Tamzin wrote:
This article is about me. I will leave it to y'all to debate the merits of WP:GNG, WP:BLP1E, and WP:BLPREQUESTDELETE. I'd like to approach this from a different, slightly unusual direction, though, one informed by years of advocating for BLP subjects. I'd just ask that y'all imagine someone who shows up to BLPN and tells this story:
So one of my coworkers wrote an article on me. (I wouldn't call us personal friends, but we're friendly at work, and have socialized at work gatherings.) Then a few other coworkers started to edit it. Some I know well; others know of me and I know of them but I don't think we've ever directly interacted. One or two I've been in conflict with before.
I tried to be helpful by listing sources about me. For completeness, I mentioned one source that had a lot of inaccuracies, but I was clear about that and even linked to an explanation of its errors. Someone then cited it, specifically a part I'd flagged as objectively incorrect. That part, at least, got removed after I complained, but since then, my coworkers keep making the strangest edits. One removed a photo of me because it wasn't "professional". He didn't add a more professional photo of me or anything, just removed it. He also insists the article can't use the pronouns I requested, even though my understanding of your site's rules is that that's required. He also removed my whole Personal life section because of something called WP:TRIVIA, but I read that whole page and it doesn't seem to have anything to do with that.
Then a bunch of my coworkers got into a whole argument about some drama I was in a few years ago. There was a news article about it at the time, and I was really happy that the article got all the important details right. But for some reasons my coworkers just cannot. get. this. right. They misstated our own company's policies, which you'd think they'd know themselves, and which the source gets right. They took two things I said in that controversy, which the source correctly compares and contrasts, and merged them into one statement I never made. Four people discussed that, and ironically the only one who kind of saw the error was the person with the strongest conflict of interest, someone who was also involved in the same drama. Both of those have been resolved, although another error, mis-paraphrasing something I said (again, that the source gets right) remains. Someone said that the error needs to stay or otherwise they'd be violating copyrights??? Meanwhile one coworker complains that it's inappropriate for me to have pointed out these errors. I really don't understand this site.
Now at this point someone might say to that new user, "That's a user conduct issue. Go take it to the administrators." To which the new user says,
But you don't understand! Most of these people are administrators. I looked at their edits to other pages, and they all seem fine! I don't know what it is about my article that makes them all suddenly get things wrong, and remove things based on rules that don't exist, but for some reason they are. I don't think any of them, or at least not most of them, are doing anything bad on purpose. But I do think if I'm going to have a Wikipedia article, it shouldn't be written by my own coworkers—not if they can't do it accurately and respectfully.
What would we say in that situation? I think we'd say that an article entirely written by people with COIs, that keeps attracting factual errors, poorly-explained removals, and generally poor editing, should not exist. The obvious rebuttal here is the rule of necessity: If all Wikipedians have a COI, then who can write about Wikipedians? To which I would say, that's a good point for Wikipedians who are unavoidably notable, and in that case it's somewhat offset because their notability will tend to attract a broader cross-section of editors. But for people like me, who are either just a bit below or a bit above the notability bar, and who the community is apparently unable to edit competently about, the only fair implementation of WP:COI and WP:BLP is to just not have an article.
TL;DR: I may technically be notable; depends on how you interpret a few guidelines. But a BLP is a social contract, and the community seems fundamentally unable to hold up its end of the bargain here. If this sounds a bit emotional, it's because it is. But I hope the community will see that this is consistent with my long-expressed views about BLPs in general. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe|
) 23:01, 31 January 2025 (UTC)
) 23:01, 31 January 2025 (UTC)
