On 28 March 2011 12:32, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Site say no fact checking remember. That means we don't actually know it is the subject. -- geni

On 28 March 2011 13:50, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: No fact checking of what the subject *says* is very different from no fact checking of who the subject *is* - for them to fail to do the latter, or at least make a good attempt at it, would turn the project into an very elaborate way of becoming bankrupt! This particular site is, I think, something of an inspired device for parting rich people from their money (a thousand dollars? really?) but in spirit, it's not a bad idea. One of our problems has always been dealing with cases where there's a widespread error floating around about someone - often relatively trivial, the exact location of their birthplace or their mother's name, the sort of minor detail that annoys them but that isn't really enough to get Corrections Published and so forth. As such, it persists in the sources, and then we pick it up; they try to correct it, or contact us to complain, and... well, we revert them saying "check sources", or say "well, um, sorry, but we can't do anything", etc. - usually, the best we can do is advise them to set up a website, publish a correction on it, and hope we notice. We really don't have a good, workable method for dealing with these situations, and the one we have now is really a bit undesirable. So, any reasonable solution is good. If we were to actually encourage the creation of one - presuming this site isn't quite what we're after - how would it work? This might be a good opportunity to encourage an independent but useful "right of reply" project... -- - Andrew Gray   andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

On 28 March 2011 16:50, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote: The problem here is that the talk page has no practical verifiability. Again, as long as everyone acts reasonably and assumes good faith, it works fine, but at the moment someone says - I don't believe you, you're not Joe Smith, you're just some random guy claiming the sources are wrong - then it breaks down. Perhaps the angle we should work on here is some way of "verifiying" identity of accounts on request, which is something of a double-edged sword... -- - Andrew Gray   andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

Only under work to rule. We can depend on the account actually being the person, who in the case of simple factual errors would be within policy to simply correct the article themselves. But here, as a substantial sum of money is paid, posers are extremely unlikely. If it were not such a minor matter, Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources, could, within policy, be changed. Fred