What happens to unreferenced BLPs?

Those of us who live other than under rocks will no doubt be aware of the latest controversy over Wikipedia's approach to biographies of living persons articles (BLPs), concerning the deletion last week of a large number of BLPs that had been tagged as being unsourced, and had not been edited for more than six months. The deletions sparked a giant administrators' noticeboard discussion, a request for arbitration and now a request for comments on how to proceed from here.

At the crux of the dispute is how seriously the project is to take the modified standards that it has adopted with respect to biographies of living persons.

Debates of this sort are usually run along inclusionist/deletionist lines, but really the more important philosophical dichotomy when it comes to BLPs is between eventualists and immediatists. Wikipedia on the whole favours an eventualist perspective - facilitated by the almost immeasurably large potential pool of labour out there - but the BLP policy is essentially a localised switch to immediatism: unsourced material needs to be sourced post-haste, or else removed.

Conceptually it's an elegant and attractive approach. But a major flaw with it is our attraction to eventualism. We just can't shake it off.

This category, and its many subcategories, tracks BLP articles that have been tagged as not having any sources. At the time of writing there are over 47,000 of them, some having been tagged as long ago as December 2006. Evidently any sense of urgency has passed those by. The backlogs mount until they approach the point where individual editors have difficulty comprehending the problem, let along working to address it. Frustration builds at the inevitable inertia, until something radical happens, like these mass deletions.

Is this view accurate? Is the problem of unsourced BLPs really out of hand? We can try to answer these questions by looking at the way the backlog has been managed.

Unfortunately, the data available for this purpose is somewhat limited. Database dumps older than the 20 September 2009 dump are currently not available due to maintenance. However that September dump, along with dumps from 28 November 2009 and 16 January this year (shortly before the deletions started), do offer three data points with which to commence.

The monthly subcategories from October 2006 to August 2009 inclusive were common to all three dumps. The total number of articles in these categories declined from 50,715 in September to 43,655 earlier this month, a 13.9% fall. However, over the same period, the total in all subcategories through December 2009 rose from 50,715 to 51,301, a 1.2% increase. At least over this period, new additions outweighed articles being removed from these categories.

It should be noted that some of these additions are due to articles that had been tagged, but were unsorted, being added into the monthly subcategories. In fact, ten of the thirty-five subcategories common to all three dumps saw increases in numbers since September. The following graph shows the change in the monthly category totals over the roughly four months between the September and January dumps:


Without analysing the actual changes in the lists of articles in these subcategories it won't be possible to tell whether the sorting process is merely outweighing the normal reductions through articles being referenced or deleted, or, as I suspect, if there are genuinely fewer reductions in these subcategories that are no longer recent, but not yet the oldest. This can be the subject of further inquiry.

What we can say now is that the total number of unreferenced BLPs is now showing real decline for at least the first time in four months, possibly longer. It seems to have been the shock of mass deletions that has spurred people into action either to fix or delete these articles. Hopefully the shock will last long enough for a significant reduction to be achieved.

All Quiet on the Waziri Front

There's an interesting piece in the New York Times today on investigative journalist David Rohde - who was kidnapped in Afghanistan last year and who escaped last week from his captors in Waziristan, in northern Pakistan - and the efforts to extend the media blackout on news of the kidnapping to his Wikipedia article.

The blackout was orchestrated by the New York Times Company and was said to have involved forty international news agencies, from NPR to al-Jazeera. NYT personnel "believed that publicity would raise Mr. Rohde's value to his captors as a bargaining chip and reduce his chance of survival", the story says, quoting Rohde's colleague Michael Moss as saying "I knew from my jihad reporting that the captors would be very quick to get online and assess who he was and what he’d done, what his value to them might be".

Along with staff at other news agencies, NYT personnel contacted Jimmy Wales too, who passed the matter along to a small group of administrators who reverted mentions of the kidnapping and protected the article a number of times over the following months. Michael Moss also apparently edited the article to emphasise Rohde's Pulitzer Prize-winning work on the Srebrenica massacre, as well as his work on Guantanamo Bay, believing that if his captors read the article they might view him as more sympathetic towards Muslims.

Jimbo acknowledges in the NYT piece that the matter was made easier by the lack of reliable sources reporting the kidnapping - a consequence of the blackout - which meant that the biographies of living persons policy could operate to keep any references to the kidnapping out of the article. The policy, of course, was originally intended to keep fabricated material out of articles, but it worked equally well to assist the blackout in this case.

