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In September 2005, Wikipedia suffered a famous embarrassment known as the Seigenthaler incident. The journalist John Seigenthaler discovered that for the past four months, Wikipedia's article about him had contained the false claim that he was a suspect in the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. In an effort to prevent similar incidents in the future, and to shield themselves from potential legal action, Wikipedia created the Biographies of living persons policy, also known as the BLP policy.
Wikipedia's BLP policy has three requirements for articles about living persons: neutrality, verifiability, and no original research. These requirements exist for all articles, but the requirements for BLP articles are especially strict. For example, self-published sources by recognized experts are sometimes acceptable in other articles, but according to BLP policy they are never acceptable in articles about living people. The policy also requires contentious material that is poorly sourced to be removed immediately, without waiting for discussion. This policy is intended to prevent Wikipedia from engaging in yellow journalism—the sort of writing that emphasizes sensationalism over reliability.
In articles about living individuals who are well-known and well-liked, this policy generally has had the intended effect. It also is useful for limiting what Wikipedia can say about individuals who have both supporters and detractors, as long as these people have enough supporters to ensure the policy is followed. But there also is a third class of living people, who have a great many detractors among Wikipedia editors, but who have no supporters, or almost none. What happens in their case? The answer is that generally, the authors of their articles ignore BLP policy, and the Wikipedia community does not appear to care.
Example 1: Adnan Oktar
Adnan Oktar (T-H-L) (permanent link to current version) is a Muslim creationist who lives in Turkey. Unlike most Western creationists, who don't have much political influence, Oktar has succeeded at getting the Turkish government to block access to several websites that criticize him. His best-known book is the "Atlas of Creation", which is mostly a collection of photographs of fossils compared to photographs of modern animals, claiming that animals haven't undergone any evolution since prehistoric times. He's also listed as the author of a 1996 book called "The Holocaust Deception", although more recently he's disowned this book, and has spoken against Holocaust denial in some of his other publications.
I tried to improve the sourcing of this article in September 2010. Two sources that I removed were P.Z. Myers' blog Pharyngula, and a personal webpage at Fortunecity, both of which violate the "avoid self-published sources" requirement of BLP policy. In November 2010, a third problematic source was brought up on the talk page. Several biographical claims were sourced to a web page which had no indication of reliability, and which contained a disclaimer stating that it was "mostly a personal attack". The discussion on the talk page quickly reached a consensus that using this source was a violation of the BLP policy, and that it should immediately be removed.
However, the source was not actually removed. The only action taken was to remove three words cited to the source, which was already cited multiples times in other parts of the article. Less than a month later, several more paragraphs cited to this source were added. This new material has never been challenged, so a source already determined to violate the BLP policy is now the second most-cited source in the article.
At around the same time, the citation to the Fortunecity page was added back. A few months later, the citation to P.Z. Myers' blog was added back, removed, and then restored again. Neither of these sources have been challenged again, and both are in the article currently.
Wikipedia has a noticeboard known as the BLP noticeboard, whose purpose is as a place for editors to bring wider attention to violations of the BLP policy. The Adnan Oktar article has been brought up there twice, in November 2010 and July 2011. Both times, the community did not conclude that there was anything wrong with the article, so no changes to it resulted from either report.
At present, 23 of the article's 88 references—over a quarter—are dead links. The references in this article which are dead links are references number 21, 28, 30, 32, 37, 40, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 55, 59, 60, 65, 68, 73, 76, 81, 83, and 84. Two of the dead links, #46 and #47, are the article's only sources for information about Oktar's book Global Freemasonry. One of the requirements of BLP policy is verifiability, but when information like this is cited to dead links, there's no way for readers to verify that it's accurate. They have to either trust the article's authors that a source used to exist for these statements, or try to find a source themselves.
In other parts of the article, there are references that are too vague for anyone to know what source they're citing. The article's entire second citation is the name "Osama Abdallah", with no title, date, or publisher. It was added to the article in October 2012, and has remained unaltered since then. Evidently, in a BLP article about a disliked individual, this sort of unverifiable material is tolerated even when it's in the article's first sentence for more than a year and a half.
Example 2: Giovanni Di Stefano
Giovanni Di Stefano (fraudster) (T-H-L) (permanent link to current version) is an Italian businessman who's acted as a legal counselor for several notorious defendants, including British serial killer Harold Shipman, Serbian President Slobodan Milošević, and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. In March 2013, he was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 14 years in prison.
Immediately after his conviction hit the news on March 27th, the article was retitled from Giovanni Di Stefano (businessman) to Giovanni Di Stefano (fraudster). The reason Di Stefano is famous, unlike most of the world's thousands of fraudsters, is because of the notoriety of the people he's represented. Based on that, an editor named The Devil's Advocate tried to rename the article to reflect what Di Stefano is best-known for.
- The Devil's Advocate retitled the article to "Giovanni Di Stefano (legal counselor)"
- One minute later Prioryman, the editor who had originally renamed it to "fraudster", moved it back to that name.
- The Devil's Advocate retitled it to say "legal counselor" a second time.
- About twenty minutes later Prioryman moved it back to "fraudster" a second time.
- The admin Beeblebrox then indefinitely [url=hhttps://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Giovanni_Di_Stefano_%28fraudster%29&diff=prev&oldid=547534188]locked[/url] the article from being renamed. Now that it's locked, it will remain under the "fraudster" name until an admin decides to remove the protection.
