On 4/20/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
I consider our current attitude to the biographies of living persons to be positively immoral. We know people are being adversely affected, libeled and harassed. We know people are having to check their articles daily because of the danger of malicious attacks. And yet we hide behind the belief that we are legally untouchable and we refuse to take any real steps to reduce the harm, on the basis that 'it isn't how we do things', it might upset our users, or it might inadvertently take out a precious article on a webcomic as collateral. Well, the collateral to real people, in the real world, is now unacceptable.
I strongly disagree that we refuse to take any real steps to reduce the harm. There are a lot of good people who watch for bio article changes. We have additional steps and procedure and policy clearly defined for detection and handling of bio article problems.
We are an encyclopedia, and an open source content project. Our objective, as a project, is to create and host content. That includes biographies of people who are alive.
Any open source project, content or code or whatever, is subject to or at risk of attacks. This is a fact of life.
After all the intensive efforts to set and maintain and enforce BLP policies, no outsider can reasonably claim we aren't trying.
No insider is going to claim we're succeeding perfectly, either.
We can't be perfect. To attain our project's goals, we have to balance technology, people's time, and policies. Lacking "approved version" code, we're doing a pretty good approximation of optimally given what our project stands for and the resource constraints.