blanking to mass stubbing. Stubbing encourages unsuspecting people to "fork" the previous content and reexpand it, likely with no more references than before. Blanking makes the problem obvious and explains the situation to even the most uninitiated reader. Gigs (talk) 16:10, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

• There was a big discussion about doing a sample blanking of some uBLP subset at the beginning of this stuff (last month? october?) to see if it works but I guess that fizzled out (I personally didn't think it was a great idea, but some did, and a trial is just a trial). There is only way to solve the BLP "problem" and that is for everyone reading this page to start sourcing some BLPs. We've gone from ~60,000 at the beginning of the year to ~20,000 today, and instituted BLP-PROD for creations after March 2010. The problem with stubification is that it requires individual effort on each article, few seem willing to make that effort, and most of those who might are the same editors just sourcing these articles. Please, everyone, become one of those editors! Just pick one BLP right now and source it! Just one!--Milowent • ^talkblp-r 16:20, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
  Click this button.
  

Reference this BLP.

• not a fan of stubification. It takes almost as long as pushing the red button and referencing an article. Often in that process, I am removing some material as well (things that are probably best left out without references to GOOD sources). I also put the 'big red button' on my talk page, and encourage others to do the same. Especially those of you who are admins and have both talkpage stalkers and lots of traffic. --Rocksanddirt (talk) 17:01, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
  • quick sort of off topic observation: since Feb 20, 2010, we have reduced the backlog of unsourced blp's by approximately 70 articles per day. This includes whatever has been added to the list as well. At this rate, the number of unsourced blps will reach zero in another 286-ish days. (not really, of course as things will get non-linear as the numbers get smaller). --Rocksanddirt (talk) 17:31, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

stubbification is the wrong direction. We want to add information, not remove it. the more material visible, the easier to reference. DGG ( talk ) 07:02, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

• Stubification is the wrong approach unless we change our whole approach to new data and require every editor who adds data to include a source. Otherwise we will just see these stubs expand again with IP edits and all we've achieved is to throw away a load of work. I believe the Germans have changed their editing screen to prompt people for their source and I think we should trial something like that and try to change editor behaviour. But we need to change our systems first, then educate the community that we are moving from verifiable to verified, and only when we've done both of those change the rules to just revert people who add unsourced content. ϢereSpielChequers 10:29, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

What is the aim?

I think the main reason for the division is a difference of purpose, a difference in what is the ultimate aim of this process. I believe that those referencing want to have a complete encylopedia, at least with as much info as it currently has, but in compliance with all policies. But we also understand that we all have real lives, other priorities and that this whole place is a work in progress. Those favouring deletion or blanking want the compliance with policy as #1, but aren't as concerned about the scope or completeness of the encyclopedia. The "do no harm" argument has been proven as flawed as no-one has shown that there is any correlation between unreferenced BLPs and problematic or vandalised BLPs.

In the past few weeks I have personally referenced almost 400 Olympians. They range from being the 54th ranked archer/fencer in a single olympics to winners of multiple individual gold medals. (I still have over 50 Handball players to go - I've never even seen a game of handball!) They have been easy to reference, as there is a single source that covers all Olympic results. I've found no more than 2 or 3 items of vandalism in them, about 2 or 3 deceased people labelled as BLPs and probably 5-10 or so which had references, either marked as refs or in the external links section. The blanking of ANY of these pages, other than the 2 or 3 vandalised pages, would not have achieved anything and would have harmed the encyclopedia the first time that someone looked for that person and found nothing but a cleanup banner. If the notability rules were ever tightened, the "low importance/notability" pages would be redirected to the event page, not deleted.

Doing anything other than some form of "don't look" automated bot task would take just as long as actually referencing the article. Now I understand that other musicians, TV/Film "stars" etc are a lot harder to reference, but I would ask that we let the watchlist message be posted, and see if we do get a spike in people contributing by referencing. Blanked or not blanked, the speed at which these will disappear is directly proportional to the number of people chipping in a referencing. Have you done your 5 UBLPs today yet? The-Pope (talk) 16:38, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

I agree that manual blanking or any manual process that requires looking at the article would take nearly as long as sourcing, if people are going to actually do it right. When I'm doing the mistagged BLP cleanup, I often get sucked into sourcing most of the articles anyway, since by the time you read the article and check out the existing purported sources, it only take a minute more to add a source. Gigs (talk) 16:58, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

