Thanks David. Please let me know what they say. I'd like to reiterate that the information I am assuming he's unhappy with wasn't backed up by sourcing, it was just a crazy rant about his relationship with UT and his book being biased. K. ----- Original Message ---- From: David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org>rg>; Arbitration Committee mailing list <arbcom-l(a)wikipedia.org> Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2005 6:35:39 AM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] More Seigenthaler fallout I wrote on wikien-l: this note. As you know, I have been the subject of some discussion in one of the pages you administer. Some of those comments I consider libelous. I strongly suggest that you, as the party responsible for this article and discussion, and/or Wiki executives take immediate action to purge such false and irresponsible statements, and block such from occurring in the future. I should emphasise here I don't mean John Siegenthaler - or, without knowledge of the case, the person who wrote to Katefan0. I've dealt with a number of cases of perfectly normal and decent people who understand and respect our mission as an NPOV encyclopedia, but are unhappy at being slandered by conspiracy-obsessed nutters who just won't quit and aren't quite sure what to do about it. Usually we work it out okay with a close watch on the article and (possibly) suitable penalties for the antisocial editor. A recent example is [[User:AI]] on [[David S. Touretzky]] (which AI started as a slander page and has now been NPOVed quite well) and [[Keith Henson]] (which AI didn't start but got heavily to work on). However, we have *plenty* of the other sort. Examples include [[Sollog]], [[Daniel Brandt]], [[Ashida Kim]], [[John Byrne]] (yep, the famous comics artist), [[Barbara Schwarz]] ... I am *greatly* reluctant to let people bowdlerise their article because they don't like notable and well-documented facts. Our concern is much more with getting things right than it is to inexpertly second-guess the law. It's also far more within our expertise! And once a case *comes to the community's attention*, the article tends to get watchlisted by skilled and experienced editors who will have familiarised themselves with the subject. This may require removing particularly bad revisions in extreme cases after due consideration, though that's a lot of tedious work that's easily undone with one new edit re-adding the crap. But IMO, we can't get into a habit of removing negative information on first request just like that. [cc: to arbcom list for consideration] - d. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

One problem I've noticed is that so many anons are editing that entire pages of edit histories consist of anon edits. Many are fine, some superb, but some are dodgy. In the past, with a smaller database of articles we could pretty much guarantee that most if not all would be checked by others and errors corrected. But all too often things don't seem to be being checked. The problem for users who see a long list of anon edits is that they don't know if they are perfectly OK edits that have been looked at by others and not thought to need correction (hence the absence of usernic edits) or if they simply have never been checked. All too often, faced with a massive list of anon edits, the approach of people (myself included) has been to look at a sample edit and see if it was a good edit or a vandalistic edit. If it was good, then we presume they were a serious contributor don't look at each edit. While reading the up-to-date article is all very well, the problem is that some perfectly valid content may well have been deleted somewhere along the line. But unless we check each edit, or go back to sample pages we don't know if something valid was dumped by someone at some stage and not noticed when a genuine user came in directly afterwards and made a good edit of the surviving test. What WP needs is some way to ensure that users can tell if anon edits were checked. That way we can spot those that weren't and not have people duplicating checks on good anon edits. Perhaps the page history should include a review box that could be ticked by a named user to indicate that they checked the text at that point. It doesn't have to mean a formal approval of the text, merely to let people know that someone had looked at it. I know there are users I from experience trust implicitly. I know the quality of their work. Seeing that say John Kenney had glanced over an edit on a royal biographical page would be enough for me to know, going by his ability, that I don't have to recheck. Similarly a review of a page had been looked over by Izehar, Michael Hardy, Mav or tons of others means I don't have to spend ages checking things. Right now, because we don't know who has checked what stuff some stuff is being checked to death, while other articles are not being checked at all. It would be a big help if we could spot the checked and unchecked articles and so focus our attentions on those that need a check. Thom --------------------------------- How much free photo storage do you get? Store your holiday snaps for FREE with Yahoo! Photos. Get Yahoo! Photos