More on Anonymity

John Siegenthaler Sr. an early
victim of bad biographical data.
Image from Wikimedia CommonsRecall that I've spoken about anonymity before ... I've also talked about biographies and notability, twice before.

I made a rather loud statement of no longer being in favor of anonymity at the Biographies of Living Persons policy discussion page, as part of discussion on a proposal to limit editing on all such articles using semi protection. This was one of a number of ideas that have been advanced recently to try to deal with the perceived growing problem in this area.

Kim Bruning asked why I felt that a fundamental principle ("anyone can edit") should perhaps change to one in which only those willing to reveal their real name (verified as well as Amazon verifies real names, that is, not a perfect scheme, but not trivial to fake) would be allowed to edit at all. Clearly it goes against the early spirit. And I'm not happy about the idea, to be sure.

Simply put, the reason is that Wikipedia, and the Wikimedia Foundation have become too big. As the projects become more and more important, higher and higher ranked, more and more turned to, the stakes for accuracy are higher than ever before, with no end to this growth in significance in sight. The project participants, and the projects, have a greater responsibility than when this was a toy site.

Merely wishing to do no harm is insufficient. Merely saying that section 230 provides protection because the projects are "not publishers" is insufficient.

Sooner or later, someone with a biography that is seriously damaging (and make no mistake, with 250,000 odd biographies out there, there are sure to be some that are) will be mad enough and well off enough to sue. Don Murphy certainly threatens to. And moreover, with the recent success at securing large donations (a very good thing, make no mistake) the WMF is now a more attractive target.

So what's to be done? More than is being done, I say.

Just as with trademark law, where the holder must show reasonable care in defending against infringment, just as with trespass law, where the owner of a property hosting an "attractive nuisance" must show reasonable care in preventing entry, the projects must show reasonable care at preventing malicious editing of biographies. Tightening of the BLP policy, making OTRS more effective, hiring paid staff, whatever it takes.

But more importantly, the model of anonymous editing, or pseudonymous editing, means that the lawsuit cannot be laid off onto the individual editor that did the bad edit, despite statements that under GFDL the individual contributors are responsible. Server logs and IP addresses are insufficient ties of responsibility. Too easily evaded, too easily used for other things, so deliberately not retained indefinitely anyway.

So... it pains me to say it, but I think the only answer is real names. Real names allow the reasonable care defense, and allow transfer of liability. That has two positive effects, one that it protects the foundation, somewhat, but a bigger positive effect? It makes people actually take responsibility for what they write.

What do you think? Is the project too big for anonymity? Or is there another way out?

More on notability and the BLP

Dave Winer, in his blog piece "Whats Wrong with Wikipedia" opines (after pointing out what is good about the project) that his bio entry on Wikipedia is in bad shape. His thesis is that it doesn't give him enough credit for things he was involved in, and moreover, that articles which should mention him, don't.

This is, of course, kind of the opposite of the beef Don Murphy has, as I described in Notability and the BLP policy... Don wants less said about him, not more.

It is easy to dismiss both of these complaints as meaningless, or to say that they balance each other out. But the WikBack threads (among them "removing marginally notable BLPs" and others), the discussions elsewhere, the activity on new proposals (among them SirFozzie's latest, "BLP-Lock") suggest that while the project may have come a ways from Siegenthaler, it still has farther to go. Consider the biographies of Ashley Alexandra Dupré (of client #9 fame... hopefully that won't mean anything in 3 months), or of Abigail and Brittany Hensel... Does Wikipedia have too much detail in those?

I won't be so full of hubris to say that I know the answer. Heck, I am not sure I even know the right question... But my unease that Wikipedia is not doing right by living persons remains.

What do you think?

Notability and the BLP policy

Given the name of my blog, you'd think I'd have written about notability before this... The issue of how to judge notability has arisen at Wikipedia again, as it does from time to time.

This time, the person in question is Don Murphy, producer of Natural Born Killers and the Transformers movie, who had an article that survived 2 previous deletion discussions (1) (2), and who has been agitating all along that he wants his article gone, and using socks and an army of meatpuppets he raised at his site, to try to effect his will. Administrator Viridae, perhaps influenced by this discussion at Wikipedia Review, deleted it without any prior process and was promptly reverted, sparking charges of wheel warring. The article matter is now at Deletion Review.

As I said there, I'm conflicted. I am very sympathetic to the notion that Wikipedia should do no harm. For non notable individuals we should have no article, for individuals who are notable because of a single event we should mention them in the context of the event, if at all. Clearly, notable people (George W. Bush, Steven Spielberg, et al) need articles. But the borderline area is where it's hard.

Don Murphy contends that despite being a producer, he's not notable. Directors are usually more famous than producers, it seems, generally speaking, and he contends he's no more notable than any of the other 300 credited people in a film.

Others contend that yes, producers of big grossing films are indeed notable.

Me, I don't know. We need to solve the problem though, It's been suggested that if someone living doesn't already have an article in at least 2 other printed encylopedias they are either not notable, or at least marginally notable and thus can ask that their bio be deleted.

What do you think?