I think that people didn't give enough consideration to WSC's proposal above. Maybe it was bad timing or bad wording. But right now BLPPROD is not preventing new unsourced BLPs. Right now an article like Saugata Mitra could not be BLP PRODed even though it's basically unsourced. This dual standard of requiring absolutely no sources at all not even a random youtube page that doesn't verify any article content to apply BLP PROD, while requiring one reliable source that supports one claim in the article to remove BLP PROD needs to end. Gigs (talk) 17:04, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

That means its doing exactly as it should. Anything sourced to those sites are sourced. They are just poorly sourced. BLP PROD is for articles without sources at all. Poorly sourced and Unsourced are two different and seperate issues. -DJSasso (talk) 17:05, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

It doesn't actually require that any claims in the article be verifiable to the material linked at this point. That's unsourced to me. We came up with a reasonable standard to remove BLP PROD that requires one claim about the person sourced to a source reliable for that claim. That's not too much to ask people to do. We are still letting people create articles that are completely unsourced under the current standard, as long as they throw in some random external links. Gigs (talk) 17:17, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

At some point it would be nice to see BLP's with only External Links and no sources marked as a uBLP although I understand there is no consensus to do that. Regards, SunCreator ^(talk) 17:51, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

It's fine and dandy to argue about the precise meaning of unsourced. Meanwhile, people like me are struggling to clean up the mess being dumped on us by people creating thousands of basically unsourced microstubs on non-notable athletes and professors that pass our absurd subject notability guidelines. BLP PROD was supposed to put the burden on the article creator to actually include some kind of source. It hasn't, because of this gaping loophole. Gigs (talk) 18:54, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

BLP PROD was only supposed to help stop the flood of completely unsourced BLPs. It was never meant to help with poorly sourced ones. If your problem is with the notability guidelines then go try and work on them. But BLP PROD is not meant to be an end run around them. A poor source is a source, it in some way will pretty much always source something, even if it is only their occupation or birthdate or something minor like that. But it does source something. Just not enough to establish notability. Which is why you would then take it to normal prod or afd. -DJSasso (talk) 19:00, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

An unsourced BLP with a random link at the bottom that does not support any claims in the article is still completely unsourced. It's only in the twisted world of BLP PROD that a random link to a slightly related website counts as a source for anything. Gigs (talk) 19:13, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

I don't think you understand. The links don't have to source a birthdate or anything. They don't have to source anything at all. I'm not talking about poorly sourced. I'm talking about "unsourced with a tangentially related link"... which gets untagged as an improper BLP PROD now. Gigs (talk) 19:14, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

So? If you still think it should be deleted then put it to afd. It's not like blp prod is the only way to delete something... -DJSasso (talk) 19:22, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

My point is that right now BLP PROD isn't doing very much. I know that I avoid using it because regular PROD or AfD is much more likely to actually get something accomplished. Gigs (talk) 19:26, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

BLPprod was designed to close the door on new unsourced BLPs and it has done that very successfully. Several hundred articles are correctly BLPprodded every month and though we do have several thousand articles tagged as UBLP from the last few months, the vast majority of them are old articles newly discovered and tagged as uBLPs, and the minority are mainly poorly sourced rather than unsourced BLPs. Judging from the sticky prods that I decline, there is quite a bit of demand to extend sticky prod to poorly sourced BLPs, some demand to extend it to dead people, as well as occasional attempts to use it on fictional characters and recently a horse. Judging from the timings I think that most BLPprodding is done by the newpage patrol, and with such enthusiasm that you are unlikely to have an opportunity to use a BLPprod unless you look at articles less than an hour old. ϢereSpielChequers 01:33, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

