"I was heartbroken and nauseated almost to the point of vomiting about
the last two lines"
These are the words of an e-mail I dealt with today - and they are not
untypical. Without breaching confidentiality I can say little more. But
it related to a biography which, without any citation, commented on an
individual - making outrageous (and quite probably libelous) claims
about certain activities.
On behalf of wikipedia and the community, I apologised and assured the
complainant we took such things seriously and were working to ensure
they didn't happen. I may have lied.
Perhaps a more honest reply would have been:
"We're sorry you had to complain about this. Regrettably that's the
price you pay for our determination to retain as many articles as we
can, even though we can't currently maintain most of them. You see, if
we change things we might upset some of our editors who might have some
of their unreferenced articles deleted by mistake. Basically, we're more
concerned with that type of collateral damage than with wrecking your life.
Over time we hope to correct articles like this, although, at current
rates of growth we'll have ten times as many by then and still won't be
able to cope.
We have fixed the article, but please be aware that this incident may
well reoccur. We'll do our best to try to avoid that (providing it
doesn't interfere with our determination not to change our basic way of
operating).
Disclaimer: the Wikimedia Foundation is protected by Section 230 and so
takes no responsible, and the Wikipedia Community has not signed up to
any ethics code.
PS. You might like to know that the objectionable content has probably
been picked up by our mirrors by now. You can either live with that, or
contact them yourself.
Yours sincerely etc."
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