Rob Smith wrote:
On 3/1/07, Stan Shebs stanshebs@earthlink.net wrote:
I'm not even sure we *could* write a policy requiring truthfulness on WP user pages. What if I said I worked at a job until 1993, and somebody out to get me calls the company and they report my last day as 4 Jan 1994? Should that be a bannable offense? Do we want to get into whether my intent was to misrepresent, or simply a faulty memory? In any case, somewhere we should counsel that deliberately providing false personal info on oneself is a Very Bad Idea, with all sorts of possible consequences, and that it's better to not say anything at all.
Stan
What about the perception he was rewarded for doing so?
"Perception"? You mean punish people because third parties misperceive things? So if I revert pro-Serbian POV, and the Belgrade press twists an offhand remark on my user page into evidence of Albanian sympathies and so I clearly have nasty motives and clearly WP is biased against Serbs, that I should be banned?
He may not know it yet, but Essjay has bigger problems than his reputation in WP - since this is now all over the net, it's going to affect his employability forever. John Draper's resume once crossed my desk, and I thought, OK, this guy looks good, but then a colleague says, "Don't you recognize the name? That's Cap'n Crunch!", and after that I really found it hard to treat it like any other resume, even though I didn't actually consider him to be a bigtime evildoer.
Stan