On 13/05/07, Todd Allen <toddmallen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Andrew Gray wrote:
On 13/05/07, Todd Allen
<toddmallen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
plenty of people that have gotten in trouble for
lying about where they
went to school, and a -ton- of people that lie about their age.)
The single most common specific OTRS complaint is "please correct my
date of birth"... I can't offhand think of any who've asked us to
correct which university they went to - at least, none where it might
have been wishful puffery. (There have been a couple who wanted us to
fix that we had them down as attending a prestigious university they
didn't, but I don't remember any the other way around)
That actually illustrates the issue very well, though. If someone
contacts you saying "Hey, correct my article, I have a PhD from
Harvard!" do you just go make the edit, or do you request independent
verification?
If it seems plausible and trivial, and doesn't disagree with any cited
source in the page, I take their word for it and make the correction.
If it seems unlikely, or it's significant - "you forgot to mention my
time in Parliament", I try to check further.
If it directly contradicts an existing source, then I decide which one
seems most likely to be true and proceed from there :-) Usually it's
fairly easy to smell a whitewashing request...
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk