How to remove negative information from Wikipedia

Can you remove negative information from Wikipedia?

Sometimes, but only when the material breaks one of Wikipedia's content policies. Being unwelcome is not enough. Wikipedia's own advice to article subjects puts it bluntly: information won't be taken down just because it makes you unhappy, and if it is uncomplimentary but accurate and backed by reliable sources, there is nothing you can do about it.

That sounds final, but in practice a great deal of negative material on Wikipedia does fail a policy. It may rest on a blog or a tabloid. The cited article may not say what the sentence claims. A charge may be reported with no mention that it was later dropped. A single complaint from years ago may fill a third of a short biography. Each of those is a recognised problem with a recognised remedy.

So the useful question is not whether the material is negative but which policy it fails, if any. Requests that answer that question get acted on. Requests that argue the material is unfair, damaging or out of character, without pointing to a policy, are read as advocacy and usually go nowhere.

Which negative material can legitimately be removed?

Material that is unsourced, poorly sourced, unsupported by its own citation, private, or a breach of the biographies of living persons policy can be removed. The table sets out the common cases and the rule behind each one.

Two of these rules apply with special force. The biographies policy says the burden of evidence rests with the editor who adds or restores material, and that when material about a living person has been removed on good-faith objections, it should not be restored without significant change unless consensus is reached first. A removal made under that policy is therefore hard to undo without better sourcing.

The policy also has limits. It does not normally apply to material about companies and other organisations, which are judged under the ordinary content policies instead, although the policy notes that a harmful statement about a very small group can come close to being a statement about the individuals in it.

What does undue weight mean for a negative section?

It means a negative episode is given more space, detail or prominence than the reliable sources on the subject as a whole give it. The neutral point of view policy requires articles to represent viewpoints in proportion to their prominence in reliable sources, and it lists the ways weight can be distorted: the depth of detail, the quantity of text, the prominence of placement and the juxtaposition of statements.

A separate part of the same policy, on balancing aspects, deals with exactly the situation many subjects face. Isolated events, criticisms or news reports may be verifiable and impartially written, it says, and still be disproportionate to their overall significance to the topic. It singles out recent events in the news as the usual culprit.

The biographies policy adds two points of its own. Criticism and praise belong in an article if reliable secondary sources report them, but disproportionate space should not go to particular viewpoints. And the idea that an article can be unbalanced for now because it will be fixed eventually does not apply to biographies, which must be fair to their subjects at all times.

Weight arguments rarely remove material outright. What they achieve is proportion:

• a long "Controversy" section trimmed to the facts the sources agree on;
• a separate criticism heading folded into the chronology, which the neutrality policy itself prefers to sections that set one side against the other;
• the outcome added where the article reports only the allegation, such as an investigation closed with no action;
• the subject's denial reported, which the policy requires when a public figure has denied an allegation.

What negative material will Wikipedia keep?

Accurate, relevant material that reliable, independent sources have published will normally stay. For public figures the biographies policy is explicit: if an allegation or incident is noteworthy, relevant and well documented, it belongs in the article even if it is negative and the subject dislikes all mention of it. Its own example is a politician whose alleged affair was widely reported. The article should say the affair was alleged, not that it happened, but it should say it.

The policy sets a floor as well. If an editor cannot find multiple reliable third-party sources documenting the incident, it should be left out. For people who are not well known, the standard is stricter still: editors are told to include only material relevant to the person's notability and to treat material that may harm their reputation with special care.

Wikipedia's verifiability policy adds a point subjects often miss. Verifiability is a requirement for inclusion, not a guarantee of it. Editors can agree that a verifiable fact does not improve an article, and the responsibility for achieving consensus to include disputed content lies with those who want it in. That is the opening for a proportionate, well-argued request about a minor episode. It is not a route to removing a story that was reported widely and in depth.

What are the proper routes to remove or rebalance material?

For most problems the route is a request on the article's talk page, made openly by the subject or someone acting for them, which an uninvolved editor then reviews. The other routes exist for particular cases:

1. A talk page edit request. Quote the sentence, say which policy it fails, and give the source or the absence of one. This is the standard route for factual, sourcing and weight problems. Our guide to Wikipedia edit requests covers the mechanics.
2. The biographies of living persons noticeboard. For a biography where a request has stalled or the problem is serious, the policy invites subjects to post an explanation there and ask uninvolved editors to check that the article is fairly written and properly sourced.
3. The Volunteer Response Team. Subjects with legal or other serious concerns can email the team, whose volunteers handle correspondence in confidence. The biographies policy says it is usually better to ask for help than to change the material yourself.
4. The oversight team. For non-public personal information, or potentially libellous material where the case is clear, oversighters can suppress revisions so that even administrators cannot see them. The biographies policy advises using a bland edit summary when removing such material, and not announcing an oversight request, to avoid drawing attention to it.
5. Dispute resolution. If editors disagree about weight after discussion, the venues described in our guide to repeated and hostile edits apply.

