On 4/20/07, Tony Sidaway <tonysidaway(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 4/21/07, George Herbert
<george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote:
We are an encyclopedia, and an open source content project. Our
objective, as a project, is to create and host content. That includes
biographies of people who are alive.
Any open source project, content or code or whatever, is subject to or
at risk of attacks. This is a fact of life.
Let's describe this "risk of attacks" to an "open source project"
in
more realistic terms: real harm done to real people on a daily basis.
This isn't a bit of code that we can assign a "no warrantees"
disclaimer on. We have to take the damage very seriously.
And Linus Torvalds doesn't? A vulnerabilty snuck into Linux today
would potentially affect half the servers on the Internet. A
vulnerability snuck into Apache would affect a vast majority of the
websites on the Internet. MySQL and PostgreSQL? Perl? Billions of
dollars are at stake with those. Not being personally responsible for
the goof wouldn't make the horrific consequences go away.
Existing presumably accidental vulnerabilities in all the above DO
constitute a major fact of life for IT staff and managers, and cause
security exposures somewhere on the net on a daily basis, with real
financial and employement and privacy effects on real people. Every
day.
We should take damage that Wikipedia can cause to people seriously.
And we do. BLP sets the policy framework, that what you say about
live people has to be better sourced and more neutral if it's at all
negative, and then some. People watch biographies as closely as any
other single class of articles. The stable versions upgrade to
Mediawiki will hopefully eliminate the driveby anon or throwaway
account bio vandalism problem, and that upgrade is if ambiguously off
in the distance at least a well understood, well agreed to technical
upgrade in the works.
Society and the law say that you have to treat people's reputations
with some care. But the standards for that care are far below what
Wikipedia already does. We can hold ourselves to higher standards,
and we do. If we try to set those standards too high, we hamstring
the project's goals to build the encyclopedia and create both open
content and a site and technology to promote the creation of more open
content.
There seems to be a strong argument being put forth here that we're
neglegent by legal and/or societal standards in our handling of living
persons biographies. We aren't. We're one of the better sites on the
Internet from those perspectives. We should neither be complacent or
underestimate the scope of the problem or be insensitive to how people
feel when they're bitten by it, nor cripple the project and denigrate
ourselves endlessly for the fact that it is still a major issue.
We're doing OK. Don't break it trying to "Fix" it.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com