ADDING INFORMATION ABOUT LIVING PERSONS

Editors must take particular care when adding information about living persons to any Wikipedia
page.
[1]
Such material requires a high degree of sensitivity, and must adhere strictly to all applicable
laws in the United States, to this policy, and to Wikipedia's three core content policies:
Neutral point of view (NPOV)
Verifiability (V)
No original research (NOR)
We must get the article right. Be very firm about the use of high-quality sources. All quotations and
any material challenged or likely to be challenged must be explicitly attributed to a reliable,
published source, which is usually done with an inline citation. Contentious material about living
persons (or, in some cases, recently deceased) that is unsourced or poorly sourced whether the
material is negative, positive, neutral, or just questionable should be removed immediately and
without waiting for discussion.
[2]
Users who persistently or egregiously violate this policy may
be blocked from editing.
Biographies of living persons ("BLP"s) must be written conservatively and with regard for the
subject's privacy. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a tabloid: it is not Wikipedia's job to be
sensationalist, or to be the primary vehicle for the spread of titillating claims about people's lives; the
possibility of harm to living subjects must always be considered when exercising editorial judgment.
This policy applies to any living person mentioned in a BLP, whether or not that person is the subject
of the article, and to material about living persons in other articles and on other pages, including talk
pages.
[3]
The burden of evidence for any edit rests with the person who adds or restores material.

Writing style
Tone
BLPs should be written responsibly, cautiously, and in a dispassionate tone, avoiding both
understatement and overstatement. Articles should document in a non-partisan manner what
reliable secondary sources have published about the subjects, and in some circumstances what the
subjects have published about themselves. BLPs should not have trivia sections.
Balance
Further information: Wikipedia:COATRACK
Criticism and praise should be included if they can be sourced to reliable secondary sources, so long
as the material is presented responsibly, conservatively, and in a disinterested tone. Do not
give disproportionate space to particular viewpoints; the views of tiny minorities should not be
included at all. Care must be taken with article structure to ensure the overall presentation and
section headings are broadly neutral. Beware of claims that rely on guilt by association, and biased,
malicious or overly promotional content.
The idea expressed in WP:Eventualism that every Wikipedia article is a work in progress, and that
it is therefore okay for an article to be temporarily unbalanced because it will eventually be brought
into shape does not apply to biographies. Given their potential impact on biography subjects' lives,
biographies must be fair to their subjects at all times.
Attack pages
Further information: Wikipedia:Attack pages and Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion G10
Pages that are unsourced and negative in tone, especially when they appear to have been created
to disparage the subject, should be deleted at once if there is no policy-compliant version to revert
to; see below. Non-administrators should tag them with {{db-attack}}. Creation of such pages,
especially when repeated or in bad faith, is grounds for immediate blocking.
Reliable sources
Challenged or likely to be challenged
Main page: WP:SOURCES
Wikipedia's sourcing policy, Verifiability, says that all quotations and any material challenged or
likely to be challenged must be attributed to a reliable, published source using an inline citation;
material not meeting this standard may be removed. This policy extends that principle, adding that
contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced should be removed
immediately and without discussion. This applies whether the material is negative, positive, neutral,
or just questionable, and whether it is in a biography or in some other article. Material should not be
added to an article when the only sourcing is tabloid journalism. When material is both verifiable and
noteworthy, it will have appeared in more reliable sources.
Remove contentious material that is unsourced or poorly sourced
See also: Wikipedia:Libel
Policy shortcuts:
WP:GRAPEVINE
WP:BLPREMOVE
Remove immediately any contentious material about a living person that is unsourced or poorly
sourced; that is a conjectural interpretation of a source (see No original research); that relies on self-
published sources, unless written by the subject of the BLP (see below); or that relies on sources
that fail in some other way to meet Verifiability standards. Note: although the three-revert rule does
not apply to such removals, what counts as exempt under BLP can be controversial. Editors who
find themselves in edit wars over potentially defamatory material about living persons should
consider raising the matter at the BLP noticeboard instead of relying on the exemption.
Administrators may enforce the removal of clear BLP violations with page protection or by blocking
the violator(s), even if they have been editing the article themselves or are in some other way
involved. In less clear cases they should request the attention of an uninvolved administrator
at Wikipedia:Administrators Noticeboard/Incidents.
Avoid gossip and feedback loops
Policy shortcut:
WP:BLPGOSSIP
Avoid repeating gossip. Ask yourself whether the source is reliable; whether the material is being
presented as true; and whether, even if true, it is relevant to a disinterested article about the subject.
Be wary of sources that use weasel words and that attribute material to anonymous sources. Also
beware of feedback loops, in which material in a Wikipedia article gets picked up by a source, which
is later cited in the Wikipedia article to support the original edit.
Avoid misuse of primary sources
Further information: WP:PRIMARY
Shortcut:
WP:BLPPRIMARY
Exercise extreme caution in using primary sources. Do not use trial transcripts and other court
records, or other public documents, to support assertions about a living person. Do not use public
records that include personal details, such as date of birth, home value, traffic citations, vehicle
registrations, and home or business addresses.
Where primary-source material has been discussed by a reliable secondary source, it may be
acceptable to rely on it to augment the secondary source, subject to the restrictions of this policy, no
original research, and the other sourcing policies.
[4]

Avoid self-published sources
Shortcut:
WP:BLPSPS
Never use self-published sources including but not limited to books, zines, websites, blogs, and
tweets as sources of material about a living person, unless written or published by the subject (see
below). "Self-published blogs" in this context refers to personal and group blogs. Some news
organizations host online columns that they call blogs, and these may be acceptable as sources so
long as the writers are professionals and the blog is subject to the newspaper's full editorial control.
Posts left by readers are never acceptable as sources.
[5]
See below for our policy on self-published
images.
Using the subject as a self-published source
Shortcut:
WP:BLPSELFPUB
Further information: WP:SELFPUB
Living persons may publish material about themselves, such as through press releases or personal
websites. Such material may be used as a source only if:
1. it is not unduly self-serving;
2. it does not involve claims about third parties;
3. it does not involve claims about events not directly related to the subject;
4. there is no reasonable doubt as to its authenticity;
5. the article is not based primarily on such sources.
Further reading, external links, and see also
Shortcuts:
WP:BLPEL
WP:BLPFR
WP:BLPSEEALSO
External links about living persons, whether in BLPs or elsewhere, are held to a higher standard than
for other topics. Questionable or self-published sourcesshould not be included in the "Further
reading" or "External links" sections of BLPs, and, when including such links in other articles, make
sure the material linked to does not violate this policy. Self-published sources written or published by
the subject of a BLP may be included in the FR or EL sections of that BLP with caution; see above.
In general, do not link to websites that contradict the spirit of this policy or violate the External
links guideline. Where that guideline is inconsistent with this or any other policy, the policies prevail.
Similarly, "See also" links should not be used to imply any contentious categorization or claim about
a living person.