Wikipedia

Wikipedia:Topics to avoid

Although Wikipedia aims to be the sum of all human knowledge, Wikipedia articles must adhere to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, with extra care given when writing about living persons or other contentious topics. Unsourced or poorly-sourced information should either be verified by reliable sources or be removed. Articles that do not appear to meet the general notability guideline can be deleted.

Even though Wikipedia is not censored, there may be very rare cases where Wikipedia has to omit certain information regardless of its coverage in reliable sources. This could be for any of these reasons:

Examples

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Information removed per court order

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There have been a couple of occasions where content has had to be removed or made unavailable to readers due to court orders:

Harassment victims accused of crimes

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A previously-unknown individual becomes the target of a long-term harassment campaign whose participants expose their personal details and attempt to create a Wikipedia article about them, but the article is deleted as an attack page under CSD G10. Years later, the target is accused of a crime, and they receive coverage in sources because of that. WP:AVOIDVICTIM warns us that including every detail can lead to problems—even when the material is well sourced. ... This is of particular importance when dealing with living individuals whose notability stems largely or entirely from being victims of another's actions. ... Wikipedia editors must not act, intentionally or otherwise, in a way that amounts to participating in or prolonging the victimization.

This means that, if bad actors have unsuccessfully tried to maintain a Wikipedia article about their target in order to harass them, recreating that article (even in draftspace) would help those bad actors, and whoever does so may be considered an accomplice to harassment, even if they don't have the same bad intentions. Furthermore, discussions about sources that mention that person may violate the harassment policy if comments about persons are gratuitous to determining source quality.

Per WP:BLP1E, we generally should avoid having an article on a person when [r]eliable sources cover the person only in the context of a single event and [t]he person otherwise remains, and is likely to remain, a low-profile individual. If a living person is covered by reliable sources in the context of a harassment campaign against them, and any apparent notability they have attained for other things (e.g. creative works, subsequent allegations of criminal behavior) is a consequence of that campaign and not something they had attained beforehand, then they were arguably only notable for being targeted by that campaign.

Even if notability was no longer a concern, there would still be a dilemma:

  • Per WP:DUE, mainspace articles must fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in those sources. If most coverage about a living person in reliable sources mentions that they have been accused of a particular crime, an article about them must give due weight to those allegations.
  • Per WP:BLPCRIME, if the subject is not a public figure, then editors must seriously consider not including material ... that suggests [they have] committed, [are] suspected of, [are] a person of interest in, or [are] accused of having committed a crime, unless a conviction has been secured for that crime. If a living person is only notable for alleged crimes and they are not a public figure, giving due weight to such allegations in an article would be ill-advised.
  • If the subject is a public figure, then per WP:BLPPUBLIC: If an allegation or incident is noteworthy, relevant, and well documented, it belongs in the article, even if it is negative and the subject dislikes all mention of it.

Even though WP:LOWPROFILE defines a high-profile person as someone who voluntarily participates in attention-seeking activities, not everyone who does so is necessarily a public figure, especially not if the person in question is a minor or has been deemed incompetent by a judge and is therefore unable to consent to any attention they receive.

  • If the subject is still considered low-profile, and they haven't been convicted of particular crimes that they've received substantial coverage in reliable sources for, then an article about them can't give due weight to the allegations without violating the biographies of living persons policy.
  • If the subject is finally considered a public figure, then an article about them would have to give due weight to the allegations based on coverage in reliable sources.

In short, DUE favors including information about the allegations if the subject is high-profile, whereas BLP favors omitting such information if the subject is low-profile. If editors are unable to agree on whether the subject is low-profile or high-profile, they may waste eachothers' time participating in debates that are irreconciliable because both sides would believe that policy favors what they want, even though it would be impossible for an article to satisfy both of them simultaneously.

See also

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