On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 2:30 PM, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
The exceptions are not "human lives". They are "human discomfort". No one is dying. You have to have a rather thin skin, or very little real-world experience to be greatly annoyed at some vandal calling you a "slimy ass bitch" or whatever. It should be relatively apparent that our readers can read through vandalism. Are people going to complain? Sure they are.
In the extreme case, things can be worse than that. The most serious BLP cases are not insults and vandalism, but outright malicious attempts to destroy someone's reputation and cause them damage in their lives. We've had a fair few of those.
Yes, the vast majority are simply stupid vandalism, but it is inaccurate to extend that to all cases.
I think, too, that both the serious case I mention above and the stupid vandalism case are pretty uncontroversial; we know what to do with them when we find them, the only issue is whether we want to make it harder to make such damage given the tradeoffs.
The hard case is when Wikipedia is repeating allegations that we can source to an offsite source. That's where the serious disagreements about what to do are taking place.
-Matt