This dislike is reflected in indifference to unsouced material. One claim made by the article, that Di Stefano filed an application on behalf of Charles Manson, has been tagged as unsourced since August 2011. This is significant because the article received a large amount of attention in March and April 2013 following Di Stefano's conviction, with over 50 edits to it in a single week. But none of the editors involved cared to remove this unsourced material or find a source for it, so it's been tagged and unaltered for the past two and a half years.
Of the article's 163 references, 30 are dead links—about 18% of them. The references which are dead links are number 5, 13, 17, 19, 29, 31, 38, 40, 45, 58, 64, 65, 72, 91, 94, 97, 98, 101, 113, 116, 125, 135, 137, 140, 142, 146, 152, 155, 158, and 163. A pair of dead links, references #97 and #98, are the only sources for the article's explanation of why a judge allowed him to visit Nicholas van Hoogstragen while the latter was in prison.
A worse example is how Wikipedia supports its claim that Di Stefano had information about a murder and failed to come forward with it to the police. This is sourced to references #62, #64, and #65, the last two of which are dead links. Reference #62 is not a dead link, but the article it links to has nothing to do with Di Stefano: it is an article about the iPhone 4.
Example 3: Richard Lynn
Richard Lynn (T-H-L) (permanent link to current version) is a British psychologist who's best known for his research about variance in average intelligence between nations, and its correlation with other measures of national prosperity such as GDP. He's also known for research about race and intelligence, one of Wikipedia's ten most controversial topics.
The lead section of this article states: "He sits on the editorial boards of the journals Intelligence and Personality and Individual Differences,[5] and on the boards of the Pioneer Fund,[6] an organization that has been described as racist in nature, and of the Pioneer-supported journal Mankind Quarterly, which has been called a white supremacist publication.[7][8]"
It isn't difficult to find sources that say the Pioneer Fund has a history of supporting racist causes, but there is far less reliable material that directly criticizes Richard Lynn for his involvement with it. (When this material was first added in April 2011, two of its four sources only criticized the Pioneer Fund in general, and did not mention Richard Lynn.) One editor named Bricology objected to the low quality of the sources used for this material, and also to its use of weasel wording. Weasel wording is the term for saying that a person or organization "has been called" something, instead of attributing it to the source that said it. A related policy is WP:LABEL, which says that the label "racist" is generally best to avoid, and that when it can't be avoided, it must always be attributed in-text to the sources using it.
Several other editors have tried to make the material comply with these policies, and all have been immediately undone.
- In March 2012, Anthon.Eff tried to add an in-text attribution specifying who was making these accusations. This edit was undone about four hours later.
- Anthon.Eff next tried to tag these parts of the article as lacking the in-text attribution required by policy. One of the tags was removed two hours later, and the other was removed a few minutes after that.
- Anthon.Eff finally tried to remove the violating material altogether. This was undone about an hour later by Volunteer Marek, the same editor who'd added the material originally.
- A little over a year later, Victor Chmara attempted to remove it a second time. This attempt was undone about two hours later. Since then, the material has remained unaltered.
There was another example of this pattern in January 2014. In this edit, someone removed material cited to a website that's self-published by American Renaissance. American Renaissance is a white nationalist organization, and their self-published material would not be considered reliable in any article, BLP or otherwise.
- A few hours after it was removed, an anonymous editor restored material almost identical to what had been removed, cited to another self-published page at the same website.
- The following month, a different editor made a second attempt to remove this material, with the argument that it was not notable enough to include if American Renaissance was the only source for it.
- A week later, the anonymous editor restored it again, with the argument that only a racist would care about removing it. Accusing other editors of racism was an effective way to stop them challenging this material, so it hasn't been challenged again.
The philosophy of yellow journalism
Adnan Oktar, Giovanni Di Stefano, and Richard Lynn might seem to have nothing in common, but they have something in common at Wikipedia. All three of them have given Wikipedia editors a reason to dislike them, and in return, Wikipedia editors have decided that these are living people for whom BLP policy should not be followed. Although the BLP violations can sometimes be removed from their articles for a little while, the editors removing these violations never have the same level of determination as those who restore them, so any compliance with BLP policy will always be short-lived.
The reasons for this aren't difficult to understand. When Wikipedians dislike someone, their priority will generally be to make sure the article about that person communicates the desired message, and policy is only important as far as it can support that. A few Wikipedians have argued that this is a healthy attitude to have towards the community's enemies, but it also shows something abnormal about where the project's priorities lie:
Hermann Göring (T-H-L) and Rudolph Hess (T-H-L) were, respectively the second-most and third-most powerful man in Nazi Germany. Göring was sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials, although he committed suicide before he could be executed, and Hess was sentenced to life imprisonment. However, both of these articles have attained "Good article" status, every statement in both articles is directly supported by a reliable source, and the articles do not contain any weasel words. More generally, the negative information about these individuals does not dominate their articles to nearly the extent that it does in the Oktar, Di Stefano and Lynn articles, because the articles about Göring and Hess articles are held to much higher standards of sourcing.
As long as the consensus of the Wikipedia community is that disliked living people do not deserve protection under BLP policy, this community holds a rather dubious distinction. It is one of the only communities, online or in the real world, where disliked individuals cannot be shown the same basic courtesies that are shown to Nazi war criminals.
