Talk:Andy Liu

Child porn arrest

Kraxler (talk · contribs) has removed the material from the article about Liu's arrest on child porn charges, citing WP:BLPCRIME and the fact that we don't know the outcome of this case. I believe this material should be included for the following reasons: (1) BLPCRIME does not state that the material should be removed, only that we should seriously consider whether or not it should be included; (2) BLPCRIME applies to "relatively unknown people" but the outcome of the AfD suggests that Liu is in fact notable; (3) Liu's arrest was reported both in the major national newspapers of Canada and internationally in the US and Asian presses (some of which were cited in the article but there are many more), so it is not just a minor incident; (4) Liu is notable for his work with youth mathematicians so this arrest may have some direct relevance to his notability; (5) the article accurately stated the events (he was arrested) without editorialization; (6) we need to use the sources about his arrest anyway, regardless of whether we mention the arrest, since they are used for unrelated claims in the article, so it seems silly and counterproductive to have a source whose headline is "Retired U of A professor among hundreds arrested" without explaining it in the article. Other opinions? —David Eppstein (talk) 18:04, 28 September 2015 (UTC)

• I'll answer here point by point:

1. BLPCRIME says "editors must seriously consider not including material in any article suggesting that the person has committed, or is accused of committing, a crime unless a conviction is secured" - "not" is bolded in the original, so here we are, considering "not" to add while "not" added righ now. (Meaning the default is not adding, we may add after the discussion is over, if that's the consensus).
2. any policy or guideline would apply only to people who actually have an article here, and thus are notable, "relatively unknown" is anybody at the low end of the spectrum, like this one, I had never heard about, and passed scraping by the AfD
3. Newsmedia suffer from the need to cause WP:SENSATIONs to sell copy, one person arrested in a batch of 150 is singled out because he was the only one with a Wikipedia article, apparently no conviction was obtained, or was worth a follow up report
4. he is retired, so his arrest has nothing to do with his academic carrer, nobody ever had accused him of impropriety before
5. the article omits the details "possession of child pornography" may be anything from a single photo of a 17-year old in a bikini to a 90-minute video of adults penetrating 1-year-old babies, the mews report (based on the police press release) attempts to blacken the perpetrators without stating any facts
6. one of the three sources about his arrest is used to ref his degree from McGill, we can look for another one, I left it in for the time being so the debaters here can see it, we may remove it later

• Please note that BLP is difficult territory, we may also proceed to a discussion at the BLP noticeboard. And now I want to see a third opinion. Kraxler (talk) 18:27, 28 September 2015 (UTC)
  • I left neutrally-worded messages requesting a third opinion at WT:WPM and WP:BLPN. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:41, 28 September 2015 (UTC)