A connected person may remove some material directly. The conflict of interest guideline allows them to remove unambiguous violations of the biographies policy and unambiguous vandalism. The guideline also says that if another editor objects for any reason, the edit is not uncontroversial, and the biographies policy warns that what counts as a violation can itself be disputed. Anything short of a plain, unsourced smear belongs on the talk page.

Why does deleting criticism yourself usually backfire?

Because the edit is public, it is usually reverted, and it turns a content question into a conduct question. Wikipedia's guidance for people working in public relations lists removing negative material, with the exception of genuine biography policy violations, among the things never to do. Every article's history records exactly what was changed, by which account, and when.

The usual sequence is predictable. The removal is undone by someone watching the page. A warning appears on the account's talk page. If the account appears connected to the subject, the article may gain a conflict of interest tag and its talk page a notice listing the connected accounts, as described in our guide to the conflict of interest tag. Repeated removals become edit warring, and accounts that appear to exist mainly to promote a person or company can be blocked, sometimes without warning.

The cases that reached the press show how far it can go. In December 2011 journalists reported that the London agency Bell Pottinger had edited articles on behalf of clients. Wikipedia editors traced up to 19 accounts to its offices and blocked 10 of them, and the edits reported included the removal of information about a client's drug conviction. The same year, PR Week described an unnamed London figure who offered to "cleanse" articles, with 42 edits from one IP address, most of them removing negative material. Wikipedia's article on conflict of interest editing records both. In each case the attempt to remove criticism became a story of its own.

Can an entire negative article be deleted?

Only in narrow circumstances. An article that is unsourced and negative in tone, and appears to exist mainly to disparage its subject, is an attack page and can be speedily deleted under criterion G10. The biographies policy also allows an administrator to delete a whole biography when it consists mostly of unsourced or poorly sourced contentious material and there is no acceptable earlier version to return to.

Relatively unknown people have a further option. A person who does not wish to be the subject of a biography can nominate it for deletion, or ask the Volunteer Response Team to do so. Unless the person clearly meets the general notability guideline or is a current or former elected or appointed official, editors are told to seriously consider honouring the request, and if the discussion ends without consensus an administrator may close it as delete. The process itself is explained in our guide to Articles for Deletion, and the checks expected before filing, with the request route for subjects, are in our guide on how to nominate a Wikipedia page for deletion.

A well-known subject cannot use deletion to escape criticism. The deletion policy says it is inappropriate to request deletion because of an editorial dispute, and Wikipedia's advice to subjects says that calling an article bad, inaccurate or biased is not a reason for deletion. A nomination made on that basis tends to be kept, and the discussion is archived permanently.

How do you build a case editors will accept?

By making the reviewer's job easy and keeping the argument on policy. The requests that succeed tend to share the same features:

• They deal with one problem at a time, quoting the exact sentence.
• They name the rule, in a phrase: unsourced, fails verification, self-published source, undue weight.
• They check the citation first. A surprising share of negative sentences overstate what their source says, and pointing that out is the strongest argument there is.
• They bring newer reliable coverage where the story moved on, such as an acquittal, a settlement or a regulator closing a case.
• They propose replacement wording rather than a blank space, because editors are more willing to change text than to lose it.
• They are short, polite and open about who is asking.

For example, a company article might carry a three-paragraph section on a regulatory investigation, sourced to two news reports from the week it opened. A trade publication later reported that the investigation closed without action. A strong request would not ask for the section to go. It would propose a two-sentence summary placed in the company's history, citing both the original reports and the later one, and explain that the current length gives the episode more weight than the coverage supports.

When is it sensible to bring in an experienced editor?

If a negative sentence has no source at all, a short talk page request pointing that out will usually be enough, and you can make it yourself. Wikipedia's processes handle that kind of problem well.

Difficulty starts when the material is sourced and the argument is about proportion, sourcing quality or what a later report changes. There the outcome depends on judgement calls that experienced editors make quickly and subjects often get wrong: whether a source counts as reliable for that claim, whether the problem is weight or accuracy, whether the noticeboard or a private email is the right venue. Requests that call accurate reporting defamatory, or that hint at legal action, damage the case, and the blocking policy treats legal threats made on or off Wikipedia as grounds for a block. Every request and reply stays on the talk page, and the next editor to review the article reads them.

Our page repair work starts by checking each negative sentence against its source and the policy that governs it, then sets out which problems can be fixed, which can only be rebalanced, and which will stay. We prepare the requests and sourcing and handle the discussion that follows. If you want that assessment first, the free page health check is the place to start.