The ethics of the blackout have come into question following Rohde's escape. NPR reported Poynter Institute journalism ethics lecturer Kelly McBride as saying "I find it a little disturbing, because it makes me wonder what else 40 international news organizations have agreed not to tell the public". Dan Murphy at the Christian Science Monitor says that the question of whether the press has a double standard in keeping quiet about their own while regularly reporting on other kidnappings will likely become part of the debate. Greg Mitchell, the editor of industry journal Editor & Publisher, details that organisation's internal debates and ultimate decision to adhere to the blackout. Mitchell raises a potential competing public interest argument, that information about events such as kidnappings in a certain area could, in some cases, help protect the public (though the average NYT reader doesn't hang out near Kabul that often - it might help protect other journalists though).

On the Wikipedia front, this is an interesting biographies of living persons case because every aspect of it involves journalists, who as a profession develop, apply and teach a whole suite of ethical principles governing their work, principles that many have suggested Wikipedia ought to adapt or learn from.

It's regularly true that hard cases make bad policy, and it is so here: the kidnapping was said to have been reported by an unnamed Afghani news agency, and apparently by Italian agency Adnkronos too; the existence of reliable sources on the matter (which I cannot verify due to absent or broken links) throws into doubt the legitimacy of enforcing the blackout on Wikipedia.

This may well put a wedge between two similar but distinct camps of support for the biographies of living persons policy: those who believe that such articles should be written from a "do no harm" perspective, and those who have a similar sympathy but only go so far as supporting a strict, immediatist adherence to ordinary content policy (instead of the typical eventualist stance), and no further.

The fullness of time

The current debate about the application of the biographies of living persons seems focused solely on the question of whether or not Wikipedia should have an article about a person at all, and there have been only a few rare attempts to frame the debate in more nuanced terms than this binary approach. One of the key questions we should be asking, in addition to the question of whether to present information at all, is the question of how that information ought to be presented.

Much as I take a mergist stance in the inclusion/deletion debate more broadly, I think a similar stance is most preferable in this current manifestation of that debate. The fundamental reason is the same: content must be presented in the most appropriate context. The right context allows the proper significance of information to be conveyed, and presents it in a naturally coherent fashion, which is exceptionally valuable for an encyclopaedia.

In the case of biographies of living persons, the question is then whether or not certain information is best presented in a biographical article, whether such an article provides the most appropriate context for the content.

One key issue to consider is the temporal focus of an article.

Articles about an event concentrate on the short-term, are generally tied to one or several discrete points in time and have a narrower scope; even though they sometimes discuss larger issues, they do so through the prism of individual situations. In contrast, biographical articles are focused on the long-term, with scope extending to the entire lifetime of a person.

When we decide where to include material that relates to a person's involvement in an event, we ought to consider the proper temporal focus of the sources for that material. Sources with a short-term focus, that discuss a person in order to discuss a particular event, should be used to develop articles about the event, and not biographical articles about the person. On the other hand sources with a long-term focus, that discuss a person, often by way of discussing a series of events, should be used to develop biographical articles.

Many of the biographical articles that have been causing problems lately are drawn largely from news sources. News coverage, generally speaking, is almost always concentrating on the here and now; if it writes about people, it is usually writing about them only insofar as they are part of a particular event, that is, only insofar as their lives intersect with this discrete point or points of time. This is the same even for "human interest" type pieces that seem to be about people: really they have the same short-term focus, the journos are just looking for a different angle to help sell the story.

Choosing to put content in a biographical article becomes increasingly appropriate the more that the content is drawn from sources with a long-term focus. Where the only sources available are short-term, event-focused sources like news coverage, then it must be questioned whether the content should be presented as a biographical article, and in most cases (especially where the news sources are all about one event) it probably should not.

Lastly, in all of this we must not forget Wikinews, a project which is intended precisely for the type of coverage which is not always proper for inclusion in an encyclopaedia: news coverage, with a narrow, short-term focus on its subjects. Wikinews is surely a far more appropriate venue for many of these types of articles, since fundamentally it concentrates on knowledge that is important at a particular point in time.

The exhortation that "we have a really serious responsibility to get things right" in the context of biographies of living persons applies not only to what content we present, but also the manner in which we present that content. We must ask ourselves, what is the most appropriate context for this information? Is it really the most desirable choice to present this information in a biographical article? Whenever the answer is no, then look to other articles instead, where context may be better established, or else look further afield, to projects like Wikinews.

Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, not a newspaper. Its content must be developed with this difference in temporal focus in mind.