Task force/Living People/Drafting pages/Living People Policy

Resolved

Having passed a previous resolution, the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees hereby resolves to mandate a global policy on living people, to be hosted on Meta-Wiki. This policy is applicable to all Wikimedia Foundation hosted projects, specifically those without current policies. All other projects must operate within the framework of the global living people policy.

Policy

Editors must take great care to assure accuracy when writing about living people on any Wikimedia page due to the real-world impact that these works may have. The first concern should always be to take human dignity and personal privacy into account when adding information, especially in articles of ephemeral or marginal interest. Articles should be written conservatively, and contested information must be justified by those who seek to add it. This also applies to treating editors and volunteers with proper respect and courtesy to build a collaborative environment.

All projects that describe living people should pay special attention to the principles of neutrality, and if applicable, verifiability when writing articles. Any inaccuracies presented as a proven fact about a living person which cannot be verified must quickly be corrected or immediately removed unless a suitable reliable source can be found.

Projects that allow primary or secondary research are instructed to put into place local standards which pay attention to the need to present new research finding on living people in a way that assures neutrality and objectivity and that ensures that original theories, hypotheses and speculations do not mislead or misrepresent the facts. This must occur when the community deems itself capable of building local, consensus driven policy formation.