[WikiEN-l] Ken Lay's death prompts confusion on Reuters

[Jesse W]

On Jul 8, 2006, at 4:01 PM, mboverload wrote:
> I am utterly shocked by your reply.
I'm sorry, but I'm also unsurprised.

> The only way to stop dubious edits by anon users is to not allow them 
> to
> edit.
Again, you don't clarify whether you mean: 1) Wikipedia editors who do 
not associate their editing with their legal name, or 2) Wikipedia 
editors editing without logging in.

Further, "stop" is not entirely clear - edits are atomic transactions - 
either they have not yet happened, or they have already happened - it's 
not possible to "stop" them.

It is possible to prevent a given user account and/or IP address from 
making future edits, for specified lengths of time.   This does not 
directly translate to the ability to stop actual *people* from making 
future edits.

In nearly all cases, we can make it harder for people to make future 
edits, and we can remove all traces of past edits they have made, but 
we can't entirely prevent them from making any edits.  There are too 
many public computers out there.  So, your statement is a non-starter - 
we can't do that.  However, luckily, as I said, we have a large number 
of measures to make it *harder* for a given person to make future 
edits, and/or to cause their past edits to be more or less hidden, and 
most people who make bad edits can be successfully persuaded, by means 
of these measures, to give up on making future edits, at least for a 
while.  That's the nature of Wikipedia (and the world at large).

>   I don't think that should be done.
Well, since it's impossible, I suppose it's good you don't think we 
should do it.

>   Newspapers don't care about how fast it was reverted, it's always in 
> the edit history.
Not always.  It can be removed from public view by deletion, and 
removed from the view of those with the sysop flag by use of the 
Oversight feature.  But, most of the time, we don't do either of those 
things.

>   Jesus christ.
Well, we do have an article (or 5) on [[Jesus Christ|Him]], but I'm not 
sure of the relevance.

> I stated the obvious
I hope readers of this thread will note that, contrary to being 
"obvious", what you stated is not even "possible".
>  and you jump on me for being a troll.
I viewed you as acting like one; it was not meant as a comment on your 
person, merely on your posts to this list.  Nevertheless, on 
reflection, you do seem to be posting in good faith; I am less certain 
of my view at this point.

>   That's pretty hurtful.
As I said above, I'm sorry, but unsurprised.

Jesse Weinstein