On 8/28/07, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 8/28/07, Puppy <puppy(a)killerchihuahua.com>
wrote:
Utter nonsense. For example, the president and
the entire secret service
as well as judges and the police are all public servants, paid from the
publics pocketbook. And they all have confidential and secret
information, and taxpayers demanding they "tell all" or risk public
censure is beyond naive, its destructive, self and otherwise.
However there are mechanisms in place for independent oversight.
There are multiple mechanisms in Wikipedia's structure for independent
oversight: the Foundation's Board, Jimmy, Arbcom, the Checkuser
community, Mike Godwin, the (er, whoever the board put in place to
review CU / privacy issues, the ombudsperson? My apologies, I only
had two hours of sleep and forget the title), and to the degree it's
public a thousand-odd admins and all the normal editors.
Not all of them can simultaneously come into play at every level of
sensitive case, by nature. But they're there.
Either the system works... we are mostly honorable people, and have
enough honest and principled people that if something seriously
sinister started someone would stand up and publically announce it and
call for it to end.
Or it does not work, in which case we're waiting for someone malign
enough to exploit the system and turn Wikipedia into a nasty private
playground for an in crowd.
I chose to believe that the system works. I see no reason to believe
that there's anyone who is actively involved who is seriously
*un*trustworthy; I think that I've seen varying levels of mistakes
from many people, and have made my fair share. But I believe in the
integrity of the people and the fundamental processes. The idea that
we could find a group of evil-minded cabalists capable enough to fake
it in public and then do dirty deeds in private sufficiently large and
talented to "run" wikipedia behind the scenes seems beyond farfetched
into paranoia.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com