To also answer the question of "what is BLPPROD" doing, there are over 5000 articles listed in the Unreferenced BLPs from April 2010 to December 2010 cats - articles which you'd think might be candidates for BLPPROD. However, according to Wikipedia:Database reports/Biographies of living people possibly eligible for deletion there are only 350 that were created since March 17 2010. Most of those would fall into the "has a source, but it's listed as an external link, and may not be reliable" category. All of the others would have been created before March, but only tagged since then. So, whilst I agree with WSC that BLPPROD should align EXACTLY with the BLP unsourced rules to make it clearer (it will require some rewording of the template), I'm not sure if firstly, the application rules are fully understood or agreed, and secondly, if it will really help that much - ie there are only 350 articles out there as potential candidates. Extending the BLPPROD application backwards in time, say to the Jan 1, 2010 for a few months and then back in 3 month increments, MIGHT work, but I reckon the effect of backdating BLPPRODs will be that the sourcing task will mainly fall on the deleting admins like DGG, rather than on the original author - which I think is the aim of BLPPROD - make the person who wrote the article supply a ref whilst they are active, not months later, when they may have moved on.The-Pope (talk) 11:22, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

What you call demand, I think reflects that these articles are actually in fact unsourced, and that we are using an unusually contrived definition of "completely unsourced" here. If an article can't pass the test of "at least one claim about the person sourced by at least one reliable source", that's completely unsourced in my mind. When we were originally discussing BLP PROD, it was always my understanding when we came up with that test that it would be used for both application and removal. Until you told me about it recently, I had no idea that the definition of "completely unsourced" for the application of the tags differed from the definition we came up with for the removal of the tags. Gigs (talk) 03:07, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

That's a common misunderstanding, but if you look through the RFCs there were various discussions on this, including one proposal to require a reliable source for all new BLPs and my now repeated proposal to exclude four common selfpublished sources. I think the compromise that has emerged is functioning but flawed, the logic was that due to our concern about possible harm to living people we wanted to take a more deletionist approach to new BLPs. If our concern is over harm then a primary source or one that we could be confident was self published by the subject of the article should be enough to reassure us that it was a low risk article in need of work. We actually have a stricter test than that for removing valid BLPprod tags, but a looser test to apply them in the first place. I would prefer that we converged the tests so that we ignored the totally unreliable ones but didn't require the article to be reliably sourced to avoid this form of deletion. So an established editor who rescued an article from a sticky prod with a link to their corporate bio would deserve a trout, but a newbie who did the same thing would get the tags changed to {{primarysource}} and an explanation that we really need our sources to be independent of the subject. However I've twice failed to carry the community on this so will now go back to trying to make the existing process work. ϢereSpielChequers 10:16, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

A primary source is a reliable source for certain claims. If you really were proposing to unconditionally disallow those sites by name even though they might be a reliable source, then I actually disagree with your proposal as well. Gigs (talk) 13:25, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

And therein lies the problem. A prestigious university website is probably OK for faculty member, but what about a small South American one? A US Gov website is probably ok for a congressman, but what about a Libyan gov website, or a small county/town sheriff website? A major national TV/radio station bio might be OK, but not a small independent station website. Self-published and primary sources aren't always the same. I'm yet to see where a personal website, facebook, myspace etc should be used, and I think these are the sites that WSC is targetting. We also have to remember that the rules for proving notability don't have to be the same for sourcing. A primary sourced article can still be deleted if the notability isn't proven by independent sources.The-Pope (talk) 13:46, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

Agreed, but at least if you've managed to confirm that Marvin J. Lipfird is the County Sheriff for Harlan County, you've reduced the chance that we are carrying wrong information about someone. Elen of the Roads (talk) 17:45, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Suggest it's time to move on, say to wt:URBLP The stunt is over, i hope, right? And there has been no productive discussion about anything engendered by the stunt, in my view. All discussion in this section and further above is about how to deal with disruptive stunts (which seems a proper use of this administrative noticeboard) and/or is calling for more editors to do actual work (which seems not a proper topic for this adminstrative noticeboard). Where is actual discussion among editors about useful strategies for addressing URBLPs and other BLP issues supposed to happen. Is that Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons? I for one would like to see some intelligent discussion again about what tactics/strategies might be most productive. Despite some major advances during this year, there still is no useful/fun contest like there is for links to disambiguation pages, and there is no decent reporting on numbers of new URBLPs and how many URBLPs have been disposed of. All we know is the current inventory count (happily just now below 20,000). It's a pretty sorry state, overall process-wise. I do think the discussion about real improvements should be at wt:URBLP or somewhere else, other than this noticeboard to deal with disruptions. --doncram (talk) 18:44, 4 December 2010 (UTC)