[WikiEN-l] errors versus errors (was: Don't remove a WP:OFFICE tag put there by Danny)

[Delirium]

Delirium wrote:

>The more such ancillary concerns influence things, the worse for the content, in my opinion.
>  
>

I thought I'd elaborate a bit on this, because I think various people 
are operating under fundamentally different assumptions of how Wikipedia 
should operate, and how its operation affects things outside itself.

 From my perspective, the sole goal of Wikipedia should be to produce an 
encyclopedia that is as complete and accurate as possible.  Any policy 
changes that contribute to that are welcome.  For example, we could 
decide that Wikipedia is getting big enough to warrant being more 
judicious about what we write: require more stringent referencing, and 
remove (at least temporarily) unreferenced facts, especially ones that 
seem questionable.  That's starting to happen already.  We could also 
better label how good specific articles (and revisions) are.  That would 
allow us to have good articles interspersed with work-in-progress 
articles, while keeping errors in the work-in-progress versions from 
being too damaging to the overall trustworthiness of our information 
(because those articles would be clearly marked as "in progress").  We 
have tags that do that to some extent (dispute tags, references-needed 
tags, etc.), and the long-anticipated sifter project (or whatever it's 
called now) would do it to a greater extent.

There is another viewpoint: that we should take into account concerns 
other than the overall accuracy of the encyclopedia.  On this account, 
inaccurate negative information about living people is worse than other 
types of inaccurate information, and so should be treated specially.  I 
disagree with that.  It's certainly a direct case where harm could come 
about, but there are many other cases where much more harm could come 
about.  Yes, if it's inaccurate, someone could read our article on 
[[Jack Thompson (lawyer)]] and get unwarranted negative views of him.  
But if we have inaccurate articles, someone could also read our articles 
on the Israeli-Arab conflict and come away with unwarranted views of 
*that*.  The latter sort of inaccuracy has the potential to have a much 
greater negative effect on many more people than defaming Jack Thompson 
ever could.

There are a lot more examples, but the main point is that there are a 
*lot* of potential errors that could cause real-world problems if people 
read them and believe them.  Defamatory information on specific 
individuals is neither the only nor the most problematic type of error.  
Therefore, trying to make fine-grained decisions about which errors are 
worse than others, and setting up special processes to deal with the 
ones deemed to be worse, is entirely the wrong approach, and likely to 
lead *neither* to a more accurate encyclopedia on the whole, *nor* to a 
reduction in the negative effects inaccuracies in Wikipedia have on real 
people.  A better approach, in my view, is to attack the problem directly.

We don't want errors at all.  Referencing standards and the like attack 
this problem, and perhaps there are additional things we could change.  
Since a work-in-progress is rarely error-free, we also want to better 
mark how trustworthy particular revisions should be considered, which 
will reduce the negative impact of any inaccuracies in the versions 
clearly marked "hey this might not be right!".  Various tags and a 
future sifter project address this issue.  And, finally, we want a 
streamlined way to vet facts.  A number of things address this problem: 
a more intuitive referencing system (with references attached to 
specific bits of information); community culture about referencing and 
dealing with controversies; facilitation by the Foundation to pass along 
inaccuracies reported by people who don't edit Wikipedia; and so on.

Of course, legal issues may intervene in some cases; if the Foundation 
is the target of legal threats or lawsuits, then they can do what their 
lawyers advise them.  The main issue at hand, though, is what we should 
do in other cases.

-Mark