2008/4/29 Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com>om>:
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"quot;. 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.
--
geni