On 13/05/07, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
Andrew Gray wrote:
On 13/05/07, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
plenty of people that have gotten in trouble for lying about where they went to school, and a -ton- of people that lie about their age.)
The single most common specific OTRS complaint is "please correct my date of birth"... I can't offhand think of any who've asked us to correct which university they went to - at least, none where it might have been wishful puffery. (There have been a couple who wanted us to fix that we had them down as attending a prestigious university they didn't, but I don't remember any the other way around)
That actually illustrates the issue very well, though. If someone contacts you saying "Hey, correct my article, I have a PhD from Harvard!" do you just go make the edit, or do you request independent verification?
If it seems plausible and trivial, and doesn't disagree with any cited source in the page, I take their word for it and make the correction. If it seems unlikely, or it's significant - "you forgot to mention my time in Parliament", I try to check further.
If it directly contradicts an existing source, then I decide which one seems most likely to be true and proceed from there :-) Usually it's fairly easy to smell a whitewashing request...