On 3/11/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
It is not just about legalities, but also about common human courtesy and good customer service. If you are thinking of this as "the foundation against the community" then you're not thinking of it in the way that I'm thinking of it, so let me explain further.
The people we are writeing articles about are not customers.
What should we do in such a case? Well, our fundamental goal *as a community* is to write a really great encyclopedia. Being jerks toward people who have their feelings hurt *and* who know nothing about how we operate, does not strike me as a very useful way to respond.
No. Explaining how things work is probably the best responce.
Rather, we should respond quickly and politely to their concerns, including in most cases, *blanking or deleting the article* and *starting over*, being *extremely* careful as a community to get all the facts right, to strike a fair and neutral tone, and to cite sources even more extensively than normal.
blanking or deleting the article= writeing off the work. Not a nice way to treat the previous writers. Telling them what is wrong might work better.
It is a bit difficult to tell how many references [[Jack Thompson (attorney)]] had since two different systems were being used but it was probably over 100 (absolute minium=99). how many do you want?
That's what WP:OFFICE is all about -- good customer service.
I seem to recall the justification was something to do with legal worries. Are you stateing that is not the case?
Ideally, it should be thought of as an action that could and should be taken by any good Wikipedian in the face of a bad article. A very firm "blank and rewrite with proper cites" is a perfectly valid move for articles like this.
/Temp exists for such purposes. Outright blanking is pretty much garenteeded to be reverted. -- geni