On Oct 28, 2008, at 12:33 AM, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
That isn't what occurred. What occurred was that the editor stated "I am this person and I say this" It's not whether we can verify who the editor is, it's whether we can verify that they are the subject.
You're still treating this as some sort of theoretical exercise as opposed to an article about a real person, and you're drawing inane technical distinctions that have little to no bearing on the real world. I would ask how "whether we can verify that they are the subject" is in any way a substantively different issue than "whether we can verify their identity," but I doubt I'd care about whatever bizarrely technical distinction you concocted.
We were informed about problems on a BLP. Instead of taking those problems seriously and looking at the article, we ignored them because we disliked how we were informed. This despite the fact that the problems were real, and that, contrary to your assertions, no sources backed up the claims. None. The film director claim was unsourced in the article, and nothing later in the article talked about the film he made. The McCluhan interpretation was unsourced and wrong.
The article sucked. We got a complaint. And because we disliked how the complaint was lodged, we ignored it. That is a case of process trumping outcome in the most toxic way imaginable, and no amount of bullshit technicalities change the basic fact that we actively chose to ignore a problem in a BLP - a problem that needed nothing more than cursory investigation from a user to identify.
-Phil