eloquence
commented
7 years ago Dear Philippe,
Thanks for starting this conversation. I won't pretend that we have good or final answers to these questions yet -- consider what we have right now an imperfect first draft for a policy.
What I would like to avoid are reviews that touch a person's fundamental dignity, and I do think, for example, that rating a person based on their appearance risks transgressing into that territory. Of course demeaning or dehumanizing comments may occur in the context of a review of, say, a restaurant experience (e.g., comments about the wait staff), but they seem much more likely if we open the pandora's box of arbitrary reviews of human beings. Hence, even if that forecloses some useful reviews, my bias is to keep the box closed for now.
For artists, authors, performers I would suggest that we focus on reviewing individual works, performances, and so on, rather than attempting to review the human being behind them. Similarly, for politicians, it is often possible to identify the party or at least the political platform on which they're campaigning.
With that said, I could imagine that we extend lib.reviews to allow for "introductions" to a person's body of work -- without the star-rating component. In that way we may be able to decouple the "rating" aspect from the observational/analytical aspect. Does that make sense?
I'll highlight this conversation on our mailing list as well in case more folks want to weigh in.
"Humans are not products: We don't permit reviews of individual human beings (reviewing business entities operated by only one person is fine)."
How does it apply to actors in a role, or singer of a song, or sportman, or politician ? Is that necessarily the same "business entity" ?
How does it apply to that same person for all their known public performances or public carrier ?
Can we criticize an actor by saying "Sean Connery is a poor actor", or "I don't like the look of the last elected Miss Universe", or "I hate Trump" when they do not necessarily drive the business in which they had their public performance as it was part of their current position, but they could also have other records of "bad" public performance in other positions, and in which they are personally and unmabiguously identifiable ?