2008/4/29 Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com:
geni wrote:
I doubt it. Mr Kinnear is already dislike by the majority of those who know about him I doubt the article had much of an impact one way or another.
Well you certainly get that impression from the wikipedia entry and the blogosphere, but the fact is, we have no idea if this is true or not. None. Zero.
There are simply no reliable sources of any kind that would lead us to think that. Reading between the lines here, I think he sounds like he is probably not the least bit unlikable as a person. He's a union leader. He called for an unpopular strike. There is no evidence in the media or anywhere else that he is "disliked by the majority of those who know about him".
Know about him in this case would be know the name or would have some reason for looking for it.
I am not looking for top down solutions. I am looking for thoughtful people within the community to stop blaming the victim and start looking for sustainable solutions that will work.
Well the good news is the community has never gone in for victim blaming.
"Start looking for sustainable solutions that will work" First problem. You haven't defined the problem properly. At the moment you are doing the equiverlent of saying that "copyright wise we should have articles that look like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-portrait". This may be true but isn't very useful.
Your past statements are no more helpful being either over specific or outright dangerous (do you really want to give a wikipedian a weapon as dangerous as do no harm? and "We must get the article right" sounds great until you realise what that actually means. An article stating mid 80s that Edwina Currie was having an affair would have been right but would have been highly inadvisable to write such a thing.
So we have a number of options:
1)Aim to keep wikipedia content non libelous within the US. This has the advantage of being fairly easy to define but problematical with regards to public figures.
2)Aim to keep wikipedia content non libelous within the US while latitude allowed for public figures is ignored. In adition aim to remove insult. This has the advantage of being fairly easy to define but technically results in wikipedia being in contempt of the english courts (of course it already is but separate issue).
3)Aim to make sure that all negative statements about living people are sourced. Define negative and sourced. For example is "Ian Hislop has become the most sued man in Britain." a negative statement. The usual fights over what counts as a source tend to get worse.
4)Aim to make sure that all negative statements about living people are fair and sourced. Fight over "fair" would be eventful and probably visible from earth orbit
5)Do no harm. I assume biron knows where the off switch is.
I prefer option 2 since it is fairly fixed and less based on an individuals judgment and thus we can be fairly sure everyone at least should be working towards the same objective.