Herostratus wants a hug from Jimbo

[Giraffe Stapler]

Herostratus is probably a nice person. I am sure he thinks he is doing the right thing when he argues (at great length) about what he thinks are BLP issues. The trouble is what he thinks and what the BLP policy says are often very different things. Herostratus has, um, idiosyncratic ideas about what should or shouldn't be included in articles.

He has left a looong message to Jimbo. He outlines some of cases where he didn't get his way. I think he is appealing to Jimbo for some kind of moral support of the BLP policy. Perhaps he wants to try again with one or more of the cases he has listed.

Since Herostratus decided to present only his view of these cases, I thought I would identify the two that I immediately recognized. Number 2 is Nathan Larson (politician) (T-H-L). The name may be familiar to some readers. Herostratus felt that BLP policy meant that his arrest for kidnapping a 12 year-old could not be mentioned on the BLP noticeboard (of all places) for the purposes of discussing whether or not it could be mentioned in Larson's article. (BLPN thread)

Example number 3 is Marek Kukula (T-H-L). This was a Crow sockpuppet trying to argue that, absent any reliable sources, the Daily Mail should be used as a source for claims that Kukula was convicted of downloading child porn. (BLPN thread)

[AndyTheGrump]

Herostratus isn't wrong in at least some of what he says, but frankly I think he's got an odd take on what the real issue is. Which is the absolute crap-ton of material blatantly in violation of existing WP:BLP policy that can be found in article space. Material which gets added all the time, with no reliable mechanism to exclude it, beyond hoping that someone notices, and is prepared to put the effort in to remove it, while knowing that for every WP:BLP violation they remove there are going to be ten more added while they are doing it.

Wikipedia may very well be the largest single publisher of libel on the internet.

[Jim]

Herostratus has been basically a bit of a weirdo since forever.

See, for instance, this thread.

Despite what others might have quite understandably seen as worrying, I've generally thought Herostratus probably has good intentions but absolutely no idea how to relate to other people at all.

If wikipedia was mine I'd ban him straight away as utterly clueless, weirdly obsessive and extremely likely to clumsily damage himself and others.

But it's not mine.

[Smiley]

I have high hopes he'll live up to his name one day.


NSFW link

[Jim]

I have high hopes he'll live up to his name one day.

I think the name probably just seemed like a good idea one day when thinking stuff through was not an active priority.

I suspect he's regretted it since.

I Know I would have.

[DanMurphy]

I have an article on my watchlist of someone I think is a very very very bad human being. (Not famous, a propagandist I came across in my old life.) An edit to the infobox to the effect that she's a professional liar and dirtbag was made by an IP 5 days ago. And there it sits.

Why do I bring this up? Because I really can't be arsed about wikipediaholics arguing BLP arcana when after all these years they've refused to take a simple step that would do the most to protect the subjects of many tens of thousands of articles (never mind that many of those people are, in fact, dirtbags.)