Talk:Kirsten Childs

CoI editing/Year of Birth

An editor (MAIMOB) claiming in the edit summaries to be the subject of this article has repeatedly removed the year of birth, even though that information is freely available online via public Authority Control records. I shall not engage in an edit war, but I have placed a Conflict of Interest tag on the article accordingly.--Muzilon (talk) 21:51, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

• She's not a public figure, and we typically take requests such as this from BLPs fairly seriously. I've removed the COI template. TonyBallioni (talk) 01:04, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

@TonyBallioni: I disagree that she is WP:LOWPROFILE. Why does she have a WP article in the first place? She's notable as a playwright (if not as an actress) because her works have won awards and been reviewed in major publications like The Guardian and the New York Times. (She has also been interviewed by the latter.) WP:DOB says "If the subject complains about the inclusion of the date of birth, or the person is borderline notable, err on the side of caution and simply list the year, provided that there is a reliable source for it." (NB. the article never included the full D-M-Y, just the year.) It seems incongruous to censor the year of birth here when that fact is publicly available via the Authority Control box at the bottom of the article.--Muzilon (talk) 03:43, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

Notability is not the same as being a public person. Additionally, not having a year of birth does not justify the use of the COI template. A non-public living person has requested that personally identifiable information be removed. We generally respect that request unless there is a compelling reason not to do so here. There isn’t, therefore we don’t include it. This has been the stable version for months and your COI tag was nothing but POINTY as you wrote the overwhelming majority of the article. Drop the stick here. TonyBallioni (talk) 03:54, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

I shall not re-add the year of birth, but there may be other editors who may do so, as that information is effectively in the public domain. I note that another editor (not me) has already added the "Year of birth missing" category to the article.--Muzilon (talk) 04:29, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

Christian75: see the above conversation. The category you added serves no purpose because we don't want a year of birth for this BLP. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:04, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

TonyBallioni Our policy, WP:DOB says " If the subject complains about the inclusion of the date of birth, or the person is borderline notable, err on the side of caution and simply list the year, provided that there is a reliable source for it. In a similar vein, [...]". Christian75 (talk) 16:16, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

If someone is a non-public person, and they have a valid reason for complaining about the inclusion of such information, we typically honour such a request as a courtesy. I'll ping DGG as a sanity check here, but this has been the case on any non-public BLP that I have dealt with, even if reliably sourced. And yes, I agree that policy allows for it in these cases as a year feature, it is a question as to if there is a reason to include the YOB that overrides the subject's desire for privacy. As she has been out of public performance for some time now, and works as a professor, I don't see a need for it, but I am willing to be convinced otherwise. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:25, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

I'll give my understanding of what we do, not my personal preference for what we ought to be doing: We have no policy or guideline that specifies that we would remove a well sourced year of birth at the subject's request. the guideline for removing date of birth under the BLP policy refers to the month and day, not the year. I am aware of a variety of motivations that would lead an individual to prefer to be publicly seen as older or younger than they are., and I suppose we have quietly made exceptions in some cases under the principle of Do No Harm. Such circumstances could be explained off-wiki by contacting the Wikimedia Foundation's volunteer response team (known as OTRS). To do this, e-mail info-en-q@wikimedia.org with a link to the article and details of the problem. I think most such requests would not be acted on, and I am not sure that a removal of birth year this way would hold up if challenged unless the reason was really critical.

The other place for such discussion would be WP:BLPN, the BLP noticeboard. I've checked its archives; there have been about 4 cases brought there, all of which resulted in having the year retained if the source was reliable.

If it is desired to change the BLP policy page to allow removal of year of birth, this would have to be discussed at WT:BLP. I would anticipate considerable opposition, and I am not sure what position I would take personally. DGG ( talk ) 23:28, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

Fair enough, DGG. I have no opposition then to the above. Thank you for the sanity check. TonyBallioni (talk) 23:35, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

No comment.--Muzilon (talk) 10:48, 31 January 2018 (UTC)