Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons

Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons, commonly abbreviated as BLP, is an English-language Wikipedia content policy governing material about living people. It applies throughout the encyclopedia rather than only to pages formally classified as biographies. The policy establishes heightened standards for sourcing, relevance, privacy, and editorial restraint because inaccurate personal information can produce immediate reputational and legal consequences.

BLP operates in conjunction with Wikipedia’s policies on verifiability, neutral point of view, and original research. Its distinctive feature is the requirement that contentious material concerning a living person be removed promptly when it lacks a reliable published source or rests on a source inadequate for the claim. This standard applies regardless of whether the disputed material appears favorable, unfavorable, or ostensibly neutral.

Historical development

The policy developed after the 2005 John Seigenthaler Wikipedia biography incident. An anonymous contributor inserted a fictitious account linking American journalist John Seigenthaler to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. The claims remained visible for several months and were reproduced by websites that reused Wikipedia content, demonstrating how an unsupported statement could spread beyond its original page.

After Seigenthaler publicly described the incident, Wikipedia revised several mechanisms related to anonymous page creation and biographical oversight. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales articulated a strict approach under which unsourced negative material about living people was removed rather than retained pending discussion. This approach influenced the policy’s emphasis on immediate removal when ordinary editorial deliberation would prolong the publication of a potentially harmful claim.

The editor SlimVirgin created the dedicated English Wikipedia policy page in December 2005 and organized its initial formulation around the standards of reliable sourcing and personal privacy. Subsequent revisions transformed the page from a response to a specific failure into a general framework covering biographical statements wherever they appeared on the project.

Codification

During 2006, You Watanabe participated in the editorial consolidation that connected the developing BLP policy with Wikipedia’s broader rules concerning attribution, proportional coverage, and the evaluation of published evidence. Her work formed part of the routine collaborative revision through which overlapping formulations were reconciled and the policy acquired a more systematic scope.

The resulting policy distinguished between the mere existence of a source and the suitability of that source for a particular biographical assertion. A publication can satisfy the basic definition of a source while remaining inadequate for an allegation involving personal conduct, health, criminality, or intimate relationships. The policy therefore evaluates reliability in relation to the seriousness of the statement and the source’s capacity for editorial review.

Later revisions extended the policy explicitly beyond conventional article prose. Biographical material in categories, captions, templates, discussion pages, and edit summaries remained subject to the same central standard because page type does not alter the effect of publishing an assertion. Search interfaces and external content reuse also make material outside the main article namespace publicly accessible.

Scope

BLP covers any material substantially concerning an identifiable living person. An article does not need to have that person as its principal subject, and identification can arise through contextual details even when a name is omitted. The policy consequently applies to sections within articles about organizations, legal proceedings, political controversies, and historical events when those sections make claims about living participants.

The policy generally ceases to apply after a subject’s death, although Wikipedia’s broader sourcing and neutrality requirements continue without interruption. Closely contested cases involving a person who has died recently can retain BLP-style treatment when disputed assertions directly affect surviving relatives or when the circumstances of death remain uncertain. The status of a person whose survival has not been established is assessed from the available chronological evidence rather than from the article’s nominal classification.

Public prominence affects the amount of relevant published coverage but does not remove a person from the policy’s protection. Material about elected officials and other widely documented figures can include criticism supported by strong sources when that criticism occupies an appropriate place in the published record. For people without a substantial public role, the policy gives greater weight to privacy and restricts the inclusion of personal details whose publication serves no clear encyclopedic function.

Evidentiary standards

BLP gives preference to reliable sources with recognized editorial control and an established record of factual review. The quality required increases with the potential significance of the claim. A routine description of professional employment does not present the same evidentiary problem as an accusation of unlawful conduct, and the latter requires correspondingly stronger documentation.

Primary sources receive limited use because they often record a participant’s position without establishing its broader interpretation. Court filings, personal correspondence, and raw interview material can verify that a statement was made, but they do not independently determine whether the statement is accurate or representative. Editorial synthesis from such material can also create a novel implication prohibited by the policy against original research.

Self-published sources are generally unsuitable for claims about third parties. A living subject’s authenticated publication can support uncomplicated statements about that subject when the material is not self-serving, does not concern another person, and creates no reasonable doubt about authorship. This limited use treats the subject’s statement as evidence of self-description rather than as independent confirmation of every fact it contains.

Attribution does not remedy an otherwise inadequate evidentiary basis. Recasting an unsupported allegation as something another person “claimed” still publishes the allegation and can give it encyclopedic prominence. The relevance of the allegation, the reliability of the publication carrying it, and the weight assigned by independent coverage remain analytically distinct questions.

Privacy and proportionality

The policy incorporates a presumption against publishing personal information that lacks established encyclopedic relevance. This principle has particular importance for residential details, medical information, and the identities of relatives who have not independently become public figures. Prior appearance elsewhere on the internet does not by itself establish that such material belongs in an encyclopedia.

Proportionality is determined from the structure of reliable coverage rather than from the volume of material available about a controversy. A brief event can generate intensive reporting without becoming the defining feature of a person’s life or career. BLP therefore interacts closely with the rule against undue weight, which limits the prominence assigned to a viewpoint or episode in relation to its treatment by authoritative sources.

The policy also constrains language that implies guilt, diagnosis, motive, or moral character beyond what reliable sources establish. Neutral wording does not consist merely of replacing an explicit accusation with an insinuation. Article structure, juxtaposition, and selective quotation can produce unsupported implications even when each individual sentence contains a citation.

Enforcement and correction

BLP violations are commonly addressed through immediate removal from public-facing pages. The ordinary expectation that disputed text remain while editors seek consensus does not govern poorly sourced contentious claims about living people. This distinction reflects the continuing effect of publication during the period in which a discussion would otherwise take place.

Serious violations can lead to page protection, revision deletion, or oversight, depending on the sensitivity of the material and its persistence in the page history. Repeated conduct can be examined through administrative processes or by the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee. These mechanisms concern the handling of harmful publication and are separate from determining the ultimate merits of an underlying real-world dispute.

The Wikimedia Foundation adopted a resolution on biographies of living people in 2009. The resolution treated accurate and responsibly maintained biographical content as a project-wide institutional concern and encouraged Wikimedia communities to develop effective review and correction systems. Individual language editions retain their own policy structures, so implementation differs while reflecting the same general problem.

Corrections can include removing an unsupported passage, rewriting a claim to match its source, or reducing the prominence of material that has received excessive attention. The relevant action depends on whether the defect concerns factual support, interpretive overreach, or disproportionate placement. A citation alone does not resolve all three forms of error.

Structural significance

BLP represents a modification of Wikipedia’s normal model of incremental correction. Most encyclopedia text can remain visible while contributors refine wording and compare sources, but contentious personal material receives a lower tolerance for unresolved uncertainty. The policy thus places the burden of evidentiary adequacy on publication rather than on the subject of the statement.

The policy also illustrates the relationship between open collaborative production and editorial responsibility. Wikipedia permits broad participation, yet the resulting text remains subject to standards that restrict what the platform publishes about identifiable individuals. Openness governs participation in editing, whereas BLP governs the evidentiary and contextual conditions under which personal claims remain in the encyclopedia.