Of course I fully support the spirit and motives behind BLP and
obviously I see the urgent need to make sure serious allegations
against living people are fully and reliably sourced. But people are
stretching BLP far beyond what it should be used to combat - unsourced
and unreliable assertions. Now people are using it to remove all
sorts of critical information that would reasonably be included and to
further their own ideological agendas. Some examples, all typed in
with presumably a straight face.
* A man who posted nude pictures of himself on websites whose domains
he registered advertising himself as a $200-an-hour gay prostitute can
not be identified as a prostitute.
* The Financial Times cannot be used as a source in an article about a
journalist because they "report on finances issues" and thus are
"unreliable" when it comes to other matters.
* The Columbia Journalism Review is a reliable source. A blog run by
the Columbia Journalism Review on the website of the Columbia
Journalism Review is not.
* The New Republic, among other reputable, long-standing publications,
cannot be used as a source because they are "too partisan".
* Partisan organizations and publications, even long-standing and
reputable ones, cannot be used in an article at all, even to
substantiate the fact that there is partisan criticism of the subject
of the article. I'm not taking about someone objecting to "John Doe
did this bad thing", I'm talking about people objecting to the article
saying "X, Y, and Z criticize John Doe, saying this thing he did may
have been bad."
In addition to well-intentioned people wildly misapplying BLP and RS,
we may have handed a powerful new weapon to POV warriors, who wish to
sanitize all the articles about their ideological fellow travelers. A
well-meaning user has created the "Libel Protection Unit", but this is
the same person who thinks that you are libeling someone by quoting
something said by the "unreliable" Financial Times, and among the
people he's unwittingly recruited for his new group and have eagerly
signed up are some notorious POV warriors and at least one certified
troll. I realize that what I'm writing may not show much good faith,
but based on what I've seen from some of these folks and the
statements I've noted above, I fear that this LPU will do much to
remove legitimate material from the encyclopedia and do little to
protect us from actual libel. Some people have weighed in with
sensible remarks, like Jmabel at [[Wikipedia talk:Libel-Protection
Unit]], but I think more people should do so before this gets out of
hand.
---- Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Lets look at the possibilities:
-In a world we where tell PR Firms not to edit:
* PR firm follows the rules, doesn't edit.
**Pool of editing people decreased
**Harm of biased insertions avoided
or
* PR firm ignores the rules, secretly inserts biased material.
**We detect it: Harm is mitigated.
**We fail to detect it: harm remains.
=====================================================
Hello Greg,
Overall agree with your post with the exception of PR firms staying in business to keep their clients. I think this type of business is perfect for con artists that open and close businesses at a rapid pace in different US states or around the world.
They bill the customers and then move on to a new company name, leaving businesses angry at us for not putting their article on Wikipedia.
I think this type of illegal activity is a real possibility and is another reason that we should ban PR firms from our site. With this policy we will not be caught up in the illegal activity.
Take care,
Sydney aka FloNight
http://news.com.com/Growing+pains+for+Wikipedia/2100-1025_3-5981119.html?ta…
"Thus, to avoid future problems, Wales plans to bar anonymous users from
creating new articles; only registered members will be able to do so.
That change will go into effect Monday, he said, adding that anonymous
users will still be able to edit existing entries."
Why were Wikipedians the last to know about this? I only saw some
discussion on the mailing list about this, but nothing final. Why do we
have to learn of this from the media instead of straight from Jimbo?
This is really disturbing.
John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])
Jared Benedict bought all of the USGS maps for $1600 and then had a
fund raiser to recoup the money. That has been done and now they are
being uploaded to the Internet Archive. Project info is here
http://ransom.redjar.org/
Just letting people know, I'm sure there are a lot of cartographers
eager to get these into wikipedia :D
Judson
I do not care about the block, but I DO care about the damage the abusive
editor will go on to do.
PLEASE somebody watch this situation so that the editor I challenged cannot
do too much damage to Wikipedia.
I have been blocked unfairly for challenging another editor's abusive
behavior.
What is unreasonable about the block is that it was put in place while this
editor publicly flaunted their sock/meatpuppetry vexatiously from several
AOL IPs and at least two usernames, which was completely ignored.
Please see details on my talk page where links are evident, including links
to the vandalism committed under one username since the block.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Zeraeph
> Surely the 3 or 4 more clicks it takes to create a crap
> article now aren't stopping that many anons.
I think this is the right question. If it turns out anon page creation (APC)
does, in fact, produce a lot more crap, then I would like to propose a
counterexperiment: just add ONE extra click to the APC process, and see what
difference it makes.
At the risk of repeating myself, sounding like a broken record, and repeating
myself, I don't see this is as a two-way choice between APC on or off, since
account creation is unrestricted anyway. I see this as a matter of how many
clicks are involved in the APC process, how obvious they are.
Currently, it is: click on red link, click on "log in or create account" (and
NOT "submit the content", which is a trap), click on "create account", fill in
the form and press "create account", navigate back to where you were, click on
red link again, and there's your edit box.
On the other hand, for logged-in users, clicking on a red link goes right to the
edit box. This was also the case for logged-out users before English Wikipedia
disabled the feature (and remains the case on other Wikipedias).
Clicking on a blue link, on the other hand, only allows reading the article; to
edit, the user has to explicitly click on "edit this page".
That is, to get to the edit box for an existing page, a casual reader has to at
least intend to edit. Not so for a non-existing page, a casual reader could just
stumble into it (when anon pgae creation was on).
So I wonder what would happen if, after turning anon page creation on for a
while, we then change it so the red link leads to the no-article page (like
this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrapositive_Enthymemetics_in_Lower_Canada)
If it turns out that having anon page creation on, but with that extra click,
produces less crap that having anon page creaton on with no extra clicks (by
whatever metrics), we might then want to think a bit more about how to design
the editing/creation interface for logged-out users.
Regards,
Daniel Mehkeri
> Now ask which is the clearer disambiguation system: the current one or
> your proposed one. I am quite willing to concede that the current
> system can be downright peculiar and mock serious subjects, but I very
> much doubt this is the solution.
How does "you may have been looking for [[this]]" "mock" anything?
~~Sean